Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes

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Radical Cartesianism This is the first book-length study of the highly original form of Cartesianism in the work of two of Descartes’s French successors, Robert Desgabets (1610–78) and Pierre-Sylvain Regis (1632–1707). The book focuses on radical doctrines in these Cartesians concerning the creation of the eternal truths, the intentionality of ideas, and the soul–body union, three issues that Descartes broached but did not fully explore. In addition to relating their discussion of these issues to the views of Descartes and of Cartesians such as Malebranche and Arnauld, the book establishes that Desgabets and Regis played an important, though neglected, role in the theologically and politically charged reception of Descartes in early modern France. A major contribution to the history of Cartesianism, this study will be of special interest to historians of early modern philosophy and historians of ideas. Tad M. Schmaltz is Associate Professor of Philosophy at Duke University.

Radical Cartesianism The French Reception of Descartes

TAD M. SCHMALTZ Duke University

          The Pitt Building, Trumpington Street, Cambridge, United Kingdom    The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK 40 West 20th Street, New York, NY 10011-4211, USA 477 Williamstown Road, Port Melbourne, VIC 3207, Australia Ruiz de Alarcón 13, 28014 Madrid, Spain Dock House, The Waterfront, Cape Town 8001, South Africa http://www.cambridge.org © Tad M. Schmaltz 2004 First published in printed format 2002 ISBN 0-511-02982-9 eBook (Adobe Reader) ISBN 0-521-81134-1 hardback

Le probl`eme n’est plus de la tradition et de la trace, mais de la d´ecoupe et de la limite; ce n’est plus celui du fondement qui se perp´etue, c’est celui des transformations qui valent comme fondation et renouvellement des fondations. The problem is no longer one of tradition and trace, but of division and limit; it is no longer that of a lasting foundation, it is of transformations that serve as a foundation and the rebuilding of foundations. – Michel Foucault, L’Arch´eologie du savoir

Contents

page ix xii xiii

Preface A Note on Citation and Translation List of Abbreviations Introduction: Radical Cartesianism in Context i.1 Desgabets and Regis i.2 French Cartesianisms i.3 A Map of Radical Cartesianism

1 3 9 19

part i. robert desgabets 1

Desgabets’s Consid´erations, Arnauld, and Cartesianism 1.1 The 1671 Decree and the Consid´erations 1.2 Descartes and Desgabets on the Eucharist 1.3 Desgabets’s Consid´erations : Three Philosophical Assumptions 1.4 Arnauld on the Eucharist and Cartesianism 1.5 La Ville on Cartesianism and Desgabets

27 29 34 47 53 68

part ii. three radical doctrines 2

The Creation Doctrine: Indefectible Material Substance and God 2.1 Three Problems from Descartes 2.2 Desgabets’s Critique: Necessary Truths and God’s Essence 2.3 The Indefectibility of Substance 2.4 Metaphysical Foundations for Physics 2.5 Quasi-Spinozistic Indivisibility 2.6 Regis’s Usage : Creation and Indefectible Motion 2.7 Quasi-Spinozistic Causal Dissimilarity vii

77 80 88 94 97 102 107 113

Contents

viii

2.8 Malebranche, Spinozism, and God’s Supersubstantiality 2.9 Radical Solutions to Descartes’s Problems

121 127

3

The Intentionality Doctrine: Ideas and Extra-mental Objects 3.1 Desgabets’s Critique : Ideas, Essences, and Extension 3.2 The Intentionality Principle 3.3 Objective Reality and the Object Argument 3.4 Pure Possibilities and the Essence Argument 3.5 Quasi-Spinozistic Connections to the Creation Doctrine 3.6 “The First Fault of Descartes” 3.7 Cartesian Realism: The First Step

130 132 137 140 147 150 156 162

4

The Union Doctrine: Temporal Human Thought and Motion 4.1 Desgabets’s Critique : Pure Intellect and Memory 4.2 “The Second Fault of Descartes” 4.3 Nihil est in Intellectu 4.4 Continuous Time and the Union with Motion 4.5 Angelic Intellect and Human Thought 4.6 A Cartesian Refutation of Idealism 4.7 Cartesian Realism: The Second Step

167 169 174 179 182 186 194 206

part iii. pierre-sylvain regis 5

Huet’s Censura, Malebranche, and Platonism 5.1 The 1691 Formulary and the Censura 5.2 Huet–Regis–Du Hamel: Cartesian Themes 5.3 Regis’s Usage : Faith and Reason 5.4 Regis–Malebranche–Lelevel: Platonic Themes 5.5 Platonism in Genest’s “Lettre a` Regis”

215 217 223 237 241 256

Conclusion: “A Forgotten Branch of Cartesianism”

261

Works Cited Index

267 280

Preface

This volume is a companion to my book on Malebranche insofar as it draws attention to the variety of Cartesianisms that emerged after the death of Descartes. Indeed, the two main protagonists here – Desgabets and Regis – were mentioned in the earlier text, which cited their discussion of the cogito and the nature of mind to illustrate what is by contrast the more orthodox Cartesian perspective on these issues in Malebranche. Upon reflection, however, I was not completely satisfied with what I said there about Desgabets and Regis, particularly with respect to their development of Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths. I also was puzzled by their serene confidence in their seemingly implausible thesis, which I all but ignored in the Malebranche book, that the mere fact that we have ideas of extra-mental objects suffices to show that such objects exist. For these reasons, I decided to return to Desgabets and Regis and, starting from the beginning, to attempt to better understand their unusual and intriguing form of Cartesianism. The result is this study, which retains the emphasis in the Malebranche book on the “radical” nature of their philosophical psychology. Yet there is the additional claim that their views in this area have a significant Cartesian basis. Moreover, this study includes the thesis that the account of the eternal truths in Desgabets and Regis indicates an important sense in which their system is closer to Descartes’s than is that of Malebranche. Finally, there is the attempt here to show that this same account provides considerable support for their realism concerning the external objects of our ideas. Naturally, there is some risk involved in devoting a study to historical figures as unfamiliar as Desgabets and Regis are. However, any doubts that I had about my project were outweighed by my sense that these Cartesians have something philosophically profound to say that no one else in the early modern period had said. My work on this project also has been motivated by the belief that Desgabets and Regis both played a crucial role in the French reception of Descartes. Neither the historical nor the philosophical ix

x

Preface

aspects of Desgabets’s system have escaped notice in France. There are, for instance, highly accomplished studies of these aspects of his Cartesianism by scholars such as Jean-Robert Armogathe and Genevi`eve Rodis-Lewis (with some of Mme Rodis-Lewis’s early, though remarkably still current, work dating from the 1950s). However, this topic has for the most part been neglected by Anglo-American scholars. For the most part neglected, I say, since Thomas Lennon is a notable exception here. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, he was a member of the editorial board of Studia cartesiana and pushed (successfully) for its sponsorship of an edition containing the hitherto unpublished writings of Desgabets. Moreover, his subsequent work on Cartesianism has emphasized the value of a consideration of the perspective on Descartes provided by Desgabets and Regis. In this volume, I tend to emphasize points of difference with Lennon to distinguish his interpretation of these Cartesians from my own. The differences are genuine, but any suggestion of a fundamental opposition is misleading, since there is a very real sense in which this book is a fruit of his labors.

acknowledgments Work on this book started during 1997–98, at the National Humanities Center. The Center and its wonderful staff and other fellows provided an ideal environment for such work. My stay there as a Benjamin N. Duke Fellow was made possible by a grant from the Triangle Foundation and by a sabbatical leave from Duke University. I am grateful for this support, which also enabled me to travel to the valuable collection of early modern texts at the Biblioth`eque nationale in Paris (at the grand old Richelieu site). During the same trip, I visited the Biblioth`eque municipale in Epinal, which houses the most important collection of Desgabets’s manuscripts. My thanks to the staff at both institutions for their skillful assistance. I was able to devote concentrated effort to my typescript during the fall of 2000 due to a “Dean’s leave” from Duke University. This leave also afforded me the opportunity to make another trip to the Biblioth`eque nationale (this time at its new Mitterrand-Tolbiac site), and the staff there again served my needs efficiently. I thank William Chafe, the Dean of Arts and Sciences at Duke, for sponsoring the research leave, which was especially opportune since I had worked on a preliminary draft of the book while serving during the summer of 2000 as a member of an NEH Summer Seminar on Descartes’s context and reception. My thanks here to Roger Ariew and Daniel Garber, who ran this most pleasant and stimulating seminar. My editor at Cambridge, Terence Moore, arranged for reports from three readers on an unfinished version of my manuscript that prompted a major restructuring of the text. I thank him for arranging for these reports. I also am grateful to Sara Black for her work in copyediting the final version of the manuscript.

Preface

xi

The discussion in this book has been shaped by conversation and correspondence over the years with various teachers and colleagues, friends all. This group includes Karl Ameriks, Roger Ariew, Monte Cook, Patricia Easton, Daniel Garber, Thomas Lennon, Paul Lodge, Eric Watkins, and the late Margaret Wilson. Monte Cook, Thomas Lennon, and Eric Watkins took the time to comment on various chapter parts or chapters, while Paul Lodge was kind enough to read and comment on the entire penultimate draft. My thanks to all for the help. I presented earlier versions of portions of my book in seminars at the National Humanities Center, the Sorbonne, the University of Toronto, the University of Western Ontario, and the University of California at Irvine. I learned a great deal from audiences on all of these occasions. In addition to individuals already mentioned, I recall having received helpful questions and comments from Giulia Belgioioso, Vincent Carraud, Gu¨ ven G¨uzeldere, Paul Hoffman, Zbigniew Janowski, Nicholas Jolley, Elmar Kremer, Alan Nelson, and Lawrence Nolan. No doubt there are others, here and elsewhere, whom I have forgotten to mention. My apologies to those who have failed to receive the credit they deserve. I gratefully acknowledge permission from publishers to use material from the following publications. Chapter 1: “What Has Cartesianism to Do with Jansenism?”, Journal of the History of Ideas 60 (1999):37–56. Chapter 2: “The Disappearance of Analogy in Descartes, Spinoza, and Regis,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (2000):85–114 (published by the University of Calgary Press). Chapter 4: “The Cartesian Refutation of Idealism,” British Journal for the History of Philosophy 10 (2002). Chapter 5: “A Tale of Two Condemnations: Two Cartesian Condemnations in 17th-Century France,” in Studi Cartesiani II. Atti del Seminario, “Descartes et ses adversaires,” Parigi, 12–13 dicembre, 2000. Ed. G. Belgioioso (Lecce: Conte, in press). In closing, I can only mention, without adequately expressing, my gratitude to my wife, Louise, for her unwavering support through thick and thin. In addition, there is the tremendous pride that both of us feel for our children – for Johanna and Sam – who have worked so hard in overcoming daunting obstacles. As a small token of my appreciation for all my wife and children have contributed, I dedicate this book to them. It is especially appropriate that I do so since they have shared with me in its labor pains. I look forward to sharing with them in the joy of its arrival. Durham, North Carolina August 2001

T.M.S.

A Note on Citation and Translation

In cases where I do not use the abbreviations listed here, citations in this work are by author and date. Complete bibliographical information is provided in the Works Cited section, which also includes what information is known about the biographical dates of the early modern authors that I cite. As a rule, I translate titles of the early modern texts I discuss only if there is a standard and readily available translation. Thus, I refer to Descartes’s Meditations, Spinoza’s Ethics, and Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, but also to Su´arez’s Disputationes Metaphysicæ, Huet’s Censura philosophiæ cartesianæ, and Lelevel’s La vraye et la fausse m´etaphysique. One notable exception here is Malebranche’s Recherche de la v´erit´e. Even though there is a fine translation of this text, I leave the title in French, since I also leave untranslated the titles of two responses to it, namely, Foucher’s Critique de la Recherche de la v´erit´e and Desgabets’s Critique de la Critique de la recherche de la v´erit´e. I have consulted standard translations of early modern texts where available, but in all cases where I cite original-language editions, the translations of passages are my own (with thanks, however, to Thomas Lennon for providing valuable assistance in this regard). There are as yet no translations of the main writings of Desgabets and Regis. This situation may change in the future; indeed, Patricia Easton is preparing an unabridged translation of Desgabets’s “Suppl´ement a` la philosophie de Monsieur Descartes.” But the current absence of translations should provide no great impediment to serious scholarship on Desgabets and Regis. After all, there is an increasing expectation that those who work on early modern philosophy have the linguistic abilities required to deal with relevant foreign-language texts. In addition, not too much effort is required to decipher the French of Desgabets and Regis, which is relatively simple and direct.

xii

Abbreviations

In the notes and text, I use the following abbreviations for editions, works containing texts, and individual texts: A AT CdC Con. Cpc CPR Crit. “Disc.” G L “Lettre” OA OCM Opera R RD “R´ef.” R´ef. R´ep. R´ep. R´ef.

Aristotle 1984. Descartes 1996 (Ed. C. Adam and P. Tannery). Desgabets 1675 (Critique de la Critique de la recherche de la v´erit´e ). Desgabets 1671 (Consid´erations sur l’´etat pr´esent de la controverse touchant le Tr`es Saint-Sacrement de l’autel ). Huet 1971 (Censura philosophiæ cartesianæ). Kant 1929 (Critique of Pure Reason); cited by edition (A or B) and page (as indicated in the translation). Foucher 1969 (Critique de la Recherche de la v´erit´e ). “Discours sur la philosophie” (in the Syst`eme; see abbreviation Syst`eme). Spinoza 1925 (Ed. G. Gerhardt). Lemaire 1901. “Lettre . . . a` M. Regis” (Genest 1716). Arnauld 1775–83 (Œuvres de Messire Antoine Arnauld ). Malebranche 1958–84 (Œuvres Compl`etes de Malebranche). Su´arez 1866 (Opera Omnia). Retz 1887. Desgabets 1983–85 (Dom Robert Desgabets: Œuvres philosophiques in´edites). “R´efutation de Spinosa” (appendix to the Usage). Du Hamel 1692 (R´eflexions critiques sur le syst`eme cartesien de la philosophie de Mr. Regis). Regis 1691a (R´eponse au livre . . . Censura Philosophiæ Cartesianæ). Regis 1692 (R´eponses aux R´eflexions critiques). xiii

Abbreviations

xiv

S.Th. Syst`eme Usage Vfm

Aquinas 1964–81 (Summa Theologiæ); cited by part, article, and question (as indicated in the translation). Regis 1970 (Cours entier de philosophie, originally Syst`eme de philosophie). Regis 1996 (L’Usage de la raison et de la foy). Lelevel 1694 (La vraye et la fausse m´etaphysique).

In the notes, I also use the following abbreviations for manuscript collections pertaining to Desgabets: MS BN fds fr.

MS Cousin

MS Epinal

Manuscript collection, fonds fran¸cais, at the Biblioth`eque nationale, Paris. This collection includes manuscripts and correspondence dating from the two decades following the death of Descartes that relate to Desgabets’s involvement in French controversies concerning the Eucharist. Manuscript collection at the Biblioth`eque V. Cousin, Paris. This collection includes the letter mentioning the charge among the Lorraine Benedictines of being “cart´esien ou robertiste.” Manuscript collection at the Biblioth`eque municipale, Epinal. This collection includes most of Desgabets’s philosophical and theological writings as well as some of his correspondence.

There is also a collection of Desgabets’s manuscripts at the Biblioth`eque municipale at Chartres that was burned during Allied bombing raids in 1944. Fortunately, some of these manuscripts were previously reproduced in Lemaire 1901. For a complete list of the Chartres manuscripts, see Armogathe 1977, 127–32. A more general listing of the Desgabets manuscript collections appears in Armogathe 1977, 120–26, and RD 1:xxii–xxxiii.

Introduction Radical Cartesianism in Context

Il ne me reste qu’`a t´emoigner a` Robert Desgabets la reconnaissance que j’ay au nom de tous les Cart´esians des avis qu’il leur donne si souvent de se garder des pr´ejugez. Il ne me reste, dis-je, qu’`a lui t´emoigner ma reconnaissance par l’avis, que je crois lui devoir en cette occasion, de se d´efendre avec application, de la pente qu’il a un peu trop naturelle a` s’imaginer que ce qui est le plus outr´e dans les sciences est le plus vrai. It remains for me only to show Robert Desgabets the recognition that I have in the name of all the Cartesians of the advice that he gives to them so often to guard against prejudices. It remains for me, I say, only to show by the warning that I believe I owe him on this occasion to defend himself carefully against the inclination that is a little too natural for him to imagine that what is the most extreme in the sciences is the most true. – Cardinal de Retz, “Dissertations sur le cart´esianisme” (R 219)

This passage, which dates from 1677, serves to introduce us to the early modern, French Cartesian Robert Desgabets, a figure almost entirely unknown in the English-speaking world. The reference here to the “extremity” of this individual’s views reflects the fact that Desgabets insisted not only that matter cannot be destroyed even by God, but also that our ideas reveal directly the existence of a material world and that our thoughts are connected in an essential way to the union of our soul with body. On all these points, he was concerned to correct the principal fault in Descartes, deriving from his treatment of the “cogito,” of holding that the existence of the self is “better known” than, and independent of, the existence of bodies. Given the preoccupation in twentieth-century discussions of Descartes with the epistemological and metaphysical implications of his cogito argument, it may seem that I have made a mistake in characterizing Desgabets as a Cartesian. Yet Desgabets’s contemporaries took him to be a committed, if somewhat idiosyncratic, follower of Descartes. Indeed, Desgabets was something of a purist in physics, opposing even those modifications 1

2

Introduction

to Descartes’s views in this area proposed by his fellow Cartesians.1 Moreover, he allied himself with the Cartesian project of founding physics on a metaphysical foundation derived from indubitable “clear and distinct” ideas, and he adopted a Cartesian dualism on which such ideas reveal that body, as an extended thing, is really distinct from mind, as a thinking thing. In metaphysics, however, Desgabets’s allegiance to Descartes is indicated most clearly by the fact that he was one of the few to defend Descartes’s controversial doctrine that God has freely created eternal truths and immutable essences.2 It is understandable that Desgabets’s distinctive form of Cartesianism is unfamiliar today since most of his philosophical work was carried out behind the scenes. With the exception of opuscles on blood transfusion and the theology of the Eucharist, the only text published during his lifetime was a rather compressed response to a critique of the Recherche de la v´erit´e of his Cartesian contemporary, the French Oratorian Nicolas Malebranche. Desgabets did circulate a number of other manuscripts and works in progress, which, as the passage cited at the outset indicates, were the source of some controversy in his day. After Desgabets’s death, however, these unpublished writings were dispersed to various provincial Benedictine abbeys, and after the Revolution they were transferred to French municipal libraries, where they remained inaccessible to most of the scholarly community for a long time. The situation has recently changed. An increasing interest in Desgabets over the past century among French scholars prepared the way for the publication in the mid-1980s of a definitive edition of various of his œuvres philosophiques.3 This publication presents us with the opportunity to return to a view in Desgabets that history has left behind. One reason to seize this opportunity is that Desgabets played a pivotal role in the initial French reception of Descartes in the decades following his death. Yet Desgabets’s work also is philosophically significant since he attempted to reconstruct central elements of Descartes’s epistemology and metaphysics. This attempt had a profound influence on the thought of Pierre-Sylvain Regis (also R´egis), who called Desgabets “one of the greatest metaphysicians 1

2 3

As I indicate later, Desgabets vigorously rejected the atomistic modifications to Descartes in the work of the Cartesian Geraud de Cordemoy. But he also resisted the more modest modifications proposed by two Cartesian Oratorians, Nicolas-Joseph Poisson and Nicolas Malebranche. His response to the modifications to Descartes’s mechanics in Poisson’s 1668 Trait´e de la m´echaique de Descartes is contained in an unpublished set of Remarques (in MS Epinal 64, 699–704), and he mentioned in a 1677 letter to Poisson (in OCM 18:126) a commentary, now lost, on Malebranche’s Recherche that criticizes the modifications to Descartes’s laws of motion in that text. On the mixture of Cartesianism and anti-Cartesianism in Desgabets, see Beaude 1979. See, for instance, the 1974 “Journ´ee D. Robert Desgabets” in Revue de synth`ese, 74. Genevi`eve Rodis-Lewis, Jean-Robert Armogathe, and Joseph Beaude are the French scholars who have done the most to foster an interest in Desgabets. In the English-speaking world, Thomas Lennon and Richard Watson have been Desgabets’s most active promoters.

Radical Cartesianism in Context

3

of our century.”4 Regis is familiar to historians of early modern science as one of the principal defenders of Cartesian natural philosophy in late seventeenth-century France. What is not widely appreciated, though, is that Regis adopted central elements of Desgabets’s distinctive form of Cartesianism. Thus, Regis took as his starting point the development in Desgabets of Descartes’s created truths doctrine. Moreover, he followed Desgabets in insisting not only that our idea of body requires the real existence of its object, but also that all our thoughts depend on the body to which our soul is united. The goal of this study is to revisit the puzzling but intrinsically interesting elements of a version of Cartesianism in Desgabets and Regis that played an important though now unappreciated role in the reception of Descartes in early modern France.

i.1 desgabets and regis Robert Desgabets was born in 1610 to Jean des Gabets and Barbe Richard in Ancemont in the Lorraine diocese of Verdun, a region annexed by France in 1552.5 He entered the Benedictine order in 1636 and served that order in various ecclesiastical and academic posts thereafter. In 1653, Descartes’s literary executor, Claude Clerselier, drew Desgabets into battles over Descartes’s views on the Eucharist, sending him the unpublished correspondence with the Jesuit Denis Mesland in which Descartes presented his own speculations concerning the Real Presence of Christ in this sacrament by means of a miraculous transformation, or “transubstantiation,” of the eucharistic elements into His body and blood. In correspondence and unpublished manuscripts, Desgabets defended these speculations against those who condemned them to Clerselier as heretical. His defense depends crucially on the argument that transubstantiation cannot involve the annihilation of the elements since matter itself is “indefectible,” that is, immutable and indestructible. Desgabets argued for the indefectibility of matter in his “Trait´e de l’ind´efectibilit´e des creatures,” a work that he started at about the time of his exchange with Clerselier. In 1658, Desgabets’s ecclesiastical duties took him to Paris for an eight-month stay, during which time he participated in the discussions of Cartesianism in the capital. He was a member of the scientific academy of Habert de Montmor and offered for discussion a short Discours on a technique for the transfusion of blood. The French physician Jean Denis included this text in the Lettre escrite a` M. Sorbi`ere, published in 1668, in 4

5

In a marginal note in his Usage, at 639. In §5.3, however, I indicate the irony that this note is found in a section of the Usage where Regis was concerned about distancing himself from Desgabets. Even so, it will become clear in what follows that Regis was, in fact, profoundly influenced by Desgabets. For a more complete biographical chronology of Desgabets, see RD 1:xvi–xx.

4

Introduction

part to draw the attention of the Royal Society to French research in this area.6 Upon his return to the provinces, Desgabets worked to spread the teaching of Cartesianism in the local Benedictine abbeys. In the mid-1660s, he also became involved in the controversies in France over “Jansenist” views of free will and grace and the moral rigorism associated with the convent of PortRoyal.7 Desgabets took the politically risky step of siding with the Jansenists and the Port-Royalists against the French religious establishment. Later, however, he later split with the Port-Royalists on the issue of the Eucharist. One occasion for the rupture was the publication in 1671 of Desgabets’s Consid´erations sur l’´etat pr´esent de la controverse, a work that drew on his development during the 1650s and 1660s of the account of the Real Presence in Descartes’s correspondence with Mesland. The Port-Royalist theologians Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole promptly denounced Desgabets’s text in an audience with the Archbishop of Paris. The publication of this text also was linked to the first official condemnation of Cartesianism, in a 1671 decree that Louis XIV issued to the University of Paris. This condemnation led Desgabets’s Benedictine superiors to interrogate him the following year and to censure his views on the Eucharist. The effects of the censure were felt even into the mid-eighteenth century, when the Benedictine authorities refused the request of some admirers of Desgabets to publish an official edition of his writings.8 Even so, the 1672 censure did not bring an end to Desgabets’s philosophical activity. Two years later, he engaged in correspondence with Malebranche after the latter sent him a copy of the first volume of his Recherche. When Simon Foucher wrote a Critique that cast doubt on claims in Malebranche’s text concerning mind–body dualism and the representative nature of ideas, Desgabets composed a Cartesian refutation of Foucher’s skeptical position. Desgabets’s Critique de la Critique appeared in 1675, and like his 1671 Consid´erations, it was published anonymously. Also like the Consid´erations, the Critique was something of a failure. Malebranche immediately disowned the work, primarily because it departed from his own views. However, what seemed bizarre to Malebranche and Foucher alike was Desgabets’s dogmatic insistence in his Critique on the impossibility of any doubt of the existence of the material world. The full argument for this impossibility is provided not in this text but in Desgabets’s commentary on the Meditations, the “Suppl´ement de la philosophie de Descartes,” which he finished in 1675 but which remained unpublished until 1985. The first part of the “Suppl´ement” rejects 6 7 8

See Denis 1668 and the discussion in Rodis-Lewis 1974. For more on these controversies, see §1.2.2. An initial request from doms Ildefonse Catelinot (b. 1671) and Augustin Calmet (1672– 1757) was refused in 1747 by authorities of the Lorraine congregation of Saint Vanne, of which they were members. Catelinot received the same response when he resubmitted his request in 1754. See the discussion of this failed project in Beaude 1974.

Radical Cartesianism in Context

5

Descartes’s hyperbolic doubt of the material world on the grounds that temporal human thought bears an essential relation to bodily motion, while the second part argues that the idea of extension, like any other “simple” idea, requires the extra-mental existence of its object. Toward the end of Desgabets’s life, in 1677, there was a series of conferences on his thought at the chateau of the Cardinal de Retz in the Lorraine region of Commercy. Manuscripts pertaining to these conferences lay concealed until the early 1840s, when Victor Cousin and Am´ed´ee Hennequin independently discovered and published them.9 These manuscripts include the passage above warning against Desgabets’s extremity, which is attributed to Retz himself. Retz was a politically ambitious cleric who was deeply involved in the Fronde, the rebellion against the French government that occurred in Paris during 1649–53. Retz, who at that time went by his given name, Jean-Fran¸cois-Paul de Gondi, was Paris Coadjutor to the Archbishop of Paris, his uncle, Jean-Fran¸cois, and the chief political rival of First Minister Cardinal Mazarin. In 1652, Gondi became the second Cardinal de Retz (his uncle Henri having been the first). Later that same year, Mazarin had Retz arrested and imprisoned, though he escaped and lived for a time under papal protection in Rome. In 1654, upon the death of his uncle, Retz was made Archbishop of Paris in absentia. His activities during this early period in his life are chronicled in his famous M´emoires, which consists mainly of Machiavellian reflections on his political battles with Mazarin that are spiced with occasional reports of dalliances with mistresses.10 In 1662, after Mazarin’s death, Louis XIV forced Retz to resign the archishopric in exchange for a pardon. Louis also banished him from court, and Retz was forced to take up residence in his ancestral estate in the semiindependent provincial territory of Commercy. In the mid-1670s, Retz attempted to resign his cardinalate for the purpose of taking up a life of contemplation at the neighboring Benedictine abbey of Saint-Mihiel.11 Rome refused to accept the resignation, but the attempt strengthened Retz’s ties to the prior of the abbey, dom Hennezon, a friend of Desgabets who shared his interest in Cartesian philosophy. Hennezon was among the “disciples of Descartes” from local Benedictine abbeys who joined with Retz to examine critically Desgabets’s corrections to

9

10 11

See Cousin 1842 and Hennequin 1842. In 1887, an editor of Retz’s Œuvres, R. de Chantelauze, published the most complete record of the conferences (in R), although it leaves out a discussion between Desgabets and Retz concerning “objective being” (reproduced in RD 7:301–305). See the corrections to this record in Rodis-Lewis 1981a. For a discussion of the conferences themselves, see Delon 1979. Retz 1987. For discussion of Retz’s involvement in the Fronde, see Salmon 1969. From Retz’s time onward, there was controversy over whether the attempt was sincere or rather motivated by a desire for fame. Compare Gazier 1875, which argues for the sincerity of Retz’s act, and a review of this work in Chantelauze 1877 that presents this act in a decidedly less flattering light.

6

Introduction

Descartes’s views. Retz’s devoted friend and cousin by marriage, the marquise de S´evign´e, expressed alarm that the gout-ridden cardinal was engaging “in metaphysical distillations and distinctions with dom Robert, which will kill him.”12 Retz (identified in the record as “Rais”) served as the main respondent to Desgabets, attempting for the most part to defend Descartes against Desgabets’s objections.13 Another participant at the conferences was the Italian scholar Jean de Corbinelli, a distant relative and confidant of the cardinal who arrived in Commercy in June 1677 and who contributed a text summarizing Desgabets’s views on the soul–body union and the temporality of human thought.14 Further topics considered at Commercy included Desgabets’s views on the intentionality of ideas and the indefectibility of substances, as sketched in “Descartes a` l’alambic, distill´e par dom Robert”15 and the aptly titled “D´efauts de la m´ethode de Descartes.” The impact of the discussions with Retz was felt beyond Commercy. A session of Cartesians held in Paris in August or September 1677 was devoted to Desgabets’s critique of the cogito. Corbinelli apparently defended this critique, while Malebranche provided the response on behalf of the assembled Cartesians.16 Corbinelli also appears to have been responsible for bringing the issues considered at Commercy into the salons of S´evign´e and of her daughter, the comtesse de Grignan (who may well be the unnamed woman to whom Retz addressed his M´emoires).17 Desgabets was able to contribute little to the further consideration of these issues, however, since he died in March 1678 at his home abbey of Breuil, near Commercy. Desgabets had something of a following in the provincial Benedictine monasteries, and as is indicated by the failed attempt in the mid-eighteenth century to publish an edition of his writings, he continued to have such a following well after his death.18 Nonetheless, his most prominent disciple was someone outside of the Benedictine order, namely, his younger contemporary Regis. Regis was born in 1632 to a wealthy family in Salvetat de 12 13

14 15 16 17 18

In a 15 October 1677 letter, in S´evign´e 1974, 2:575f. The one notable exception is an exchange at the end of the record of the conferences in which Retz presented an instrumentalist understanding of Copernican theory, while Desgabets defended the literal truth of Descartes’s cosmological views (see R 49–60). Also, Retz sometimes served merely in the role of summarizing the main issues separating Desgabets and Descartes. See R 292f. On Corbinelli’s role in the conferences, see Plasance 1981. Literally, “Descartes from the Still, Distilled by dom Robert.” According to Chantelauze, this is the title that Retz gave to the work (see R 211, n. 1). A brief record of this session was published in 1961 in OCM 18:122–24. See L 253–56. Compare Deprun 1973. On Desgabets’s success in converting other Benedictines to Cartesianism, see Taveneaux 1960, 116–23. For a discussion of certain writings of former Benedictines toward the end of the seventeenth century that seem to have been influenced by Desgabets’s writings, see Rodis-Lewis 1979.

Radical Cartesianism in Context

7

Blanquefort, in the county of Agenois.19 Like Descartes, but unlike Desgabets, Regis received a Jesuit education, in Regis’s case, at the Jesuit college of Cahors. He was offered a professorship at the university there, but decided instead to study theology at the Sorbonne. Regis arrived in Paris in 1655, and at some point began to attend the famous Wednesday conferences (popularly known as the Mercredis) of the Cartesian physicist Jacques Rohault, which were already underway by 1659. Regis may have met Desgabets during the late 1650s, when both were in Paris, though we have no decisive evidence to that effect. What we do have, however, is the linguistically tortured report of Desgabets’s disciple, dom Ildefonse Catelinot, that the two “wrote to each other, exchanged objections, illuminated by the thorniest difficulties.”20 Regis’s exposure to Cartesian natural philosophy prompted him to give up his theological studies and to devote himself to Cartesian philosophy. In 1665, he accepted Rohault’s invitation to travel as a Cartesian missionary to Toulouse, where he lectured with great success as a member of the philosophical Soci´et´e des Lanternistes.21 While in Toulouse, Regis met the marquis Fran¸cois-Ren´e de Vardes, who became his patron. He followed Vardes to Aigues-Mortes and then to Montpellier, where he continued his popular lectures on Cartesianism. In 1680, Regis returned to Paris, in part to revive Rohault’s conferences (Rohault having died in 1672) and in part to seek publication of his massive Syst`eme de philosophie. Due to the political firestorm created by the controversies over the Cartesian explanation of the Eucharist, however, Regis was forced to suspend his public meetings, and permission to publish his Syst`eme was denied.22 He did receive this permission in 1688, though, and the work itself was finally published in 1690. The Syst`eme is divided into three volumes composed of books devoted to logic, metaphysics, physics, and ethics. These were the four main topics covered in the standard course in philosophy taught in the coll`ege de plein

19

20

21

22

For the details of Regis’s biography, I am drawing on the eulogy that Fontenelle, in his role as secretary of the Acad´emie des sciences, presented for him in 1707. See Fontenelle 1989–94, 6:143–52. MS Epinal 64, 822, cited in RD 1:xvii. Kirwan also reports, without documentation, that there is a letter in which Desgabets “congratulates his correspondent for having been able to be led by him to the philosophy of Descartes, and which appears to have been addressed to Sylvain Regis” (Kirwan 1903, 399). The society was founded in 1634 and, after an interruption of several years, began again in 1667 at the home of Nolet. The group received its name from the fact that its meetings were held in the evening and began with a procession of members carrying lanterns. For more on the society, see Desbarreaux-Bernard 1858. On Fontenelle’s report, however, Regis continued to hold private sessions, and his clients included not only members of the nobility such as the duc de Cond´e but also the same Archbishop of Paris who had advised him to discontinue his public lectures (Fontenelle 1989–94, 6:150f ).

8

Introduction

exercise.23 Regis’s treatment of logic follows the Cartesio-scholastic line laid down in the Port-Royalist Art de penser (first published in 1662), while his treatment of physics borrows heavily from Rohault’s Trait´e de physique (1671). Regis’s discussion of ethics is less dependent on the standard Cartesian discussions,24 but his discussion of metaphysics will receive most of our attention. For it is the book of the Syst`eme devoted to metaphysics that provides the best support for the claim, in a 1712 historical dictionary, that “Regis had a great deal to do with Father Desgabets, and he profited greatly from his illuminations [lumi`eres] and from his method in the three volumes of philosophy that he has published.”25 At the start of this book, Regis endorsed the argument, found in Desgabets, that the mere fact that we have an idea of extension suffices to establish the existence of an external material world. He also followed Desgabets not only in endorsing Descartes’s doctrine of the free creation of the eternal truths but also in linking this doctrine to the thesis of the indefectibility of created substances. Finally, Regis’s discussion in this book reflects the position in Desgabets that the union of the human soul with body serves to distinguish all human thoughts from the thoughts of a purely intellectual mind. A third edition of the Syst`eme appeared in Amsterdam in 1691 with the new title, Cours entier de philosophie. That same year, Louis XIV issued his second directive to the University of Paris pertaining to the teaching of Cartesianism. This directive required the signature of a formulary condemning various Cartesian and Jansenist propositions. Some of the propositions concerned Descartes’s method of doubt and his appeal to clear and distinct ideas, two issues that the Cartesian critic Pierre-Daniel Huet had highlighted in his 1689 Censura philosophiæ cartesianæ. In 1692, Regis took it upon himself to publish a response to the Censura on behalf of the Cartesians, and that 23

24

25

For the details of the teaching of philosophy in the French colleges, which was supposed to prepare students for study of the higher sciences of theology, law, and medicine in the university, see Brockliss 1987, chs. 4 and 7. As Brockliss indicates, traditionally logic and ethics were taught in the first year of coursework, and physics and metaphysics, during the second year. By the middle of the seventeenth century, however, metaphysics began to be taught before physics (see ibid., 187f ). Regis’s nonstandard placement of ethics (la morale) as the last topic of discussion reflects his allegiance to Descartes’s position that the study of morals presupposes a knowledge of metaphysics and physics (see AT 9-2:14). Bouillier has claimed that Regis seemed to be inclined in ethics “more to Gassendi or even to Hobbes than to Descartes” (Bouillier 1868, 1:519). The Gassendist connection is most evident in Regis’s emphasis in the Syst`eme on the fact that actions are guided by a love of self (amour propre) (see Syst`eme 3:404f ), while the Hobbesian connection is most evident in his claim there that we can best escape the inconveniences of a “state of nature” by entering into a “contract” in which we cede our rights to a state that has absolute power (3:412– 16, and 3:451–57). To explicate the precise nature of these connections, a more detailed examination of Regis’s ethical and political theory is required, one which I do not provide in this study. Mor´eri 1712, 2:602.

Radical Cartesianism in Context

9

same year he engaged in an exchange with the Paris professor Jean Du Hamel that concerned both his Syst`eme and his reply to Huet. Following this debate triggered by Huet’s Censura, there was a dispute internal to the Cartesian camp in which Regis again was prominent. This dispute started with the publication in 1693 of Malebranche’s response to the specific objections to his Recherche in Regis’s Syst`eme. Regis reacted in 1694 by publishing his own reply to Malebranche, and that same year one of Malebranche’s disciples, Henri de Lelevel, defended a Malebranchean line against claims in Regis as well as in Huet and Du Hamel. In 1699, Regis’s reputation as an expositor of Cartesian natural philosophy was such that he was appointed, along with his nemesis Malebranche, to an honorary position in the newly reformed Acad´emie des sciences. Due to failing health, Regis was unable to participate in the life of this institution. However, he did complete his second major work, L’Usage de la raison et de la foy, which was published in 1704. This text emphasizes the distinction between the realms of faith and reason, and the account of reason there draws heavily on the Syst`eme, including the views in the book on metaphysics that bespeak the influence of Desgabets. Regis wrote his Usage under the patronage of the duc de Rohan, who had accepted Regis into his household upon the death of his father-in-law, the marquis de Vardes, in 1688. Regis himself died in January 1707 in Rohan’s apartment in Paris. After Regis’s death, Desgabets’s views ceased to play any serious role in discussions of Cartesianism.

i.2 french cartesianisms Historians of philosophy frequently appeal to certain constructed “isms” named for some pivotal thinker (e.g., Aristotelianism, Thomism, Marxism).26 Such constructions are difficult to avoid, especially if the concern is to map trends or countertrends in intellectual history. Even so, there are practical difficulties in the appeal to the constructed ideologies that derive from the absence of precise criteria that serve in all cases to indicate whether particular individuals are properly characterized as belonging to the targeted movement.27 26

27

There are, of course, also ideological constructions not so named. Perhaps the most familiar to those who work in early modern philosophy are rationalism and empiricism. I sometimes speak of particular doctrines as rationalist or empiricist in senses that I hope will be clear from the context. However, the distinction between rationalism and empiricism is somewhat less important with respect to my discussion of Desgabets and Regis than the distinction between idealism and realism. There is the reasonable Wittgensteinian counter that intellectual movements are to be characterized not in terms of necessary and sufficient conditions but rather in terms of overlapping positions that bear a certain “family resemblance” to each other. Compare the suggestion in Grant that the term “Aristotelian” denotes not a species with a fixed essence

10

Introduction

The difficulties in the case of Cartesianism are illustrated by the recent comment that “there was hardly a doctrine, view, or argument that was advanced by everyone thought, and rightly thought, to be a Cartesian.”28 Even if we bracket out national and religious differences by focusing on the case of Catholic France, we find disagreement among Descartes’s successors with respect to the “metaphysical core” of his system, namely, his doctrine that the essence of body consists in extension and that the essence of mind consists in thought. For Descartes, the portion of this doctrine concerning the essence of body entails the impossibility of both atoms and the void; atoms, because extension is divisible without end (or indefinitely, as Descartes put it), and the void, because space does not really differ from the extension of a particular body.29 Yet in the 1666 Discernement du corps et de l’ˆame, the Cartesian Geraud de Cordemoy argued for the conclusion that there are indivisible atoms in nature.30 Desgabets was sent a copy of the Discernement by his friend Clerselier, who was in turn a friend of Cordemoy. Desgabets wrote back to Clerselier to protest the fact that “Cordemoy thoughtlessly causes a schism that is all the more serious since it all of a sudden removes from the true philosophy one of its strongest columns and notably strengthens the camp of Gassendi, which already seems only too likely to support itself and to overcome that of Descartes.”31 For Desgabets, it was essential that Descartes’s plenism be distinguished from, and defended against, the atomism of Gassendi and the Gassendists.32 Beyond Cordemoy, however, there were other followers of Descartes in France, such as the Oratorian Fromentier in Angers and the Minim Maignan in Toulouse, who confused the issue by offering atomistic versions of what was widely taken to be a kind of Cartesian physics.33 In contrast to the orthodoxy of his rejection of Cordemoy’s atomism, Desgabets challenged the Cartesian doctrine – which Cordemoy’s Discernement

28 29 30

31 32 33

but rather something like a population in the sense used in evolutionary biology, which can exhibit considerable variation among members (Grant 1987, 347–53). Presumably, the analogue to reproductive isolation is some sort of derivation of later positions from the doctrines of the founding member. Further precision would, of course, be required for those concerned with defending Grant’s suggestion. Lennon and Easton 1992, 1. See AT 8-1:49 and 51f. On Descartes’s rejection of atomism, see Garber 1992, ch. 5. Cordemoy charged that there is a circularity in Descartes that derives from the fact that he defined motion in terms of the tranference of individual bodies but also held that bodies are individuated by their transference or motion. He held that Cartesians can cut this Gordian knot by defining bodies in terms of indivisible atoms that are distinguished by their shape rather than their motion (see Cordemoy 1968, 95f ). For more on Cordemoy’s position, see Battail 1973, chs. 3–4. From an unpublished 1666 letter quoted in Prost 1907, 158. I return in §2.4.1 to Descartes’s Cartesian opposition to Gassendist physics. On the perception in the second half of the seventeenth century that Descartes belonged to the same camp as the atomist Gassendi, see Lennon 1993, 9–17.

Radical Cartesianism in Context

11

is concerned about defending – that we can completely understand the nature of our soul in terms of thought alone. Reacting to the endorsement of this doctrine in Malebranche, Desgabets wrote to this Cartesian in 1674 that “I consider the angel to be of a nature much more contrary to that of the soul than simply distinguished.” While the nature of an angel, or of any other “pure mind,” consists in purely intellectual thought, according to Desgabets, our soul must be understood to be “a thinking substance, but thinking in a certain manner, that is that the thoughts that are its modes naturally demand to be united with corporeal motions” (OCM 18:84f ). He went so far as to claim that all our thoughts depend essentially on body. Desgabets’s admirer Regis adopted this same position, and with Desgabets he argued explicitly against the assertion in Malebranche of the existence in us of a “pure intellect” that operates apart from the body. Given this variety in opinions among Descartes’s followers in France, there is reason to speak not of a single movement, French Cartesianism, but rather of a variety of French Cartesianisms. This proposal is the counterpart for the early modern period of the suggestion of Charles Schmitt that it is best to speak of ‘Aristotelianisms’ since “the single rubric Aristotelianism is not adequate to describe the range of diverse assumptions, attitudes, approaches to knowledge, reliance on authority, utilization of sources, and methods of analysis to be found among Renaissance followers of Aristotle.”34 In the case of Cartesianism, there are admittedly special difficulties regarding the attack on plenist physics in Cordemoy and the Cartesian atomists and the attack on pure intellect in Desgabets and Regis, since Descartes explicitly rejected the positions offered here in his name. Even so, Desgabets insisted that his intent in offering his deviant views was to refine rather than to replace Descartes’s system. Thus, he noted in a 1677 letter that the faults in Descartes’s Meditations “would have angered me were it not M. Descartes himself who redresses himself” (OCM 18:127). Elsewhere, Desgabets wrote that Descartes himself would not have been disturbed by this attempt at dialectical refinement since he “has no less modesty than light and does not fail to know that God is not accustomed to do everything by a single man, for fear of giving him occasion to elevate himself above the Father of lights.”35 For Desgabets, Cartesianism is not a fixed position that can simply be extracted from Descartes, but rather a work in progress that starts with Descartes’s insights but that subjects his views to revision and correction. It is clear, then, that Descartes’s followers did not take him to have bequeathed a seamless system of thought. His complex and multilayered texts in fact gave rise to a variety of different views and approaches. Even in his own day, his Dutch follower Henricus Regius, who had a chair in medicine

34 35

Schmitt 1983, 10. From the “nouvelle pr´eface” to the “Suppl´ement,” at RD 5:155.

12

Introduction

at the University of Utrecht, attempted to detach Descartes’s natural philosophy from its metaphysical and epistemological moorings. Thus, in his 1646 Fundamenta physices, Regius defended a mechanistic physics and physiology akin to that found in Descartes while also urging that, apart from faith, natural reason can reveal neither the existence of the material world nor the distinction of mind from body.36 More generally, Regius urged in this text that even judgments based on “evidence” are not indubitable but can be accepted as true only “as long as experience or argument has not proved them to be false.”37 As in the case of atomism and the denial of pure intellect, though, Descartes explicitly rejected the position in question. In the 1647 preface to the French edition of the Principles, he protested in particular that Regius’s Fundamenta has “denied certain truths of metaphysics on which the whole of physics must be based” (AT 9-2:19f).38 Nevertheless, something of Regius’s approach remains in the work of the natural philosopher Jacques Rohault, who was perhaps the most prominent Cartesian in France in the decades immediately following Descartes’s death.39 It is true that Rohault refrained from endorsing the sort of fideism in Regius with respect to metaphysical truths. Indeed, Rohault’s Trait´e de physique opens with the claim that we know the existence of our mind and its distinction from body as well as the existence of God.40 However, the thesis that there is a material world is treated in this text as a causal hypothesis that is confirmed by sense experience.41 More generally, the Trait´e highlights a “true method of philosophizing about particular things” that involves the testing of probable conjectures concerning phenomena by means of observation and experiment (exp´erience).42 Descartes earlier allowed that his explanations in physics have a “moral 36 37 38

39 40

41

42

Regius 1646, 246, 249f. Ibid., 287. Descartes had earlier expressed his confidence in Regius’s ability to represent his own views in disputes over Cartesianism in the early 1640s in Utrecht; see, for instance, Descartes’s remarks in his 1643 letter to Voetius, his chief opponent at Utrecht, in AT 8-2:163. In reaction to Descartes’s public repudiation of the Fundamenta, Regius published a broadsheet in 1647 that outlined his differences with Descartes, and Descartes promptly issued his own pointby-point reply to this broadsheet. For more on the tempestuous relation between Descartes and Regius, see Verbeek 1992, chs. 2 and 4. For a discussion of Rohault’s influence, see the biographical introduction in Rohault 1978. Rohault 1683, 1:4–9. Rohault also claimed in this section that we can know the existence of the material world, though his subsequent discussion suggests that this knowledge is not warranted prior to our investigation of particular effects in nature. Ibid., 1:20. Rohault held that mental operations distinct from sensation (viz., simple perceptions, judgment, and reasoning) can establish only the possibility of the existence of the material world (ibid., 1:8). Ibid., 1:24–28. Compare Rohault’s comment in the unpaginated preface of this work that progress in physics has been hindered by those who treat it “too metaphysically” and who focus on questions that are “so abstract and so general.” On Rohault’s hypothetical method in physics, see Mouy 1934, 114f, and Clarke 1989, ch. 7.

Radical Cartesianism in Context

13

certainty” that is tied to their empirical confirmation.43 However, he also stressed, in a manner that Rohault did not, that these explanations are acceptable only because they rest on metaphysical foundations that are not just morally but “absolutely” certain.44 We will see presently that Descartes’s emphasis on indubitable metaphysical foundations is reflected in the views of his followers in France. Yet Rohault’s Trait´e was widely regarded as a definitive Cartesian text.45 The influence of his probabilism in particular is revealed by the fact that a set of Cartesian theses officially condemned by the Jesuits in 1706 included the proposition that “Descartes’s system can be defended as an hypothesis, the principles and postulates of which harmonize among themselves and with their conclusions.”46 One might expect that Regis, as Rohault’s prize pupil, would have adopted the probabilism of his teacher. Even though he did use probabilistic language in the book on physics in his Syst`eme,47 there is no probabilism in Regis’s claim elsewhere in this text that certain “metaphysical truths” are “clear and evident propositions that serve as the standard [regle] to judge the truth of things.”48 Earlier, Desgabets had claimed in his Critique de la Critique that his primary purpose was “to discover the true foundations of the sciences and to walk on the path of solid truths” (CdC 19). There is a similar emphasis on indubitable foundations in the main figure of the Critique, Malebranche, who urged in his Recherche that “we cannot clearly and distinctly know the particular things of physics without the more general, and without ascending to the level of metaphysics” (OCM 1:319). This concern in Malebranche, Desgabets, and Regis to provide secure metaphysical foundations for Cartesian physics contrasts with the attempt of Rohault (and Regius) to offer a probabilistic defense of this physics that jettisons much of Descartes’s metaphysical baggage (see Figure 1). In Descartes, the project of establishing indubitable metaphysical truths is motivated not only by a concern to provide foundations for physics but also by a desire to appeal to natural reason in support of religious doctrines

43

44

45

46 47 48

See AT 8-1:327f, where Descartes compared his explanations in physics to a conjecture that provides a coherent interpretation of an encoded message. This comparison is the same as that Rohault invoked in the passage from the Trait´e cited in note 42. Descartes held out the hope that even his particular results in physics, at least with regard to “the general features of the universe and of the earth,” could be absolutely certain insofar as “they have been deduced in a continuous series from first and most simple principles of human cognition” (AT 8-1:328f ). It was made one of the most popular Cartesian texts in natural philosophy in the Englishspeaking world by Rohault 1969, a 1723 translation that the Newtonian Samuel Clarke annotated. “Systema Cartesii defendi potest tanquam hypothesis, cujus principia et postulata inter se et sum conclusionibus rect`e cohaerunt” (Prop. 30, in Ariew 1994, 6). See Mouy 1934, 152f, and Clarke 1980. From the “avertissement” to the metaphysical part of the Syst`eme at 1:63.

14

Cause of sensations in material world

Cannot assign limits to God’s power

Arnauld

Malebranche

Pure intellect

Object of perception of extension in God

Representative ideas are in God

Eternal truths are beyond God’s control

rationalism/idealism

Objective reality of idea of extension in us

figure 1. French Cartesianisms

No pure intellect

Object of idea of extension in material world

Representative ideas are in us

?

Cartesian physics requires indubitable metaphysical foundations (existence of God, immateriality of mind, matter = extension)

Desgabets/Regis

God freely creates eternal truths

empiricism/realism

Probabilistic Cartesian physics without metaphysics

Rohault

Radical Cartesianism in Context

15

concerning the existence of God and the immortality of the soul.49 A similar desire is evident in Desgabets, who stressed in a letter to Malebranche that “the two fundamental truths” of the immortality of the soul and the existence of God are “absolutely necessary to all men” (OCM 18:82f ). The importance of these two truths is reflected in the structure of his “Suppl´ement,” which devotes its first section to considerations involving the immortality of the soul and its second section to considerations involving the existence of God. There is also a significant theological component to Malebranche’s philosophy, as revealed by the fact that he emphasized from the start – in the preface to his first published work, the Recherche – that our mind has an intellectual knowledge that derives from a “union with God” that is essential to it (OCM 1:9). Here we have the doctrine in Malebranche that we understand objects by means of a vision of ideas in God. This doctrine of “the vision in God” is at the forefront of Malebranche’s famous dispute with his main Cartesian opponent, Antoine Arnauld, over the nature of ideas. Both sides of this dispute invoked the authority of Descartes; Arnauld used it to establish that the “objective reality” of ideas that serves to represent objects exists in us, whereas Malebranche called on Descartes to support the conclusion that this objective reality is something distinct from our mind that exists in God.50 An increased interest in this dispute in the recent literature has, in fact, strengthened the awareness among scholars of the different ways in which Descartes was interpreted and used by his successors.51 On what was most prominently at issue in the debate between Arnauld and Malebranche on ideas, Desgabets and Regis had little to add. Desgabets anticipated, and Regis echoed, the basic point in Arnauld that representative ideas exist in our mind rather than in God’s.52 However, these Cartesians went beyond Arnauld in opposing certain elements of Malebranche’s doctrine of the vision in God. A case in point is provided by Malebranche’s insistence that uncreated divine ideas provide the foundations for the eternal truths we perceive. Here he was setting himself against the doctrine in Descartes that these truths issue from God’s free will. Arnauld never did 49

50

51 52

This desire is particularly evident in the letter that dedicates the Meditations to the Paris Faculty of Theology. Caton argues that Descartes did not actually accept these doctrines but used theology as a cover for a physics that has materialistic implications (see Caton 1973). I find this argument to be unpersuasive, but even if it holds in the case of Descartes, it certainly does not hold for later French Cartesians such as Desgabets, Malebranche, and Arnauld. Compare Arnauld’s position in OA 38:200 and Malebranche’s position in OCM 6:172. It should be said, however, that when Malebranche was most concerned with arguing that representative ideas are in God, he tended to appeal to Augustine rather than to Descartes. On this point, see Schmaltz 2000a. See, for instance, Jolley 1990 and Nadler 1992b, in the English-language literature, and Moreau 1999, in the French literature. Desgabets defended this position in his Critique de la Critique some eight years prior to the publication of Arnauld’s first response to Malebranche in the 1683 Vraies et fausses id´ees, while Regis first defended it seven years after Arnauld in the Syst`eme de philosophie.

16

Introduction

take a stand on this doctrine, but Desgabets and Regis came out firmly and unequivocally in favor of Descartes on this matter. In arguing with Descartes against encroachments on God’s power, the latter were similar to Rohault, who had announced in his Trait´e de physique that it is temerarious to “undertake to determine how far the power of God extends” and thus that “I will never assert that a thing is impossible for God; and . . . will content myself simply with saying that this thing is not numbered among the things that I know that He can make.”53 As this passage indicates, however, Rohault took the fact that God has unlimited power to reveal the limitations of our thought. Characteristically, he was unwilling to explore the metaphysical issues regarding this power. In contrast, Desgabets and Regis were concerned with constructing a metaphysical foundation for a suitably revised version of Descartes’s views on the eternal truths. More than Rohault, and certainly more than Arnauld, Desgabets and Regis offered a Cartesian alternative to Malebranche’s metaphysics of uncreated divine ideas. Desgabets and Regis also differed from Arnauld in opposing the claim in Malebranche that the union with God involves the production in us of pure intellectual thoughts that do not depend on body.54 This opposition to pure intellect explains why their alternative to Malebranche has come to be characterized as “Cartesian empiricism.”55 Such a characterization is only reinforced by their resistance to the view in Malebranche that eternal truths have a “hard” necessity that is beyond even God’s control. Yet Rohault seems to offer a more refined form of empiricistic Cartesianism than what we find in Desgabets and Regis. After all, Rohault emphasized more than they ever did the importance of an empirical scientific method. Moreover, Rohault was more inclined than Desgabets and Regis to stress the limitations in our ability to know metaphysical truths that go beyond what is confirmed in sense experience.56 Even so, it is fair to say that Desgabets and Regis are closer in some respects to Rohault’s empiricism than they are to a “rationalism” linked to Malebranche’s insistence on uncreated eternal truths and pure intellect.57 53 54 55

56

57

Rohault 1683, 1:40. For Descartes’s reluctance to assert that something is impossible for God, see the passages cited in §2.1.1, at note 13. For an indication of Arnauld’s sympathy with this claim, see the passage cited in §1.4.4, at note 124. Thus, Rodis-Lewis speaks of Desgabets, Regis, and Cally as part of “the empirical current” (die empiristische Str¨omung) of French Cartesianism (Rodis-Lewis 1993a, 423). Compare Easton 1992; Lennon and Easton 1992, 23; and Lennon 1998, 353. The Toulouse Cartesian Fran¸cois Bayle seems to be closer to Rohault than to Desgabets and Regis on this point. See the texts collected in Lennon and Easton 1992, which also includes a useful introduction that, nonetheless, stresses Bayle’s connections to Desgabets and Regis. One complication here concerns the case of knowledge of the soul. Desgabets and Regis, as well as Arnauld, defended Descartes’s “rationalistic” claim that we have a clear and distinct idea of the soul, but Malebranche notoriously denied that we have access to such an idea. For a discussion of the debate among the Cartesians on this matter, see Schmaltz 1996.

Radical Cartesianism in Context

17

Moreover, Desgabets and Regis share with Rohault a “realism” that involves a reluctance to entertain the possibility that there is no extended material world. There is a clear contrast here with an “idealism” in Malebranche that stresses the dependence of our perception of the material world on an idea of extension in God that does not require the existence of any extension external to us. To be sure, the argument against this sort of idealism in Desgabets and Regis differs from the argument that we find in Rohault. Whereas Rohault offered empirical grounds for the belief in the material world, Desgabets and Regis argued in a more rationalistic manner that this world must exist as the object of our idea of extension. As in the case of empiricism, however, so in the case of realism Desgabets and Regis are closer to Rohault than they are to Malebranche (see Figure 1). I will have more to say later about the empiricistic and realistic elements of the thought of Desgabets and Regis. Since my concern is to highlight what is truly distinctive in the views of Desgabets and Regis, however, I have chosen not to characterize their Cartesianism primarily in terms of such elements. Following the lead provided by Retz’s reference in the opening remark to the “outr´e” nature of Desgabets’s thought, I have decided to call the system that he shared with Regis “Radical Cartesianism.” An illustration of the radical nature of their Cartesianism is provided by their attitude toward Descartes’s method of doubt. While Rohault politely ignored this aspect of Descartes’s epistemology, Desgabets explicitly rejected it as a hindrance in the search for truth. There is a similar rejection in Rohault’s student, Regis, that is particularly evident in his argument in the Usage against the thesis in Descartes that our view of our own mind is epistemically superior to our view of body. Rohault also refrained from addressing directly Descartes’s views on purely intellectual thought. Here again, Desgabets and Regis were more radical in constructing a detailed defense of the conclusion that all human thought derives from the soul–body union. Both this conclusion and their claim that our idea of extension directly reveals the existence of its object are radical in the sense that they deviate from Descartes’s own position in the Meditations that in the search for knowledge we must start with a self that is detached from external reality.58 Even so, there is a sense in which the Cartesianism of Desgabets and Regis is radical in the more etymological sense of getting to the “root” of Descartes’s thought. This is so particularly with regard to their views concerning Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths. Whereas Descartes intimated without fully explaining the metaphysical significance of this doctrine, Desgabets and Regis both made it the centerpiece of their metaphysical system. They also showed in their writings how this 58

Here I depart from the suggestion in Lennon that Descartes accepted the main lines of the position that we find in Desgabets and Regis; see Lennon 1993, 210; 1994, 24.

18

Introduction

doctrine reinforces a realism that takes the existence of created extension to be assured from the start. Moreover, the metaphysics that they introduced to shore up Descartes’s doctrine backs their argument for the conclusion that temporal human thought depends on the body. In a sense, then, even deviant elements of their system have a profoundly Cartesian basis. After having settled on “Radical Cartesianism” as the label for the system of Desgabets and Regis, I discovered that Henri Krop had already used it to characterize the views of Spinoza and other Dutch thinkers.59 As we will see, the metaphysics of Desgabets and Regis does have Spinozistic (or rather, as I call them, quasi-Spinozistic) features. Moreover, it will become clear later that Spinozism played a prominent (though mainly negative and polemical) role in Regis’s debates with Malebranche and his followers.60 Even so, there is no denying that Spinoza’s system is in certain respects more radical than anything found in Desgabets and Regis. Thus, there is no counterpart in the work of these French Cartesians of Spinoza’s sweeping rejection of the miraculous and his insistence that human beings can be adequately considered simply as parts of a material world that are wholly governed by its deterministic laws. There is thus an argument for taking Spinoza to be the true radical in the Cartesian camp. Such an argument is strengthened by the recent claim that Spinozism helped to shape a “radical enlightenment” in France that is reflected in the deterministic materialism of eighteenth-century philosophes such as La Mettrie and Diderot.61 However, in an earlier period Spinoza’s following was restricted for the most part to the Dutch Republic.62 During the last half of the personal rule of Louis XIV (extending from the death of Mazarin in 1660 to his own death in 1715), there simply was no one in France who promoted Spinozism in the way in which Regis promoted Desgabets’s brand of Cartesianism. Given the focus in this work, intimated in its subtitle, on the initial French reception of Descartes, there is reason to associate Radical Cartesianism here with Desgabets and Regis rather than with Spinoza. There is an additional, more theoretical consideration that reinforces the focus on Desgabets and Regis. Even though Spinoza was undoubtedly a radical Cartesian, he was not a radical Cartesian in quite the sense that Desgabets and Regis were. In contrast to Desgabets and Regis, Spinoza was relatively unconcerned with showing that his radical views do justice to Descartes’s deepest insights. The contrast is especially evident with respect to their attitudes toward the doctrine of the creation of the eternal 59 60 61 62

Krop 1996. On the Spinozistic aspects of the metaphysics of Desgabets and Regis, see §§2.5 and 2.7–2.8. On the role of Spinozism in the Regis–Malebranche disputes, see §§2.8 and 5.4. Israel 2001. As indicated in ibid., ch. 17.

Radical Cartesianism in Context

19

truths. While Spinoza emphasized his radical view that effects in nature derive with geometrical necessity from God, and thus do not derive from the divine will, Desgabets and Regis embraced Descartes’s voluntarism and explored its deep implications.63 Moreover, even in cases where the French Cartesians rejected aspects of Descartes’s system, they attempted to find a basis in his writings for the rejection. There simply is nothing comparable in, for instance, Spinoza’s rejection of miracles or his argument that we can conceive of ourselves as bits of material nature. In considering the radical revisions of Descartes in Desgabets and Regis, I depart from a well-traveled route in English-language studies of Cartesianism that involves a concentration on Descartes and even more narrowly on a small set of propositions drawn from his Meditations. To be sure, some recent studies have prepared the way for this departure by drawing attention to the different reactions to Descartes in the work of Malebranche and Arnauld. Yet I will go even farther afield to explore what is, for Anglo-American scholars, at least, the unfamiliar terrain of the Radical Cartesianism of Desgabets and Regis. Some may well hesitate to follow me this far from the beaten path. For those who persist, however, there is the potential for a reward that goes beyond an increased understanding of the history of French Cartesianism (though there is that, too). The views of Desgabets and Regis differ from all the other major Cartesians after Descartes in clearing a logical space that accommodates both Descartes’s voluntarism and his insistence that our knowledge is grounded in eternal and immutable essences. Such views continue to be relevant for those today who want to give full weight to God’s omnipotence without admitting a kind of epistemological nihilism. Moreover, Desgabets and Regis proposed a reconciliation of Descartes’s dualism with the demands of the soul–body union that challenges the contemporary commonplace that Aristotelian and Cartesian theories of mind are separated by an unbridgeable gap. Both historical and philosophical interests are served, then, by an exploration of the territory staked out by the two radical French Cartesians.

i.3 a map of radical cartesianism The announcement in the subtitle that this study considers “the French reception of Descartes” requires qualification at the start. The subtitle accurately reflects the discussion here of certain definitive moments in the history of the reception of Descartes in France in the second half of the seventeenth century. However, there is no pretense of providing an exhaustive narrative concerning the development of French Cartesianism that rivals 63

In §3.5, however, I discuss Spinoza’s claim that his account of God accords in one respect with the views of the Cartesian voluntarists.

20

Introduction

the one provided in Francisque Bouillier’s monumental Histoire de la philosophie cart´esienne, or more recently in Genevi`eve Rodis-Lewis’s state-of-the-art contributions to the new Grundriss der Geschichte der Philosophie.64 The more limited purpose of the discussion of French Cartesianism that follows is rather to draw attention to the ways in which Desgabets and Regis contributed to this movement. Even here, there is no claim to completeness. For instance, there is no extended discussion of the technical details of (as opposed to the metaphysical basis for) the mechanistic physics of Desgabets and Regis.65 Furthermore, almost nothing is said about Desgabets’s extensive writings on theological topics such as grace, original sin, and attrition, and Regis’s views on ethics and political philosophy are considered in only a cursory manner.66 The scope of this work is limited for the most part to their radical revision of central elements of Cartesian metaphysics and epistemology. This is more than enough, however, since the positions themselves are subtle and the arguments for them are complex. In focusing on these positions and arguments, my discussion follows the lead of Desgabets and Regis, who indicated themselves that these elements of their system constitute their most distinctive contribution to Cartesianism. This work is flanked by sections that focus on their role in the history of early modern French Cartesianism. Part I begins with a consideration of Desgabets’s entanglement in controversies over the Eucharist, which dominated discussions of Descartes in France during the 1670s, while Part III closes with a consideration of Regis’s participation in debates over Cartesianism in France starting in the 1690s. The centerpiece of this study, however, is the detailed consideration in Part II of the doctrines that I take to constitute the Radical Cartesianism of Desgabets and Regis. The historical narrative in the flanking parts is linked in important ways to the doctrines considered in the middle part. However, this narrative largely abstracts from the details of the various arguments for these doctrines that I consider in the middle. By the same token, the philosophical discussion in the middle part can in principle be read independently of the details of the historical narrative. There is the option of choosing to focus on only one of these two sections of the text. Those who favor rational reconstructions of positions on philosophical topics may well find that they are more 64

65

66

Compare Bouillier 1868, 1:466–607, 2:1–402, and the discussion of Cartesianism and Malebranchism in Rodis-Lewis 1993a, b. For a review of the treatment in the new Grundriss volumes of seventeenth-century philosophy in France and the Netherlands that places it in context and indicates its importance, see Steenbakkers 1997. Both obviously had an intense interest in the details. As indicated in note 1, Desgabets responded to Poisson’s work on mechanics. Moreover, nearly two of the three volumes of Regis’s Syst`eme are devoted to topics pertaining to physics. For a discussion of Desgabets’s views on these topics, see Taveneaux 1960, 118–31. On Regis’s ethics and political philosophy, see Canziani 1990.

Radical Cartesianism in Context

21

comfortable in the middle, while those who prefer a consideration of the broader historical context of philosophical discussions may feel more at home in the flanking parts. However, even those who prefer to concentrate on one portion of the text may nonetheless use the cross-references to attend selectively to discussions of related topics in other portions. Of course, there may be those who share my interest in both the historical and the philosophical aspects of Cartesianism. In that case, my advice is to read the book through, from start to finish. It was, in fact, designed to be so read. Part I was written as an historical introduction to Radical Cartesianism, the philosophical dimensions of which are explored in Part II. Part III was composed as a kind of historical epilogue that considers the fate of this system after the death of Desgabets. The intent is that the various historical and philosophical considerations converge on the point that Desgabets and Regis provided a powerful and highly original counter to the form of Cartesianism found in Malebranche and his followers. The three parts of this volume consist of five chapters altogether. Part I is composed of a single chapter devoted to the role of Desgabets in French discussions of Descartes during a period starting with Desgabets’s introduction to Descartes in the 1650s and ending with the publication in 1680 of a critique of Cartesianism in which Desgabets’s views are prominent. This period is noteworthy since it includes the first wave of a state-sponsored campaign against Cartesians in French universities and religious orders. Desgabets’s early work reflects the preoccupation of the campaign itself with the implications of Cartesian physics for the theology of the Eucharist, and one of his writings on this issue is, in fact, implicated in the initial condemnation that marks the start of the campaign. What interests me here is not just the history of Desgabets’s involvement in the Eucharist controversies but also the philosophically significant aspects of his views on this theological issue. One surprising point that emerges from my discussion is that these views are in some respects less revisionary from a Cartesian standpoint than the views on this issue in Arnauld, who otherwise was a cautious interpreter of Descartes. However, Desgabets was more radical than Arnauld in insisting that any eucharistic theology must be constrained by the philosophical thesis of the indefectibility of matter. From his earliest writings, Desgabets took this thesis to be linked in an essential manner with a doctrine of created eternal truths in Descartes that Arnauld never directly considered. Desgabets’s work on the issue of the Eucharist also serves to introduce both his claim that our idea of extension must have as its object a real extended substance and his conclusion that the human soul differs in nature from a purely intellectual mind by virtue of its union with a human body. Desgabets’s views concerning the creation of eternal truths, the correspondence of ideas to their objects, and the distinctive nature of the soul– body union constitute what I call his three “radical doctrines.” Part II consists

22

Introduction

of chapters devoted to the development of each of these doctrines in both Desgabets and Regis. In Chapter 2, I begin with a radical “creation doctrine” connected to Descartes’s thesis that God has freely created the eternal truths. Descartes introduced this thesis as something that provides the metaphysical foundations of his physics. He never clearly indicated the sense in which this thesis is foundational, however, and his scattered remarks concerning the eternal truths raise certain problems that he himself never resolved. Desgabets attempted to address these problems by offering an overtly metaphysical reading of this doctrine that avoids the “conceptualist” suggestion in Descartes that eternal truths depend primarily on features of our mind. For Desgabets, eternal truths concerning the physical world ultimately are grounded in an atemporal and indefectible material substance. Desgabets’s account here of this metaphysical foundation for physics is informed by an understanding of the relation between material substance and its modes that is similar in some respects to what one finds in Spinoza. One central difference derives from Desgabets’s insistence that God is distinct from the atemporal material substance He creates. The insistence is even more emphatic in Regis, who otherwise adopted Desgabets’s quasi-Spinozistic metaphysics. For Regis emphasized more strongly than Desgabets that the creation doctrine reveals an unbridgable gap that separates God’s mind from our own. The emphasis on this gap is particularly evident in Regis’s claim, in opposition to Malebranche’s “vision in God,” that nothing in God’s nature can serve to represent creatures to Him. Chapter 3 concerns the “intentionality doctrine” in Desgabets and Regis. This doctrine requires that all ideas bear an intentional relation to real and existing objects. One result here is that there must be a real extra-mental extension to which the idea of this extension is related. Both thinkers appealed to such a result to block the sort of hyperbolic doubt of the material world that Descartes introduced at the start of the Meditations. This line of argument may seem odd given that Desgabets and Regis both accepted the conclusion, which Arnauld defended against Malebranche, that representative ideas exist in us. Insofar as we have ideas that can represent on their own, it is unclear why we need to posit anything external to our mind. However, Desgabets and Regis insisted on a realism, found also in Malebranche, that places the immutable essences of the external objects we conceive outside of our mind. What distinguishes these two from Malebranche is their commitment to the result of the creation doctrine that these essences are creatures distinct from God. For Desgabets and Regis, these essences are to be identified not with divine ideas but rather with the created indefectible substances that this doctrine requires. The failure to recognize that our ideas of substances presuppose their extra-mental existence is one of two primary “faults” that Desgabets found in Descartes. The second fault is Descartes’s purported failure to see that all human thought depends on the union of our soul with body. Chapter 4

Radical Cartesianism in Context

23

is devoted to the development of this “union doctrine” in Desgabets and Regis. Each of these Cartesians defended the doctrine against the claim in Malebranche that we possess purely intellectual thoughts that do not require any body. At times, Desgabets and Regis both suggested that a body is required because all our thoughts derive from the senses. However, their deeper argument for the union doctrine depends on the principle that temporal duration bears an essential relation to bodily motion. This principle provides a further element of the substance–mode metaphysic that emerges from their discussion of the creation doctrine. It also provides the basis for a proto-Kantian “refutation of idealism” that is particularly evident in Desgabets. Kant opposed the “problematic idealism” of Descartes by holding that our knowledge of temporal relations presupposes the existence of spatial objects. In contrast, Desgabets argued against Descartes’s appeal to disembodied thought by claiming that the nature of the temporality of our thought is determined by continuous motion rather than by our thought itself. This argument constitutes a second step toward realism beyond the step to indefectible material substance, one which involves the positing of particular bodily modes that express that substance by means of motion. The organization of Part II is guided by the thesis that the radical creation doctrine constitutes the core of Radical Cartesianism. Both the intentionality doctrine and the union doctrine add to this core, though the additions provided by the former leave one closer to the center than the additions provided by the latter. The general effect is of a gradual expansion that starts from, but is not completely determined by, the creation doctrine. What we have in the end is a system that is complex and multifaceted but also reasonably coherent and unified. After discussing the central doctrines of Radical Cartesianism, I turn in the one and only chapter in Part III to the role of this system in French discussions of Cartesianism after Desgabets’s death. The starting point here is the 1691 condemnation of Descartes at the University of Paris, which marks the start of a second wave of the campaign against his followers in France. In contrast to the first wave of the campaign, this condemnation does not focus narrowly on the issue of the Eucharist. Instead, it raises broader issues concerning the compatibility of the Cartesian method of doubt with the demands of faith. These issues bespeak the influence of Huet’s Censura on post-Desgabets discussions in France of Cartesianism. Regis entered into these discussions through this work, for he wrote a response to Huet that addresses the issues raised in the 1691 condemnation. The radical nature of Regis’s views is somewhat hidden in this response, though they are more noticeable in a related exchange with Du Hamel. Such views also emerge in Regis’s disputes in the mid-1690s with Malebranche and Lelevel. What results from these latter disputes is Regis’s firm opposition to a kind of Platonic idealism in Malebranche that stresses the lack of dependence of our mind

24

Introduction

and its ideas on the external material world. In Regis’s hands, Desgabets’s Radical Cartesianism transforms into an Aristotelian realism that insists on the dependence of our experience on such a world. Even though this sort of Cartesianism may seem unusual, it was widely recognized in its day as constituting a possible though certainly controversial development of Descartes’s system. In this respect, Radical Cartesianism is similar to Malebranche’s form of Cartesianism. Ignorance of Malebranche among those with an interest in Cartesianism has recently become disreputable. In light of this welcome development, it would be appropriate if the current widespread ignorance of the radical response to Malebranche in Desgabets and Regis were to become disreputable as well.

part i ROBERT DESGABETS

1 Desgabets’s Consid´erations, Arnauld, and Cartesianism

The Descartes most familiar to twentieth-century philosophers is the Descartes of the first two Meditations, someone preoccupied with hyperbolic doubt of the material world and the certainty of knowledge of the self that emerges from the famous cogito argument. However, this Descartes, the paradigmatic egoistic epistemologist, contrasts markedly with the Descartes received in the first few decades following his death. That Descartes was concerned primarily with overturning the old scholastic philosophy of nature in a manner that has ramifications for the doctrine of the Eucharist. One thesis here is that the early modern emphasis on Cartesian eucharistic theology is reflected in the 1671 decree from Louis XIV that triggered the state-sponsored campaign against Cartesianism in France. The theological importance of the doctrine of the Eucharist is clear from its central role in the Reformation and Counter-Reformation. In France, moreover, the political ramifications of the doctrine are revealed by the religious wars between Catholics and (Calvinist) Huguenots that resulted in the uneasy truce declared in the Edict of Nantes (1598).1 However, the Cartesian episode in the history of the controversy over the Eucharist highlights important philosophical aspects of this doctrine. The official Catholic teaching on the sacrament draws on the ontologically loaded notions of persisting “species” and “transubstaniated” substances. Just as such notions had earlier forced the scholastics to modify Aristotelian categories that were not originally constructed to accommodate them, so Descartes and his Catholic followers felt the need to make room for these notions within the confines of Cartesian ontology. In both cases, the theology of the Eucharist required a reevaluation of basic ontological principles. Even though I argue that Desgabets’s contributions to this theology have historical significance for 1

For a treatment of the role in these disputes of the doctrine that has a decidedly Huguenotist slant, see Lestringant 1996. See also Adam 2000, ch. IV.

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Robert Desgabets

the early modern reception of Descartes, I also am concerned about drawing attention to the deep features of his ontology that these contributions presuppose. In §1.1, I begin with Louis’s 1671 decree, emphasizing in particular its connections to the publication that same year of an overtly Cartesian account of the Eucharist in Desgabets’s Consid´erations sur l’´etat pr´esent de la controverse touchant le Tr`es Saint-Sacrament de l’autel. In §1.2, I consider the intellectual context of the Consid´erations provided by the distinctive ontology that Descartes offered in his discussions of the Eucharist and that Desgabets developed in various writings dating from the 1650s and 1660s. Desgabets’s work culminated in his defense in the Consid´erations of a “cartesianized” version of a broadly Thomistic account of transubstantiation. Though Desgabets had attempted to enlist the support of Port-Royal in his project of developing Descartes’s views on the Eucharist, theologians associated with this convent were among his most vigorous opponents. This opposition to the Consid´erations has theologico-political sources connected to the controversies in France concerning “Jansenism.” However, the disputes over Desgabets’s eucharistic theology also broach some deep philosophical points. In §1.3, I consider in particular three philosophical assumptions that underlie the theological discussion in the Consid´erations. The first of these assumptions concerns the “indefectibility” or indestructibility of matter; the second, the necessity of the existence of material substance for our perceptions of the material world; and the third, the essential nature of the union of the human soul with the body. In §1.4, I turn to the alternative to Desgabets’s account of the Eucharist in the work of his main Cartesian opponent at Port-Royal, Antoine Arnauld. Arnauld accepted the view of the eucharistic “species” that Descartes presented in his published works; however, he rejected the speculations concerning transubstantiation in Descartes that Desgabets emphasized. Arnauld’s main argument against such speculations is that they involve a dangerous incursion of philosophy into matters that depend on faith alone. However, a closer examination reveals that his own views on eucharistic transubstantiation are not free of philosophical commitments. Indeed, his account of this doctrine has certain ontological implications that are problematic from a Cartesian standpoint. A comparison with Desgabets illustrates the Cartesian difficulties both with this account and with Arnauld’s attempt to draw an absolute distinction between Catholic theology and Cartesian philosophy. I close in §1.5 with a discussion of a polemical scholastic tract, the Sentimens de M. Descartes, which was published after Desgabets’s death. This work, from a Caen Jesuit using the name “La Ville,” is in line with criticisms of Cartesianism issuing from Louis’s 1671 decree insofar as it emphasizes the incompatibility of Descartes’s system with the Church teachings regarding the Eucharist. However, La Ville’s text introduces some new elements, including, in an appendix, Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of the eternal

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truths. The discussion in this appendix highlights in particular the version of this doctrine in Desgabets, drawing attention to the three philosophical assumptions in the Consid´erations. These assumptions reveal in turn the three radical doctrines that are the focus of the treatment in Part II of the unusual but philosophically significant form of Cartesianism in the work of Desgabets and Regis.

1.1 the 1671 decree and the consid e´ rations On 4 August 1671, the Archbishop of Paris, Fran¸cois de Harlay de Champvallon, called together the rector, the deans of the higher faculties, and the majority of principals of the colleges in the University of Paris to issue the following decree from Louis XIV. The king, having learned that certain opinions, that the faculty of theology had once censored and that the Parlement had prohibited from teaching and from publishing, are now being disseminated, not only in the University, but also in the rest of this city and in certain parts of the kingdom, either by strangers, or also by people within, [and] wishing to prevent the course of this opinion that could bring some confusion in the explanation of our mysteries, pushed by his zeal and his usual piety, has commanded me to tell you of his intentions. The king exhorts you, Sirs, to bring it about that no other doctrine than the one conveyed in the rules and statutes of the University is taught in the universities nor put into theses, and leaves you to your prudence and to your wise conduct to take the necessary path for this.2

The “rules and statutes” referred to here are connected to the controversy triggered by the announcement in 1624 of a private defense of antiAristotelian theses organized by three individuals associated with the University of Paris.3 The Sorbonne examined these theses and found several of them to be harmful to the faith. In particular, this faculty condemned a thesis that rejects the “Peripatetic view” that “physical alterations” involve the introduction of “accidental entities” in a subject that is “invariant with respect to substance.” The judgment of the Sorbonne was that this rejection is “false, temerarious, scandalous, and in some way attacks the sacrosanct sacrament of the Eucharist.”4 This judgment draws on the official Catholic account of the sacrament of the Eucharist, which was laid down at the thirteenth session of the Council 2 3

4

As quoted in Bouillier 1868, 1:469. Namely, Jean Bitaud, Antoine Villon, and Etienne de Clave. Bitaud was named as a defender of the fourteen theses, which contain a mixture of atomistic and alchemical views. The soldier– philosopher Villon was to serve as moderator of the defense, while the alchemist Clave, who was Bitaud’s teacher, was to serve as its president. The defense of the theses could not proceed as scheduled since it was banned by an arrˆet of the Paris parlement. See the copy of the censure in Babin 1679, 96. On the context of the action of the Sorbonne, see Garber 1988. Compare F´eret 1900–10, 3:322–26.

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Robert Desgabets

of Trent, in 1551.5 The decision of the council was that there is in this sacrament “a wonderful conversion of the whole substance of the bread into the body [of Jesus Christ], and of the entire substance of the wine into [His] blood, the species [specie] of the bread and wine only remaining, which the Catholic Church most fittingly calls transubstantiation.”6 It is the second point concerning the persistence of the species that is most directly relevant to the censure of the thesis rejecting the Peripatetic view. In particular, the Sorbonne determined that the denial of accidental entities that are in some way distinct from their subject threatens the Tridentine doctrine that the species of the eucharistic elements remain even after the substance of those elements has been replaced by the substance of the body and blood of Christ.7 Due to this determination, the Paris Parlement placed under penalty of death anyone within its jurisdiction (about one third of France) who was caught teaching “any maxims contrary to approved and ancient authorities” and providing “any disputations other than those approved by the doctors of the Faculty of Theology.” This context indicates that the mystery that Louis was particularly concerned with protecting from innovation was the miracle of the Eucharist. Louis’s 1671 decree mentions neither Descartes nor his followers. However, it is clear that Cartesianism was the primary target. Thus, when the Sorbonne issued a September 1671 declaration in support of the decree, it declared itself “contra Doctrinam Carthesi.”8 Louis himself singled out “les opinions et les sentimens de des Carthes” in a 1675 letter to officials at the University of Angers who were attempting to enforce his decree by condemning the views of certain professors sympathetic to Cartesianism.9 Moreover, a resolution drawn to Louis’s own specifications, which was adopted during the Sixteenth General Assembly of the Oratory, dictated that in the Oratorian colleges “one must depart in physics neither from the physics nor from the principles of physics of Aristotle commonly received in the Colleges in order to follow the new doctrine of M. Descartes, the teaching of which the King has prohibited for good reasons.”10 While the text of the 5

6 7

8 9

10

Denzinger 1963, 384–90. The Trent formulation was preceded by the declarations on the Eucharist at the 1415 session of the Council of Constance (ibid., 320f ). For discussion of the various formulations, see Jansen 1939. Denzinger 1963, 387. Even so, the thesis denies only that there is no change in a substance when accidental entities are introduced into it, and not that such entities can persist through substantial change, as the Tridentine doctrine of the Eucharist requires. This perhaps explains why the Sorbonne did not declare the thesis to be simply heretical. Babin 1679, 5f. The result here was that certain theses purportedly drawn from the lectures of the Oratorians Bernard Lamy and Cyprien de Villecroze were condemned, and Lamy was exiled from Angers and prohibited from teaching. For more on the Angers affair, see the primary source material in Babin 1679 and the discussion in Girbail 1964. Text in Bayle 1684, 11f.

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31

1671 decree fails to mention Descartes explicitly, the decree itself became a vehicle for an official campaign against the teaching of the new Cartesian philosophy in the schools.11 An initial question is why Louis felt the need to make a move against Cartesianism when he did. A partial answer is indicated by the reference in the decree itself to the spread of certain opinions “in the University.” This reference reflects a growing concern with Cartesianism from within the Parisian academic community. In 1665, the Jesuit Coll`ege de Claremont had held a disputation that condemned “Cartesian hypotheses” on the grounds that they were “distasteful to mathematics, philosophy, and theology.”12 Two years later, the chancellor of the abbey of the University of Paris, Pierre Lallement, was prevented by a last-minute royal order from delivering the funeral oration at the reburial of Descartes’s remains at that abbey. According to Lallement’s journal entries concerning this event, university authorities had warned him that it would be inappropriate for a representative of the university to ally himself in such a public manner with Descartes and his disciples. In light of these entries, it seems reasonable to assume that these same authorities pressed for the royal order banning Lallement’s oration.13 Finally, we have the 1669 report that candidates for a vacant chair in philosophy at the Coll`ege Royal were required to defend “theses on the excellence of peripateticism and against the new philosophy of M. Descartes.”14 These various actions seem to be reactions to the successful promotion of Cartesianism outside of the universities during the late 1650s and the 1660s. This was the time of the vigorous discussions of Descartes and Cartesianism in various Paris cabinets, academies, and salons.15 As we know, Desgabets 11 12

13

14 15

For more on this campaign, see Clarke 1989, ch. 1, and Ariew 1999, ch. 9. The condemnation is reported in a 4 July 1665 letter from Oldenburg to Robert Boyle, which contains the following summary (Oldenburg 1966, 2:435): “To say no more, the Cartesian hypotheses must be distasteful to mathematics, philosophy, and theology. To philosophy because it overthrows all its principles and ideas which commonsense has accepted for centuries; to mathematics, because it is applied to the explanation of natural things, which are of another kind, not without great disturbance of order; to theology, because it seems to follow from the hypothesis that (i) too much is attributed to the fortuitous concourse of corpuscles, which favors the atheist; (ii) there is no necessity to allow a substantial form in man, which favors the impious and dissolute; (iii) there can be no conversion of bread and wine in the Eucharist into the body and blood of Christ, nor can it be determined what is destroyed in that conversion, which favors heretics.” The entries are cited in McClaughlin 1979, 565f. However, the reburial was possible in the first place due to the action of the Treasurer General, Etienne d’Aligre, who had arranged for the transfer of Descartes’s remains from Sweden to France. In contrast to the period following the 1671 decree, the French state did not make a unified effort during this time to suppress Cartesianism. Jourdain 1862–66, 1:234. The report is found in a 1669 letter from Guy Patin to Falconet (quoted in ibid., 1:234, n. 3). On the promotion of Descartes in the second half of the seventeenth century, see Gouhier 1978, Jolley 1992, and Lennon 1992, 3–26.

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himself participated in the academy of Habert de Montmor during a short stay in Paris in 1657–58. This also was the time of Rohault’s popular Mercredis, which first converted Regis to Cartesianism. Moreover, the publication of Descartes’s writings continued apace, with new editions from Claude Clerselier and Ren´e F´ed´e.16 Before the 1660s, the universities for the most part could ignore the new Cartesian philosophy.17 During the course of this decade, however, academic traditionalists increasingly saw the need to engage the Cartesian enemy actively. Given this context, it is understandable that the 1671 decree to the University of Paris was widely understood to be a prohibition of the views of Descartes. Even so, there remains the question of why this decree implicitly linked Cartesianism to the issue of the Eucharist. Though Descartes did address this issue briefly in his published writings (see §1.2.1), it hardly seems to be one of his central concerns. Moreover, we will discover that the Eucharist was not always the main focus of official French condemnations of Cartesianism (see §5.1). It is true that the theology faculty at Louvain had censured Descartes’s philosophy in 1662, in part due to the purported difficulties it creates for eucharistic theology.18 Yet that censure dates from almost a decade before Louis’s decree, and derives from a foreign source that had no authority in France. A more immediately relevant factor here seems to be the appearance in Amsterdam in 1671 – “toward the middle of the year,”19 and therefore just prior to Louis’s decree – of the anonymous tract, the Consid´erations sur l’´etat pr´esent. We know that copies of this work were indeed “disseminated” in Paris, presumably “either by strangers, or also by people from within [the kingdom]” (to quote from the 1671 decree).20 We also know from correspondence dating from the time of the 1671 decree that the royal confessor, Jean Ferrier, found the Consid´erations to be “a heretical and very pernicious book.” Ferrier reported this opinion to the king, who in turn passed the text along to Archbishop Harlay in order “to examine and censure it.”21 Unlike the 1624 Sorbonne condemnation, the Consid´erations does not focus on the issue of the persistence of the eucharistic species. Rather, the 16 17 18 19 20

21

For Clerselier’s editions, see Descartes 1657, 1659, 1664, 1666–67. On F´ed´e, see Levron 1960. For this point, especially with respect to the instruction of natural philosophy, see Brockliss 1992. For the text of the censure, see Argentr´e 1963, 3-2:304. For discussion, see Monchamp 1886. MS Epinal 43, 201. There is a reference in a 19 September 1671 letter from the Procurer General of the Benedictines to Desgabets that mentions that “a short work . . . concerning the explication of the mystery of the Eucharist” is “circulating in Paris” and that Desgabets is suspected of not only writing this work but also “sending it to several people” (quoted in L 126, n. 2). As reported in the letter cited in note 20.

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discussion in this text concerns the Trent declaration that Christ comes to be physically present in the sacrament by means of the miracle of “transubstantiation.” The main argument in the Consid´erations is directed against the view of the “scholastics” that this miracle involves the annihilation of the matter of the eucharistic elements. However, it also sketches the alternative view, indicated in its subtitle, that “the matter of the bread is changed into the body of Jesus Christ by its substantial union to His soul and to His divine person. ”22 The view here is that the bread is converted into Christ’s body when its matter is united to Christ’s soul and to His divinity. In defense of its argument against the scholastics, the Consid´erations appeals to certain Cartesian tenets in the Art de penser, a logic textbook culled from instruction at schools associated with the convent of Port-Royal-deschamps. This text thereby linked Cartesianism to an account of eucharistic transubstantiation that was particularly controversial. The controversy derives from the fact that the thesis in the Consid´erations that Christ contributes only His soul and divinity to the process of transubstantiation comes perilously close to the heretical Calvinist position that Christ is only “spiritually” and not “physically” present in this sacrament. Therefore, one can understand Ferrier’s charge that the Consid´erations is “heretical and pernicious.” The fact that this purportedly heretical text is overtly Cartesian may also have significance for the 1671 decree. In particular, it is tempting to appeal to Louis’s encounter with the Consid´erations to explain the timing of his response to a long-standing concern in the academic community about the threat of Cartesianism.23 To be sure, the record does not establish beyond doubt that Ferrier passed the Consid´erations along to Louis before the king issued his decree. Even if this text was not an immediate cause of that decree, however, it certainly was closely associated with the royal action against the new philosophy. Soon after Louis issued his decree, there was a concerted effort to discover the author of this text. Already by the beginning of September 1671, the author was identified as the lowly provincial Benedictine Robert Desgabets.24 By the end of the year, moreover, Desgabets figured prominently in explanations of the crackdown on Cartesianism. Thus, Clerselier reported to Desgabets that, in his meeting with Harlay in December, the archbishop had singled out “a certain writing published by a Benedictine religious” as the 22

23 24

The full title of Desgabets’s text is Consid´erations sur l’´etat pr´esent de la controverse touchant le Tr`es Saint-Sacrement de l’autel, ou` il est trait´e en peu mots de l’opinion qui enseigne que la mati`ere du pain est chang´e en celle du corps de J´esus-Christ par son union substantielle a` son aˆ me et a` sa personne divine. For more on the connections between the 1671 decree and the Consid´erations, see McClaughlin 1979, Nadler 1988, Schmaltz 1999b and in press. See the text cited in note 19, as well as the 5 September 1671 letter from Desgabets to Bossuet, in L 379. In the latter, Desgabets singled out “M. Arnauld et ces Messieurs [de Port-Royal]” as the ones who “did not refrain from attributing [the Consid´erations] to me.”

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source of “the troubles between the theologians over difficult and intricate questions.”25 The importance of this writing was such that the archbishop pressed Desgabets’s superiors to punish him for the views expressed therein. This pressure perhaps doomed Desgabets’s promotion to a choice position at the Benedictine abbey of Saint-Airy in Verdun 26 and, in any case, led to an interrogation in 1672 that resulted in the order that he “no longer speak or write” on the issue of the Eucharist.27 In a September 1671 letter, Desgabets noted in his own defense that the Consid´erations “passed from my hands and fell under the press, without my being able to know how it arrived there” (L 379). He also insisted elsewhere that the text “had not been written to be published” and that it “speaks with a liberty which the public has some reason to disapprove of.”28 Yet even though he submitted in 1672 to the negative judgment on the Consid´erations by his superiors,29 he continued thereafter to defend the account of the Eucharist that he had offered in that text, both in personal correspondence and in unpublished writings.30 His commitment to the Cartesian principles invoked in that account was simply too deep for him to turn away from the account itself, even given the opposition to it on the part of individuals at Port-Royal with whom he had attempted to ally himself.

1.2 descartes and desgabets on the eucharist 1.2.1 Descartes on the Eucharist As we have seen, there are two parts to the official Tridentine doctrine of the Eucharist, the first of which says that the substance of the bread and wine is transformed, by means of transubstantiation, into the substance of Christ’s body and blood, and the second of which says that the “species” of the bread and wine remain even though the bread and wine themselves do not. 25 26

27 28 29 30

See the portion of Clerselier’s 1672 letter to Desgabets provided in L 129f. Desgabets mentioned the promotion at Saint-Airy in September 1670 letters to NicolasJoseph Poisson, but he wrote to this Cartesian in a June 1671 letter that the intervention of Arnauld had put this promotion on hold. Desgabets’s further indication in an October 1671 letter that he is “only under-prior” at the monastary in the Lorraine outpost of Breuil, near Commercy, also suggests that he was prevented from taking higher positions elsewhere (see the passages cited in RD i:xviii). L 51, 127, n. 2. For a more complete transcript of Desgabets’s interrogation, see Armogathe 1977, 133–35. MS Epinal 64, 215. As indicated in L 127, n. 2. One of his discussions of the Eucharist was published some forty years after his death, in Mabillon and Ruinart 1724, 1:201–204. See also Desgabets’s 1674 “R´eponse d’un cart´esien a la lette d’un philosophe de ses amis,” in L 347–78. As indicated in §1.2.3, his attempt to defend his eucharistic theology prompted a 1673–74 exchange on this issue with Arnauld and Nicole.

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Descartes publicly addressed only the second point about the eucharistic species.31 In particular, he responded in the “Fourth Replies” to the objection of Arnauld – then a young theological student at the Sorbonne – that the implication of his 1641 Meditations that there are no “accidents, but only modes, which cannot be understood, and indeed cannot exist, without some substance in which they are present” seems to conflict with the revealed truth that “when the substance of the bread has been removed from the eucharistic bread, the accidents remain by themselves” (AT 7:248). Descartes countered that the Tridentine doctrine that the species of the eucharistic elements remain after consecration does not require the existence of accidents that can exist apart from any subject.32 Here Descartes reacted to the account of the eucharistic species offered in the work of Thomas Aquinas and his followers. Guided by his belief that such species subsist apart from any subject after consecration, Thomas substituted for the traditional Aristotelian view that all accidents inhere in a subject the weaker position that accidents merely have a natural “aptitude” so to inhere.33 For Thomas, the eucharistic species are accidents that naturally inhere in a subject but that can supernaturally subsist apart from it in this sacrament. As an alternative to the admission here of subjectless accidents, Descartes proposed that the persisting species of the bread be identified with “the surface that is common to the individual particles of the bread and the body that surround them” (AT 7:251). He claimed that the identification is appropriate given that these surfaces affect the senses, bringing about the perception of the sensible qualities of the bread. In a related discussion in the “Sixth Replies,” Descartes noted that these surfaces are not three-dimensional parts of the bread, but only two-dimensional modes. He also explained there that since the surfaces are boundaries shared by the elements and the bodies that surround them, they “can remain even though the bodies are removed, provided only that other bodies of exactly the same size and shape take their places” (7:433f ). Descartes concluded that the body of Christ is “precisely contained” within the surfaces of the 31

32

33

That his interest in this issue is long-standing is indicated by his announcement in a 1630 letter to Mersenne of his (never realized) intention to include in a forthcoming work on dioptrics, an account of colors that explains “how the whiteness of the bread remains in the Holy Sacrament” (AT 1:179). While the first edition of this text restricts itself to the argument that the Trent declaration does not require the existence of such accidents, the original manuscript contained the stronger argument that the alternative identification of species with separable accidents actually conflicts with the Catholic eucharistic dogma. Descartes’s editor, Mersenne, excised the argument out of fear that it would complicate the effort to win the approval of the Paris Faculty of Theology, but Descartes decided to include the excised material in the second edition of his text, which was published in Amsterdam in 1642. S.Th. IIIa, 77, 1 ad 2. Perhaps the most sophisticated development of this Thomistic position was provided by the sixteenth-century scholastic, Francisco Su´arez. For discussion of Su´arez’s views on substance, mode, and accident, see Menn 1997.

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eucharistic bread, although he also added, in line with the statement from the Council of Trent, that this body is contained only “sacramentally and with that form of existence which we cannot express in words” (7:252).34 In his published writings, Descartes refrained from saying anything more about this “sacramental” presence.35 However, he did say more about it in correspondence with a teacher from his school at La Fl`eche, the Jesuit Denis Mesland. This correspondence began in 1644 when Mesland wrote to Descartes to ask whether his system can allow for the doctrine of the substantial or “real” presence of Christ’s body in the Eucharist. Descartes was initially reluctant to address the issue of the Real Presence, claiming that “not being a theologian by training, I was afraid that anything I might write would be less well taken from me than from another” (AT 4:165). Yet he ventured to suggest that the nature of transubstantiation can be understood in terms of a distinction between two senses of body: “body in general,” which is simply a determinate “part of the quantity of which the universe is composed,” and “the body of a man,” which is “the whole of the matter united to the soul of that man.” Descartes noted that such a distinction is required since body in the first sense cannot remain the same if its quantity changes, while body in the second sense does retain its identity through such a change “so long as it remains joined and substantially united to the same soul” (4:166f). What is more directly relevant to Descartes’s account of the Eucharist, however, is the case where a body retains its quantity and yet becomes a part of the human body. Descartes told Mesland that such a case occurs whenever we eat bread or drink wine since the particles we ingest retain the quantity that they had when they composed the bread and wine. He further claimed that since the particles are now also mixed with our blood, and thus incorporated into the matter united to our soul, they are parts of our own body. Descartes called this a case of “natural transubstantiation” and distinguished it from the miraculous transubstantiation in the Eucharist, where the particles of the bread and wine become part of Christ’s matter without mixing with the blood of His heavenly body, and thus without becoming naturally incorporated into that body. Given the analogy to natural transubstantiation, the suggestion here is that the particles of the eucharistic elements retain their particular quantity. The only change is that these particles 34 35

Compare Denzinger 1963, 385. For further discussion of Descartes’s response to Arnauld and its scholastic context, see Menn 1994. Descartes later told Mesland that he had quoted the Trent declaration that the sacramental presence cannot be expressed in words “precisely to excuse myself from giving an explanation” (AT 4:119). However, prior to the publication of the Meditations he had boldly announced that “transubstantiation, in particular, which the Calvinists take as impossible to explain by ordinary philosophy, is very easily explained by mine” (AT 1:564). For a defense of the claim that Descartes had a deep and continuing interest in the issue of the Eucharist, see Ariew 1999, ch. 7.

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become united to Christ’s soul by the power of the words of consecration, and thereby miraculously become part of His human body (AT 4:167f ). Whereas Descartes openly promoted the account of the eucharistic species in the “Fourth Replies,” he was more cautious about the explanation of the Real Presence that he offered to Mesland. Thus, he requested that Mesland not communicate this explanation “unless you judge it to be altogether in accord with what has been laid down by the Church,” and that if he did communicate it he “not attribute its authorship to me” (AT 4:165). That Descartes failed to receive Mesland’s imprimatur for his particular explanation prior to the 1646 departure of the latter for missionary work in Martinique is indicated by a later exchange that he had on this issue with Arnauld.36 In a 1648 letter, Arnauld raised the question of how it is that “the body of Christ is present without local extension” (AT 5:190). Descartes answered by return mail that it would be better for him to discuss the matter with Arnauld in person (5:194). When Arnauld pressed the question again in a follow-up letter, noting that a meeting would be impossible (5:212), Descartes responded with silence. Even so, Descartes had attempted to persuade Mesland of the virtues of this account to the end, in a last undated letter to his friend.37 It may have been prudence, then, rather than a change of mind that led Descartes to omit from his 1648 correspondence with Arnauld any mention of the union of Christ’s soul with the eucharistic matter.38 Whatever the explanation, the account in the Mesland correspondence did not die with Descartes. Indeed, it has a rich history that prominently features both Desgabets and his Consid´erations.

1.2.2 The Road to the Consid´erations Due no doubt to concerns about broaching publicly the sensitive issue of eucharistic transubstantiation, Clerselier excluded the Mesland 36

37

38

A note in the margins of the text of the Mesland correspondence claims that Mesland was “consigned [relegu´e ] to Canada, where he died, due to the closeness of the relation that he had with M. Descartes” (AT 4:345, n. a). This note is reflected in the claim of one commentator that “as extreme discipline for his commerce with Descartes, Mesland was banished to Canada” (Watson 1982, 129). As indicated in AT 4:669, however, Mesland was assigned not to Canada but initially to Martinique and then to Sante Fe (now Bogat´a) of Nouvelle-Grenade (now Colombia). Moreover, Descartes referred in his last letter to Mesland to “your aim of converting the savages” (AT 4:345), which perhaps indicates that the assignment was not involuntary. In any case, it is clear that Mesland himself did not fully approve of Descartes’s account of the Real Presence from Descartes’s comment to him that “there is no need at all to accept the explanation I sent you in order to make it agree with my principles” (AT 4:216). See AT 4:345–48. The disappointment that he expressed in this letter concerning the news of Mesland’s departure may have derived in part from the sense that he was losing a possible Jesuit convert to his account of the Eucharist. As is argued in Armogathe 1977, 79–81.

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correspondence on this issue from his various editions of Descartes’s writings. Nonetheless, he did circulate copies of the correspondence among his intellectual acquaintances. He evidently sent them to Desgabets by 1653, when he attempted to draw on the expertise of his Benedictine friend regarding disputes over the Eucharist.39 Clerselier had an exchange with the Sorbonne doctor Fran¸cois Viogu´e40 in which he attempted to respond to the charge of the latter that Descartes cannot accommodate the Real Presence. When informed of this exchange, an Auvergne physician, Pastel, composed a brief response to Clerselier on Viogu´e’s behalf.41 One objection that Pastel pressed in his reply is that Descartes is not entitled to the position in the letter to Mesland that the soul of Christ “informs” the matter of the bread. According to Pastel, the notion that the soul informs the body is one “of the School that Mr Descartes does not know and in the end cannot conceive clearly and distinctly.” Using common scholastic terminology, he claimed that the most Descartes could say is that Christ’s soul is united to the bread as an assisting form, and in the manner in which an angel is in a bodily phantasm, or is united to a celestial body in order to move it. . . . But what [the philosophers] call information is an entirely different thing, because by that they understand that the informing substance is the first internal and unique principle of all natural, vital, and animal operations.42

To be the “first internal and unique principle” of a human being, Christ’s rational soul would have to inform an animal body. Pastel concluded that the bread united to Christ’s soul would be not His human body but simply bread.43 39

40

41

42

43

In a 1671 letter, Desgabets wrote that “it has been not less than eighteen years that I started to examine this great question [concerning the Eucharist] when I received what Monsieur Descartes had written in a letter that could not be published and the original of which one of my friends sent me” (MS Epinal 43, 216). However, he also indicated in a letter that same year to Bossuet that “it was 25 years ago” that he began to develop “new doctrines” concerning the Eucharist. That would date his interest in the Eucharist from 1646, about seven years before he considered Descartes’s views on this topic. For further discussion of Desgabets’s early views on the Eucharist, see Armogathe 1977, ch. 3. Viogu´e was chaplain to the French ambassador to Sweden when Descartes lived in this country, and he administered Descartes’s last rites (see Baillet 1970, 2:422). Viogu´e’s doubts about Descartes must have dissipated by 1667, when he wrote a letter attesting to Descartes’s religious orthodoxy for presentation at the reburial of his remains in Paris (see ibid., 2:549–52). This document, entitled “Instances que l’on peut faire contre les deux pr´ec´edence ecrits qui expliquent le myst`ere de la Eucharistie par la doctrine de Mr. Descartes,” is contained in MS Epinal 43, 251–55. MS Epinal 43, 251f. For the distinction between forma assistens and forma informans, see the commentary on De anima in Opera 3:469. Su´arez attributed the view that the soul is merely a forma assistens to Plato. MS Epinal 43, 251f.

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Because he was otherwise occupied with his official duties in the Paris Parlement, or perhaps because he felt out of his depth, Clerselier forwarded Pastel’s comments to Desgabets. Desgabets responded by attempting to defend the Mesland account of the Real Presence against Pastel’s objections. He noted, for instance, that a Cartesian could say that the soul “is made to be united by its essence to a body” and thus that it “can form a unit . . . resulting in a composite [un compos´e ] that one can call with reason the chief work of omnipotence, having united together in a manner so admirable two things so disproportionate.”44 The reference here to the work of omnipotence in uniting “two things so disproportionate” may seem to be connected to the problem of mind–body interaction. In light of Pastel’s remarks, however, it is clear that Desgabets was concerned not with this problem but rather with the fact that a “pure” mind, such as that of an angel, cannot be united to body by its essence. His response to Pastel is that Christ’s soul does not have the sort of accidental relation to matter that the angel has but instead has the sort of essential connection that a human soul has to its own body. To Pastel’s further point that Christ’s soul cannot change bread and wine into His body and blood, Desgabets rejoined that the eucharistic bread is in “an extraordinary and miraculous state” that allows it to be united to Christ’s soul.45 Since a body is a human body just in case it is united with a human soul, according to Desgabets, one can say that the bread becomes Christ’s body after consecration.46 Clerselier was so impressed with Desgabets’s defense that he told Pastel that “this good religious examines things to the bottom, and shows, by his responses, that he has much piety and erudition.”47 When he received a 1667 letter in which the Cartesian Oratorian, Nicolas Poisson, charged that the Mesland account of the Eucharist is heretical, Clerselier turned again to Desgabets. Once more Desgabets responded in a manner that impressed Clerselier, who wrote to Poisson that Desgabets’s discussion “will persuade you better than all my words could” (L 117). Desgabets’s appreciation for the physics underlying Descartes’s account of the Eucharist was strengthened by his participation in Cartesian academies during his stint in Paris in 1657–58. Thereafter he returned to the Lorraine provinces to spread the good word of Descartes. His success in drawing attention both to himself and to Descartes is indicated by the report of one Lorraine Benedictine that he has been accused of being cart´esien ou robertiste.48 Desgabets’s interest in the Mesland account of the Eucharist 44 45 46 47 48

MS BN fds fr. 13262, 313. Ibid., 319. Ibid., 313. See the passage cited in L 118, n. 1. From a letter from dom Humbert Belhomme, in MS Cousin 56, 119. As examples of Desgabets’s Cartesian followers in the Lorraine Benedictine Congregation of Saint-Vanne,

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also continued, and he completed his first discussion of this account in 1663. Ironically, this was the same year that the Congregation of the Index condemned Descartes’s writings “until corrected” (donec corrigantur) for reasons that were recognized at the time to involve the issue of the Eucharist.49 In his 1663 text, Desgabets promised to give in good faith an explication of the manner in which the body of our Savior is present in the Sacrament of the Altar, according to the new principles and discoveries, and to show that far from being contrary to what faith, the tradition and the Council of Trent teach us concerning this mystery, it does not oppose even the most strongly scholastic opinions and it is only a simple and necessary complement [to them]. (L 91)50

What the “new principles and discoveries” of Descartes complement, more specifically, is the “strongly scholastic” position of St. Thomas that the words of consecration bring about the “conversion” of the eucharistic elements into Christ’s body and blood. This position Desgabets preferred to the popular “adduction” theory proposed by Duns Scotus, on which the elements are annihilated and replaced by the matter of Christ’s heavenly body.51 The Council of Trent refrained from choosing between the Scotist and Thomistic explanations of the manner in which Christ comes to be present in the Eucharist.52 Desgabets, therefore, had no definitive conciliar precedent for his rejection of adduction theory. Yet he was already committed on philosophical grounds to the conclusion that such a theory is unacceptable. Desgabets himself indicated that he was led to his account of the Eucharist by the “proof that all creatures without exception are indefectible,” and thus

49

50 51

52

Taveneaux mentions doms Barth´elemy Senocq, Thierry de Viaixnes, Claude Paquin, Ildefonse Catilnot, Pierre Balon, and Nicolas Maillot (Taveneaux 1960, 121, n. 35). Descartes’s biographer Baillet claims that the “intrigues” of a particular author, whom he identified as Honor´e Fabri, brought about this condemnation (Baillet 1970, 2:529). Clerselier’s correspondence from the 1660s indicates that he sent a copy of the Mesland letters to the French Jesuit Jean Bertet, who was a prot´eg´e of Fabri. The Benedictine monk Antoine Vinot admonished Clerselier in a 1664 letter that this move “delivered a blow to the philosophy of Descartes” insofar as it allowed Fabri to issue a “private censure” that “has procured a public one” (L 110f ). Fabri did indeed write a 1660 “Censura” that condemns the view, similar to the one in the Mesland correspondence, that eucharistic conversion involves nothing more than the fact that “the whole soul of Christ is united to the entity of the bread” (MS BN fds. fr. 13262, 386, reproduced in Sortais 1929, 51, n. 2). The passage is from Desgabets’s “Explicatio positionis ac praesentiae realis Christi Domini in Sacramento Altaris,” in MS Epinal 43, 435–37. Conversion theory is set out in S.Th. IIIa, 75. The dispute between Thomists and Scotists was not over whether the substance of the elements disappears and is replaced by the substance of Christ’s body and blood; both camps agreed that they do and are. The point at issue is rather the manner in which the substantial replacement is effected. The bishop who presided over the Trent session decided to “make a declaration in terms so general that it could be accommodated to the sense of the two parties” (from the report cited in Armogathe 1977, 30f ).

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that “it is necessary that all matter exists notwithstanding all the changes that it undergoes.”53 At about the same time that Clerselier introduced him to the Mesland correspondence, Desgabets began work on his “Trait´e de l’ind´efectibilit´e des creatures,” which argues explicitly for the “indefectibility” or indestructibility of matter.54 There is little doubt that his reading of Descartes’s views led him to consider the philosophical basis for his rejection of Scotist adduction in favor of Thomistic conversion. The Thomistic theory had a long tradition in the Benedictine Order, and Desgabets himself emphasized its presence in the work of the eleventh-century French Benedictine Durand of Troarn.55 The encounter with Clerselier also led him to see in this thinker an anticipation of Descartes’s position that eucharistic conversion takes place by means of the union of Christ’s soul with the matter of the bread and wine.56 From Desgabets’s perspective, philosophy and Catholic tradition converge on the account in the Mesland letters of Christ’s Real Presence. In 1670, Desgabets engaged in a “petit commerce” with the “Messieurs de Port-Royal” on the Eucharist,57 an event that also involved the Benedictine procurer general, who was “sorely tried” by “a doctrine contrary to all tradition.”58 Desgabets’s interaction with Port-Royal seems to be connected to a letter in which Arnauld wrote concerning a work from Desgabets that his unnamed correspondent had forwarded to him. Arnauld’s judgment in that letter is that this work contains “an opinion that one must acknowledge to be at least contrary to all that has been taught in the Church for 600 years,” one which would give the Calvinists “only the greatest advantage against the Church” in defending their departure on “one of the principal points of doctrine, which is transubstantiation” (OA 1:670f). Arnauld further indicated that he would send Desgabets’s writing to his fellow Port-Royalist, Pierre Nicole, for evaluation. In a follow-up letter written a month later, Arnauld noted that he had received Nicole’s negative judgment on this work and that he endorsed it. He recommended that his correspondent forward this response to Desgabets himself, no doubt in hopes that it would dissuade 53 54 55

56

57 58

From a “Trait´e en forme de lettre touchant la Sainte Eucharistie,” which dates from after the Consid´erations, in MS Epinal, 43, 218. In a 1674 letter to Poisson, Desgabets noted that he had started on this manuscript “20 years ago” (cited in RD 1:xvi). On Desgabets’s argument for the indefectibility of matter, see §2.4. Desgabets wrote in a 1670 letter that “around 15 years ago I started to discuss in writing and by word of mouth on several occasions the opinion of Saint Jean de Demas [i.e., John Damasc`ene], of Durand, of Monsieur Descartes etc. touching on the Holy Sacrament” (MS BN fds fr. 17155, 307v). Thus, Desgabets noted in an unpublished writing on the Eucharist that his own account of eucharistic conversion is based “on senitments that we have attributed to the Fathers, to Durand, and to M. Descartes” (MS Epinal 43, 220). For more on Desgabets’s use of Durand, see Armogathe 1977, 88, 97f. As indicated in a 15 September 1670 letter from Desgabets to a fellow Benedictine, in MS BN fds fr. 17155, 307f. Ibid., 311r.

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this Benedictine from developing his eucharistic account further. Arnauld ended by noting that this account seems “contrary to the Tradition of the Church, which has always believed that the body of J.C., which we receive, is that born of the Virgin” (1:672).59 Even prior to the publication of the Consid´erations, then, Desgabets had received a clear rebuke from Descartes’s leading supporter at Port-Royal.

1.2.3 The Consid´erations and After The disastrous results of the petit commerce with Port-Royal did not deter Desgabets from seeking the support of the theologians associated with this convent for his views on the Eucharist. In the Consid´erations, he even cited explicitly “points of the new philosophy” presented in “the incomparable Logique or Art de penser of the MM. of Port-Royal” (Con. 6), which was cowritten by Arnauld and Nicole.60 Desgabets appealed in particular to four principles drawn from this text: (1) “The idea or notion of matter, or of corporeal substance, is the same as that of extension or quantity, which is not really distinct from it”; (2) “there are no substantial corporeal forms”; (3) “there are no corporeal forms other than the local dispositions of the insensible parts of matter”; and (4) “in external objects there are no sensible qualities other than the local disposition of the parts of matter, which are nothing other than modes.”61 The conclusion based on these principles is that “after the consecration we have in the Holy Sacrament the matter of the bread under the name of quantity, and that we have also its own specific and essential form under the name of the eucharistic accidents, or sacramental species” (Con. 6). This conclusion may seem to address most directly the problem of the persistence of the eucharistic species that Descartes had addressed in the 59

60

61

One problem with connecting Arnauld letters to Desgabets’s 1670 “commerce” with PortRoyal is that the letters themselves are dated 18 October and 16 November 1669, respectively. However, the editors of Arnauld’s œuvres have expressed doubts that these are the correct dates. They suggest as an alternative that the letters date from the time of the 1673/74 exchanges between Nicole and Desgabets (OA 38:xxi, n. f ). Yet in his first letter, Arnauld asked his correspondent to request that Desgabets “not develop this opinion” on transubstantiation (OA 1:671). It would have been strange for Arnauld to make such a request after the publication of the Consid´erations and after Desgabets’s superiors had already silenced him on the issue of the Eucharist. On balance, I think that we must accept the view, offered in [Rodis-]Lewis 1950a, 155f, n. 99, that the letters date from the time of Desgabets’s 1670 commerce with Port-Royal. Compare Desgabets’s claim that the Art de penser is a chef-d’œuvre that “marvelously gives birth to the most beautiful thoughts of M. Descartes” (quoted in L 270). On Desgabets’s role in the introduction of this text into the provincial Benedictine abbeys, see Taveneaux 1960, 131, n. 91. The first principle is drawn from Arnauld and Nicole 1981, I.7, 60, the second from ibid., III.19, 243f, the third from ibid., IV.6, 320, and the fourth from ibid., I.9, 73f.

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“Fourth Replies” (see §1.2.1). However, the view that the species persist as the very same modes of matter requires that the matter of which they are mode persist as well.62 There is the question of how this matter can be said to constitute Christ’s body. It is at just this point that the Mesland account saves the day by indicating that this matter constitutes that body simply by virtue of its substantial union with Christ’s soul.63 Desgabets’s enthusiasm for the Mesland account was such that just prior to the publication of the Consid´erations, he lobbied for Clerselier to publish the letters containing this account.64 After the ill-fated publication of his text, Desgabets lobbied as well for Port-Royal acceptance of his development of this account. He failed miserably in both campaigns. Clerselier never did publish the relevant correspondence from Descartes. Moreover, Desgabets himself indicated in a September 1671 letter that the “Messieurs de PortRoyal” were among the principal opponents of the Consid´erations.65 Indeed, Arnauld and Nicole denounced this text when called before Archbishop Harlay in January 1672.66 There were, in fact, sound practical reasons for the denunciation. To understand these reasons, we must pause briefly to consider the theologicopolitical warfare in France triggered by the posthumous publication in 1640 of the Augustinus of the Louvain theologian Cornelius Jansenius. This text presents itself as a summary of Augustine’s position, directed against the heresy of Pelagianism, that salvation is possible only by means of justificatory grace. Against Protestant interpreters who took Augustine to emphasize the sufficiency of faith for salvation, Jansenius found in this Church Father the Tridentine position that salvation requires meritorious action as well. Moreover, he concurred with the Catholic consensus that such action is impossible without the help of a special “efficient” grace from God. Yet Jansenius rejected the received Jesuit view, defended in the sixteenth century by the Spanish Jesuit Luis de Molina, that even a will corrupted by the Fall retains the power to accept or reject this efficient grace.67 The French reaction to the Augustinus was a complex affair that involved disputes over penitential discipline, the status of moral laws, and 62 63

64 65 66 67

For a further argument to this effect, see §1.4.3. In the discussion that follows, I leave out the point in the Consid´erations and Desgabets’s other writings concerning the union of the matter of the eucharistic elements with Christ’s “divinity.” For discussion of Desgabets’s views pertaining to this theological point, see Armogathe 1977, ch. 3. Cited in L 260. Clerselier’s prudent response was that “minds do not appear to me to be well enough disposed” for publication. As indicated in Desgabets’s 5 September 1671 letter to Bossuet, the text of which is provided in L 379. As Clerselier reported to Desgabets in a 1672 letter quoted in L 130f. For a detailed summary of the argument in the Augustinus, see Abercrombie 1936, 125–58. Compare Carreyre 1947.

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church governance between Jesuits and individuals associated with the convent of Port-Royal-des-champs.68 Even so, issues involving grace and free will were certainly prominent in the reception of Jansenius. Jesuit critics of the Augustinus attempted to bait the supporters of Port-Royal with the charge that they supported the heretical Calvinist denial of human freedom. The counter here, common among the “solitaires” associated with Port-Royal, was that the Jesuits offered a version of the heretical Pelagian view that our free will, and not divine grace, is the ultimate source of our salvation. Toward the end of the Consid´erations, Desgabets indicated his support for the Port-Royalist side of this dispute when he claimed that the scholastic account of the Eucharist is “no less Calvinist in essence, at least materially, than the Pelagians and their supporters are enemies of grace, though they hold up the name of grace as a trophy” (Con. 13). His support included deeds that matched these words. During the 1660s, Louis attempted to impose on the French Church a formulary endorsing papal condemnations of purportedly Jansenist claims concerning grace and free will.69 Despite considerable pressure from his superiors, Desgabets resolutely refused to sign the formulary. At the same time, he played an active role in promoting the views of Jansenius in his order.70 In the passage from the Consid´erations, Desgabets applied the charge of Calvinism so often directed against the Jansenists to scholastic (read Scotist) critics of an account of eucharistic transubstantiation in Cartesian terms. The juxtaposition here of scholasticism and Pelagianism suggests some connection between his Cartesian defense of conversion theory and a Jansenist theology of grace. It must be admitted that this connection is 68

69

70

For instance, issues independent of the Augustinus are introduced in the pre-1640 work of the abb´e de Saint-Cyran, the first spiritual counsellor of Port-Royal. These included views on penance and contrition that Arnauld developed in his controversial 1644 text, the Frequente communion. There is a vast literature on Jansenism, Port-Royal, and their relations and differences. The standard general history of Jansenism is found in Gazier 1922, while the standard history of Port-Royal is found in Saint-Beuve 1952–55. Both works have a decidedly anti-Jesuit bias. For a clear introduction to the basic features of the Jansenist movement, see Cognet 1961. In the English-language literature, there are helpful discussions of the historical and philosophical aspects of this movement in Abercrombie 1936 and Kolakowski 1995. This formulary endorsed both the 1653 bull Cum Occasione from Innocent X, which condemns five propositions concerning grace and free will, and the 1656 bull Ad Sanctam from Alexander VII, which attributes the five condemned propositions to the Augustinus. Arnauld responded to the latter bull by distinguishing between what is “right” (droit) in the sense of being in accord with faith, on which the pope’s authority is absolute, and the “fact” ( fait ) about what an author means in a text, concerning which the pope has no special authority. On Desgabets’s active promotion of Jansenism, see Taveneaux 1960, 123–31. On his refusal to sign the formulary, see L 125, n. 1.

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rather tenuous.71 It also turned out that any emphasis on such a connection was contrary to the interests of Port-Royal. In 1669, Clement IX had worked with Louis XIV to establish a paix de l’Eglise that prohibited public attacks on the orthodoxy of the account of grace and free will in the work of Jansenius.72 The animosities between Jansenius’s supporters and his Jesuit critics were rather deep, however, and so the peace was a particularly fragile one. This fragility explains Arnauld’s concern, which Desgabets mentioned in a letter to Rohault, that the friends of Port-Royal not “create new difficulties.”73 When they met with the archbishop, moreover, Arnauld and Nicole had just published the second volume of the Perp´etuit´e de la foy (in 1671), in which they were attempting to divert attention from the old battles over grace by emphasizing Port-Royalist solidarity with the Jesuits against Calvinists who deny the Real Presence.74 By producing a work that insinuates a connection of Port-Royalist views to an account of the Eucharist with Calvinist overtones, Desgabets was undermining this effort at reconciliation. Yet there were theoretical grounds for the Port-Royalist rejection of the eucharistic theology of the Consid´erations. These reasons are indicated in a letter from Nicole in which he responded to a defense of this account in a work from Desgabets that someone – most likely the abb´e de Pontchˆateau, a solitaire at Port-Royal – had sent to him toward the end of 1673 or the beginning of 1674.75 Apparently Nicole had been asked to write a response to this work, since he indicated in his letter that he had no interest in engaging in a protracted dispute with those who consider Cartesian philosophical principles first and then adjust the doctrine of the Eucharist to fit them. He reasoned that his own preferred course was simply to learn “what the Church and tradition teaches us about this mystery and adhere to it inviolably, 71

72

73 74 75

Elsewhere I have drawn on the case of the reception of Descartes in France to argue against the general thesis in the work of the great nineteenth-century scholar of Cartesianism, Francisque Bouillier, that “there is a natural alliance of the doctrines of Jansenius with those of Descartes” (Bouillier 1868, 1:432–44); see Schmaltz 1999b and in press. For an account of Descartes’s thought that is more sympathetic to Bouillier’s thesis, see Janowski 2000. In particular, the peace allowed for these supporters to sign a formulary condemning certain propositions on grace and free will while maintaining “respectful silence” with respect to the factual issue of whether these propositions are to be found in the Augustinus. See note 69. MS Epinal 43, 270. For more on this work and its context, see Snoeks 1951, 198–214. Compare Adam 2000, 140–46. We know the approximate date of Nicole’s letter because he mentioned in passing the forthcoming publication of the third volume of the Perp´etuit´e, which was issued in February 1674 (“Lettre” 83, in Nicole 1730–35, 8:195). The hypothesis that Pontchˆateau is Nicole’s correspondent is found in [Rodis-]Lewis 1950a, 156f. Some support for this hypothesis is provided by the fact that Pontchˆateau had sent to Desgabets “an exact and very faithful copy” of Nicole’s letter (MS Epinal 43, 27).

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without regard to philosophical principles.”76 Nonetheless, Nicole did express his judgment that the eucharistic account in “ces Messieurs” – that is, Desgabets and his Benedictine followers – conflicts with the view of the Church Fathers that “we receive in the Eucharist the same body that Jesus Christ has in the heavens.” To the rejoinder that the matter of the eucharistic elements is the same as Christ’s body in the heavens by virtue of the fact that this matter is united to the same soul that is united to His heavenly body, Nicole claimed that “no one has said that if a soul were joined successively to different bodies, without unity of succession, these bodies would be the same thing by means of a union with the same soul.” In any case, he concluded, common sense indicates that the Church Fathers did not mean to refer to “a new matter separated locally from that of Jesus Christ in the heavens” when they spoke of the Real Presence.77 This line of objection to Desgabets is anticipated in a Port-Royalist text that precedes even Desgabets’s work on the Eucharist during the 1660s. In a fragment dating from 1655 or 1656, Blaise Pascal broached the suggestion, which seems to derive from the Mesland correspondence, that eucharistic conversion is to be understood in terms of the fact that “my soul united to some matter makes this my body.”78 In his fragment, Pascal resisted the suggestion by noting that even though a union with the soul is necessary for matter to belong to my body, such a union is not sufficient by itself. He further objected that the numerical identity of a material being at a certain time must depend on the identity of its matter, since otherwise his body in France would be the same idem numero as a body in China “if God united my soul to a body in China.”79 The suggestion in Pascal, as well as in Nicole, is that the Real Presence requires the displacement of the matter of the eucharistic elements with matter that is numerically identical with that which composes Christ’s natural body.80 There is an obvious disagreement with Desgabets here concerning what Church tradition requires in the case of the Eucharist. However, the Consid´erations also broaches some controversial philosophical points. I focus 76 77

78

79 80

Nicole 1730–35, 8:193f. Ibid., 8:196–99. There is mention of a response from Desgabets in a letter from Pontchˆateau dated 6 March 1674 (in MS Epinal 143, 27–29). Desgabets may have provided a further response in a letter to Nicole dated 17 March 1674, which is listed among the “lost writings” cited in L 20. Armogathe suggests that the Mesland correspondence was not widely known enough to provide the source for Pascal’s fragment (Armogathe 1969, 69), but I am inclined with Gouhier to think that Pascal had seen this correspondence by that time (Gouhier 1978, 222 n. 36). Even so, I concur with Armogathe’s claim that Pascal’s fragment probably is too early to have been influenced by Desgabets’s views on the Eucharist. From the text of the fragment in Couture 1911, 106. Compare the discussion of the fragment in ibid., 104–22. For more on Pascal’s account of the Eucharist, see Adam 2000, 117–32.

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in particular on three philosophical assumptions that underlie the eucharistic theology in this text. It turns out that these assumptions bring Desgabets into direct conflict with the account of the Eucharist in the writings of Arnauld.

1.3 desgabets’s consid e´ rations : three philosophical assumptions The primary purpose of the Consid´erations is to counter a Scotistic account of transubstantiation that required the annihilation of the matter of the eucharistic elements. Even though Desgabets was concerned here about defending a more Thomistic account of transubstantiation, I have indicated that his opposition to the Scotists has a philosophical basis. In particular, he assumed that any view that involves an appeal to the annihilation of matter is a nonstarter since such an annihilation is impossible for the Cartesian. I consider this assumption in some detail, particularly since it conflicts directly with the insistence in Arnauld and Nicole on the thesis that God can annihilate any being He creates. But I also discuss more briefly two other philosophical assumptions in the Consid´erations, the first of which concerns the possibility that quantity can exist without substance, and the second of which concerns the union of the soul with the body. (1) The Annihilation of Matter The main argument in the Consid´erations against the possibility of an “absolute annihilation” of eucharistic matter is that this account conflicts with the identification in the Art de penser of matter or corporeal substance with extension. The assumption in the Consid´erations is that this identification rules out any annihilation of matter that leaves its extension untouched. Yet Desgabets also had a more general reason for rejecting such an annihilation that does not derive from his Cartesian identification of matter with extension. This reason is connected rather to the “proof,” which he had discovered several years prior to the publication of the Consid´erations, of the indefectibility of all created substances. Such a proof is supposed to rule out the possibility not only of the annihilation of portions of matter but also of the annihilation of matter as a whole. In an anonymous defense of the Consid´erations, there is the charge that Port-Royalist critics of this text “are not far from the scholastic opinions concerning this point [viz., transubstantiation],” and in particular from Scotist adduction theory.81 A more specific indication that Arnauld accepted this theory is provided by Desgabets’s report that he rejected the claim, prominent in Desgabets’s own writings, that Durand was in line with Church 81

MS Epinal 43, 205, cited in Armogathe 1977, 107.

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tradition in holding that the eucharistic matter is transformed without being annihilated.82 If this report is correct, Arnauld allied himself with the late sixteenth-century Jesuit, Cardinal Bellarmino, who insisted that Durand’s position was contrary to this tradition insofar as it conflicted with the formula that the consecrated eucharistic matter is identical to “the flesh born of the Virgin and suspended from the Cross.”83 He thereby also would have set himself against Descartes, who claimed in the Mesland correspondence that since the Church had not formally decided that Christ is present in the Eucharist with the same matter that composes His human body, it allowed for the position that Christ is present there with the quantity that composed the eucharistic elements prior to consecration (AT 4:169f ). In any case, Arnauld was concerned with allowing for the possibility that God could annihilate the matter He created. This concern is clear from the same 1648 correspondence with Descartes in which he introduced the objection that the Cartesian doctrine that a quantified thing is not distinct from its local extension conflicts with the Catholic teaching that Christ’s body is present in the Eucharist without local extension.84 Immediately after raising this objection, Arnauld took exception to Descartes’s claim that there cannot be a void in nature on the grounds that such a claim detracts from God’s omnipotence. Descartes argued in his Principles that the very notion of a void is contradictory given that any extension separating bodies is a property that must inhere in a corporeal substance (AT 8-1:49). Arnauld’s response is that it seems to follow from divine omnipotence that God can “annihilate the wine in a wine jar without producing another body in its place or permitting anything else to take its place.” In this case, one could understand the extension that separates the sides of the jar in terms of the sides themselves, without supposing that it belongs to some body that fills the cavity of the jar (OA 38:73). In a 1673/74 letter about Desgabets cited earlier, Nicole also was concerned about allowing for the possible annihilation of matter. In particular, he countered Desgabets’s claim that he himself granted that “God cannot annihilate any part of matter” by insisting that he “never had the least thought” that God cannot do such a thing.85 This disavowal is immediately preceded by the comment that Desgabets’s position that Pascal was “an advocate of these philosophical principles [of Descartes] concerning extension” flies in the face of the fact that Pascal himself often used “the ordinary 82 83

84 85

MS Epinal 43, 217. Bellarmino 1586–93, 2:col. 731–34. The fact that a prominent Jesuit such as Bellarmino accepted a form of adduction theory reveals the need to qualify the standard identification of scholasticism with Thomism, even when consideration is limited to the relatively conservative Jesuit Order. Compare the comments on this 1648 correspondence in §1.2.1. Nicole 1730–35, 8:201, quoted in OA 38:xxiii.

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opinion of Descartes on space and matter” as an example of a rˆeverie “that can be approved by obstinacy.”86 The insinuation here is that Desgabets is no better an interpreter of Nicole’s views on annihilation than he is of Pascal’s views on matter and extension. Yet Nicole’s remarks also bring to mind the fact that Pascal argued that empirical evidence undermines Descartes’s dogmatic rejection of the void.87 Given this fact, along with the emphasis in his letter on the insufficiency of Cartesian philosophical principles, we can take Nicole’s remarks concerning Pascal to suggest that Desgabets’s argument against annihilation is no more acceptable than Descartes’s argument against the void. I have not found the passage in which Desgabets cited Pascal in defense of Descartes’s account of matter. However, Desgabets did defend the impossibility of the annihilation of matter by appealing to Nicole’s comment, from a Discours on the immortality of the soul, that “the annihilation of a being is for us inconceivable” since “we have no example of it in nature” and “the whole of our reason opposes it.” Nicole himself inferred from this comment that one need not fear the annihilation of the soul since this is “infinitely more noble than bodies,” the annihilation of which we do not fear.88 One could perhaps excuse Desgabets for taking this passage to indicate that Nicole had “the least thought” that God cannot annihilate a material being. Nonetheless, Pontchˆateau wrote in a 1674 letter to Desgabets that Nicole’s protest is justified since his remarks in the Discours “concern only the natural and human reasoning of some philosophers, and not what God can do.”89 Even if human reason can rule out annihilation in the natural realm, it cannot preclude the supernatural annihilation of a being by an omnipotent God.90 One implication of Nicole’s remarks, on Pontchˆateau’s reading at least, is that our reason can pose no threat to the claim that eucharistic transubstantiation brings about a miraculous annihilation of the matter of the elements. It may seem that Descartes himself allowed at times for a miraculous annihilation that brings about a void. Thus, in the course of a 1649 exchange with the Cambridge Platonist Henry More on this issue, he abstained from saying that God cannot create a void on the grounds that “it should not be said of anything that it cannot be done by God” since “every aspect of the 86 87 88

89 90

Nicole 1730–35, 8:201, quoted in Pascal 1964–, 1:1000. There is a discussion of Pascal’s opposition to Descartes on this point in Garber 1992, 136–43. MS Epinal 43, 219; the quotation is from Nicole 1730–35, 2:30. Desgabets referred to this passage as coming from De l’Education du Prince (see MS Epinal 43, 219), which was the title of editions of the volume containing the Discours that were published prior to 1679. From a letter dated 6 March 1674, in MS Epinal 43, 28. Compare Pontchˆateau’s claim in a 1664 letter to Neercassel that “it does not seem to me too difficult to place the belief in mysteries that depend on the absolute power [toute-puissance] of God together with the knowledge that we have of nature” (quoted in OA 38:xx).

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true and the good depends on his omnipotence.” Descartes insisted that he is committed to saying “only that He has given me a mind such that I cannot conceive” that which implies “a contradiction in my concept.” According to Descartes, then, the conclusion that there cannot be a void in the wine jar indicates merely that the jar cannot “be conceived to be so empty that there is nothing extended, and thus no body, in its cavity, because wherever there is extension, there also, necessarily, is body” (AT 5:273).91 Even so, Descartes went beyond Nicole’s claim that the creation of a void is “inconceivable for us” when he said that such a creation is in fact contradictory since extension necessarily is accompanied by body. On Descartes’s own view, then, the void is not a supernatural or miraculous event but a conceptual impossibility. Thus, his refusal to say that God cannot create a void is not based on his admission of the logical possibility of vacua. A clue to what this rejection does require is indicated by his remark to Arnauld that the true and good depend on God’s omnipotence. In response to objections to the Meditations, Descartes earlier argued that truth and goodness must be so dependent given that God is “completely indifferent with respect to his creation of what he did in fact create” (AT 7:435). Here he drew on his famous thesis, first proposed in his 1630 correspondence with Marin Mersenne, that even the eternal truths depend on God’s absolutely free will. In this correspondence, Descartes indicated to Mersenne that we can understand the eternal truths to be “eternal and unchangeable” because they derive from a will that is itself eternal and immutable (AT 1:146). The fact that these truths depend on God is consistent with the claim that they are now unchangeable, precluding only the conclusion that God could not have changed them from eternity. Likewise, it would seem, Descartes refrained from saying that God cannot create a void not because he wanted to leave open the possibility that God could now create one in some supernatural manner, but rather because he did not want to deny that God could from eternity have made vacua to be possible.92 As I indicate in §2.1, Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths is not entirely unproblematic. However, my point here is simply that his remarks concerning this doctrine reveal that he did not take his rejection of the claim that God cannot produce a void to open up the possibility of the miraculous appearance of vacua. In contrast, the remarks in his 1673/74 91

92

More objected to Descartes in 1649 that it seems to be within God’s power to prevent the sides of a vessel from touching after He has annihilated a body (AT 5:240f ). In line with his remarks to Arnauld, Descartes responded that he cannot say that God cannot do “what contradicts my conception,” but that he still can say that “it implies a contradiction” for the extension of the cavity to remain after the contained body is eliminated, “and therefore the sides of the vessel touch” (AT 5:272). Compare the view attributed to Descartes by Burman that God is unalterable with respect to decrees instituted by His indifferent will (AT 5:166), and the discussion of this view in Schmaltz 1991.

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letter indicate that Nicole wanted to allow for the possibility that God actually does annihilate portions of matter. On the points at issue here, Desgabets clearly sided with Descartes. Indeed, we will discover in Chapter 2 that his argument for the indefectibility of material substance is backed by his version of Descartes’s doctrine of created truths. This version draws in turn on the quasi-Spinozistic distinction (which Desgabets adopted independently of Spinoza) between atemporal material substance and its temporal modes. Here we confront the deepest features of the ontology that underlies Desgabets’s rejection of the annihilation of matter. (2) Quantity without Substance In addition to rejecting the annihilation of matter, Desgabets claimed in the Consid´erations that the quantity of a body cannot subsist apart from material substance. Though Arnauld defended the position that quantity can so subsist (see §1.5.2), Desgabets rejected it on the grounds that it yields a deep sort of skepticism. Thus, he argued toward the end of his text that if there could be quantity without substance, we could doubt with reason whether there were any men on earth, whether there were a true world, a true religion; and then there would be no contradiction to say that accidents could be detached from all subjects, that there could be motion without anything moved, shape without shaped things, the love of God without the person loved, etc. In a word, we could see an empty [creuse] image of a true world without there being anything other than a deceptive appearance, which far surpasses all the excess of the Pyrrhonians. (Con. 11f )

On this reductio, the admission of substanceless quantity opens up the Pyrrhonian possibility that our perceptions of the world have absolutely no basis in reality. Later, in his 1675 Critique de la Critique, Desgabets insisted that “we could not be assured that there are true men, a true world, a religion, a God, etc.,” if we denied “that the first operation of mind is always conformed to its object, that is to say, that one cannot think of nothing” (CdC 58f ). In the particular case at issue in the Consid´erations, the mere fact that our perceptions of the material world are intentional, that is to say, are “of” that world, is supposed to guarantee that such a world is not merely an “empty image” but rather has its source in material substance. Thus, Desgabets’s opposition to substanceless quantity, or more generally to the detached accidents of the scholastics, relies on his acceptance of a strong “intentionality principle.” As we will discover in Chapter 3, this principle is the central plank of a theory of ideas in Desgabets that has some radical consequences. One such consequence is that our thought about the material world reveals as evidently the existence of material substance as it reveals our own existence as thinking substance. This consequence provides one of the the main sources for Desgabets’s rejection of Descartes’s

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hyperbolic doubt and the related thesis, deriving from the cogito argument, that mind is better known than body. (3) The Soul–Body Union The final philosophical assumption in the Consid´erations is linked to the position highlighted in the subtitle of this text, according to which the conversion of the eucharistic bread occurs by means of its “substantial union” with Christ’s soul. We have seen how Desgabets drew on the Mesland correspondence to support the conclusion that this union converts the matter of the bread into the matter of Christ’s body. However, there is also the point that this union must be “substantial.” The significance of this point is indicated by Desgabets’s exchange with Descartes’s critic, Pastel. Recall Pastel’s objection that, on the account that Descartes offered to Mesland, Christ’s soul would be not a “internal principle” of the eucharistic matter but only an “assisting form” that is related to that matter as an angel is related to a celestial body. Desgabets’s response was that Christ’s soul is not merely externally related to the matter since it “is made to be united by its essence to a body” (see §1.2.2). One implication of the claim that this soul is substantially united to the matter, then, is that the soul differs in an essential manner from a mind that bears merely an external relation to body. One might suspect that this appeal to the substantial union is an ad hoc move on Desgabets’s part to shore up his theological views. In fact, however, the distinction between the human soul and angelic minds is a fundamental feature of his system. We will see in Chapter 4 that such a distinction is central to his argument, directed against Descartes’s hyperbolic doubt, that our experience does not allow us to doubt the existence of our own body. Desgabets’s critics took his eucharistic views to be beyond the pale because they suggested that Christ is merely spiritually present in that sacrament, but what is most radical from a philosophical perspective is his suggestion that Christ’s soul differs from an angelic mind by virtue of its essential relation to body. Even though the argument in the Consid´erations against Scotistic views on transubstantiation may seem initially to be narrowly theological, it relies on a version of Cartesianism that includes radical views on the indefectibility of material substance, the intentionality of our ideas, and the nature of the soul–body union. There is no reason to think that Arnauld recognized all these connections. However, he did realize that the argument in the Consid´erations has a philosophical basis. He even suggested at times that the main problem with this argument is that it has any such basis, and that one would do better to leave philosophy behind when considering doctrines grounded in revelation. Even so, his own views on the Eucharist presuppose an ontology that conflicts with fundamental Cartesian tenets that Desgabets was concerned to defend.

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1.4 arnauld on the eucharist and cartesianism 1.4.1 Cartesian Eucharistic Theology In the first of his 1648 letters to Descartes (mentioned in §1.2.1), Arnauld proclaimed as “not unfortunate” Descartes’s earlier attempt in the “Fourth Replies” to show “how the indistinction between accidents and substance can cohere with this mystery [of the Eucharist]” (AT 5:190). Arnauld went on to indicate, however, that this solution does not remove the apparent tension between Descartes’s theory of matter and the Catholic teaching that Christ’s body is present in the Eucharist without its local extension. In later years, he never did acknowledge the solution to this problem that Descartes had proposed in his letters to Mesland, focusing instead on his published remarks in the “Fourth Replies” concerning the eucharistic species.93 As Descartes’s chief spokesman at Port-Royal, Arnauld surely would have been among the people to whom Clerselier distributed copies of the Mesland correspondence. It is likely that his silence was motivated by his disapproval of Descartes’s conjectures to Mesland, a disapproval reflected also in his opposition to Desgabets. In the 1670s, the prominent French bishop Jacques-B´enigne Bossuet joined Arnauld in emphasizing the “Fourth Replies” to the exclusion of the Mesland correspondence.94 Bossuet also stood with Arnauld as one of the most vocal critics of Desgabets. Thus, in a 1671 manuscript, “Examen d’un nouvelle explication du myst`ere de l’Eucharistie,” Bossuet responded to “a religious of a very holy order” – namely, Desgabets – by noting that its author “has been too free, not to say too licentious, and not having been approved by his brothers, scarcely has authority on this position.” He continued by contrasting Desgabets’s radical views with “what M. Descartes himself has taught, in his Response to the fourth Objections, since he has taken great pains there to explain, according to the principles of his Philosophy, the species and the appearances of the bread and wine in this mystery.”95 Bossuet’s endorsement of the orthodoxy of the “Fourth Replies” account of the eucharistic species shows a considerable sympathy for Cartesianism on his part. Indeed, in a 1671 letter, Desgabets himself praised the bishop – then serving as royal pr´ecepteur – for “teaching the Dauphin the general principles of this [Cartesian] philosophy, which are so simple, so natural, and so related to the lights of good sense, that there is nothing that can render 93 94

95

See, for instance, OA 38:122. In the case of Bossuet, however, this was due to the fact that he did not learn of the existence of the Mesland correspondence until 1701. See the 1701 letter from Bossuet to Jean Antoine Pastel, in Bossuet 1909–25, 13:45–47, 49. Bossuet’s judgment there is that the conjectures in the Mesland correspondence are “directly opposed to Catholic doctrine” (ibid., 13:49). For more on Bossuet’s views concerning the Eucharist, see Adam 2000, 181–89. From the excerpts from Bossuet’s “Examen” provided in OA 38:xxiv.

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a man more capable of judging all that depends on reason” (L 380).96 Even so, Bossuet did not follow Desgabets in attempting to respond to the charge of Calvinism by constructing an alternative Cartesian account of the Real Presence. Indeed, it is quite the opposite: Bossuet appealed to Descartes in support of the position that this issue is beyond philosophical examination. He noted in particular that, with respect to this mystery, “the good Philosopher teaches that God can demand of us the belief in several unbelievable and inconceivable things” (OA 38:xxv). He further cited with approval the claim in Rohault’s Trait´e de physique that “God being the master, he can make things as he pleases, without undertaking to decide by our reason what our reason cannot approach”(38:xxvi).97 Bossuet apparently concluded that even though Cartesianism does explain how the eucharistic species could remain after consecration, it can have nothing to say about the manner in which Christ’s body is present in the sacrament. Arnauld also insisted that the mystery of the Real Presence is best left to faith alone. There is, for instance, his comment, in the course of a discussion of this issue, that “faith, far from engaging me in these philosophical discussions, compels me to avoid them as dangerous temptations, and, moreover, is satisfied if I simply believe without philosophizing, by submitting myself entirely to everything that God asks me to believe” (OA 38:123f ). This comment reflects his desire to devote himself to a “positive” or historical theology devoid of philosophy that serves as a barrier to the speculative philosophy of the scholastics. Yet even though a nonphilosophical account of the Real Presence is perhaps possible in principle, Arnauld found it difficult in practice to resist the temptation to philosophize when tackling the issue of the Eucharist. Here we have the not uncommon phenomenon of a thorough-going rejection of a position – in this case, the scholastic account of the Real Presence – being compromised by an actual engagement with it.

1.4.2 Arnauld’s “Examen” Arnauld’s most explicit engagement with the scholastic account of the Real Presence occurred in 1680. That was the year in which Arnauld sent an “Examen d’un e´ crit” to his niece, M`ere Ang´elique de Saint Jean of PortRoyal. The particular “´ecrit” to which the title refers is a now-lost “Trait´e de l’essence du corps & de l’union de l’Ame avec le corps, contre la philosophie de M. Descartes,” written by a certain M. Le Moine, who was dean of the chapter of Vitr´e. The second part of Arnauld’s “Examen” focuses in particular on Le Moine’s charge that Descartes’s system is heretical because it precludes the purported “truth of faith” that Christ’s body is present in 96 97

On Bossuet’s use of Cartesianism, see Bouillier 1868, 1:460–62. The passage quoted is from Rohault 1683, 1:40.

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the Eucharist while “being able to conserve all its parts while occupying no space, and being in an indivisible point” (OA 1:105).98 To understand this charge, and so also Arnauld’s response to it, we must pause a bit to consider the intricacies of scholastic eucharistic theology. Let us start with Le Moine’s claim that Christ’s body is present “while occupying no space, and being in an indivisible point.” Particularly relevant to this claim is the official Thomistic position that the “dimensive quantity” of the eucharistic elements is sustained after consecration apart from any subject of inherence by God’s absolute power. On this position, the dimensive quantity is that in virtue of which a corporeal substance is impenetrable, that is to say, in virtue of which it occupies a certain bounded area to the exclusion of any other corporeal substance. Yet since the Thomists also held that the quantity of the eucharistic elements is miraculously sustained after consecration, they concluded that Christ’s body cannot be related to the place of these elements through its own quantity. As Thomas himself put the point in the section of his Summa Theologiœ on the Eucharist, Christ’s body is “related to that place [locum] by means of dimensions that are not its own, and contrariwise the dimensions of Christ’s own body are related to that place only insofar as the substance of His body is.”99 In his commentary on this section, the sixteenth-century Jesuit scholastic, Francisco Su´arez, understood the claim that Christ’s body is present in a place only insofar as his bodily substance is related to that place as indicating that “this presence is a real mode of the body of Christ that is reduced to the category of Ubi.”100 He was drawing here on the distinction in his Disputationes Metaphysicœ between “intrinsic place” (Ubi), in virtue of which something is simply present at a place, and the “extrinsic place” (locus) in virtue of which something occupies a certain place circumscribed by contiguous bodies.101 An object must have dimensive quantity to have an extrinsic place, since it is this quantity that allows it to occupy that place to the exclusion of other bodies. Yet it is not necessary to be quantified to have an intrinsic place; God and angels can have such a place simply by acting through a body. Su´arez accepted the traditional view, found also in Thomas, that Christ’s heavenly body has its own dimensions in heaven by virtue of being quantified there. Yet, for both thinkers, this quantity cannot relate it to the place of the altar. In Su´arezian terms, Christ’s body has no locus at that place but only an Ubi of the sort spiritual beings possess.102 98

99 100 101 102

I cite the passages from Arnauld’s “Examen” in OA, which contains some deviations from the original manuscript of this text that are indicated in Arnauld 1999. The deviations do not affect the summary of the argument in this text presented here. S.Th. IIIa, 76, 5. Opera 21:49r. Opera 26:980. The discussion of Su´arez that follows draws on Des Chene 1996, 101–105. Su´arez did distinguish between God’s presence at a place through His substance and the angels’ presence there through their power (in Opera 26:984), a distinction which is tied

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Such a position may seem to support the objection in Descartes that the scholastic who separates corporeal substance from quantity is confusedly conceiving of it as incorporeal substance (AT 8-1:45). However, the conclusion in Le Moine’s “Trait´e” that Christ’s body “retains all of its parts” even when it is reduced to an indivisible point in the Eucharist is relevant at this point.103 There is little doubt that Le Moine was relying here on the position in Su´arez that the parts of a body can be “distinct in being” even if they do not actually exist at different places. Su´arez claimed that bodily parts require only a dispositionem to exist in different places in order to be distinct in being. He further insisted that a corporeal substance naturally occupies a place by virtue of having such a disposition, but that God can, through His absolute power, block the realization of the disposition and so prevent the parts of that body from being spatially distributed. In this way, corporeal substance is akin to the real eucharistic accidents that have a natural aptitude to exist in a subject but that God can miraculously sustain apart from any subject. Yet, just as the aptitude to exist in a subject distinguishes the eucharistic accidents from substance, in Su´arez’s view, so the disposition to possess spatially distributed parts distinguishes Christ’s unquantified body from spiritual substance. This Su´arezian context indicates that the point of Le Moine’s claim that Christ’s body retains its parts is to show that this body remains a corporeal substance even when it is present at the altar without occupying any place there. It is perhaps difficult to set aside Cartesian intuitions to comprehend the notion of a body that has an unactualized disposition to have spatially distributed parts. Arnauld urged that there is no need to set the intuitions aside, however, since Le Moine was simply wrong in claiming that faith requires the possibility of a body that lacks extension in space, and so exists “in an indivisible point.” Arnauld did concede to his opponent that “extension is not the essence of matter, if this is contrary to faith” (OA 38:102). However, he insisted that the notion of existence at an indivisible point is “a novelty in theological matters” that is not supported by the writings of the Church Fathers. He cited in particular Augustine’s own definition of body as “anything occupying places in space [spatium loci] by [its] length, width and depth” (38:105).104 Arnauld concluded that those who take the Catholic doctrine of the Real Presence to require a rejection of this Augustinian definition give aid and comfort to Calvinist critics, such as the Huguenot minister Claude, who insist that this doctrine is contrary to Church tradition (38:107–109). Even so, Arnauld allowed that the Catholic faith requires the (philosophical) distinction between the essence of body as an extended thing and

103 104

to the fact that God is present through a power identical to His substance whereas angels are present through a power distinct from their substance. Compare Opera 26:538, which cites explicitly the case of the Eucharist. The passage quoted is from Augustine’s De Genesi ad litteram. Arnauld also quotes from a number of other Augustinian texts; see OA 38:106f.

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further properties of body such as impenetrability. In support of such a distinction, he cited a passage from Malebranche’s Recherche concerning the essence of matter. Although this citation is somewhat ironic given that he was soon to become embroiled in a bitter dispute with this Oratorian over the nature of ideas and grace, it is understandable since Arnauld initially had a favorable impression of the Recherche.105 At the start of his response to Le Moine’s comments on the Eucharist, Arnauld noted his approval of a passage from this text that stipulates that the essence of a thing is a property that not only is inseparable from that thing but also is primary in the sense that all the other properties of the object depend on it. This passage also claims that the properties of divisibility, shape, impenetrability, and extension are inseparable from matter, in contrast to properties such as motion that matter can lack. However, it concludes that extension alone can constitute the essence of matter since the remaining properties of divisibility, shape, and impenetrability depend on extension but extension depends on no further property (OA 38:100–102).106 Ignoring Malebranche’s own claim in this passage that the dependent properties are inseparable from matter, Arnauld concluded from the argument presented there that since “only the essence is inseparable from” body, nothing prevents the Cartesian from saying that further bodily properties “can be separated from it by the power of God” (OA 38:105). There is in fact such a separation in the Eucharist, where Christ’s body is present without being “enclosed in a place” (renferm´e dans un lieu) or having “a closed surface” (une surface born´ee), both of which presuppose impenetrability (38:111f). Christ’s body is present at the altar, but like a ghost it penetrates and is penetrated by other bodies, and thus does not exclusively occupy any place there. The result here seems to be quite close to the Su´arezian position that Christ’s body has an Ubi at the place of the eucharistic elements without having a locus there. Yet Arnauld insisted that since the penetrable body he posited has actual extension, it retains the essence of matter and so, unlike a scholastic unextended body, is within the realm of possibility. The difference here between Arnauld and Su´arez seems to turn on the assumption of the latter that the only sort of spatial quantity that Christ’s body could possess in the Eucharist is dimensive quantity, which itself includes both divisibility and impenetrability. For Su´arez, the mere fact that this body lacks a locus in this sacrament reveals that it lacks any sort of spatial distribution. In contrast, Arnauld claimed that Christ’s body can possess a 105

106

See his complementary remarks on this text in a 1680 letter to Quesnel at OA 2:73f. The change in Arnauld’s attitude toward the Recherche seems to have been triggered by disapproval of the theology that he found in Malebranche’s 1680 Trait´e de la nature et de la grˆace. The passage here is from OCM 1:460. My discussion of Arnauld’s position is indebted to Kremer 1996b.

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sort of quantity that includes actual extension alone, and not divisibility and impenetrability. Thus, he denied that the fact that Christ’s body lacks a locus shows that it is deprived of its actual extension. These differences are relevant to the discussion in a 1681 text, the “Observations sur la philosophie de Descartes,” in which the exiled Jansenist Louis-Paul du Vaucel warned his fellow Port-Royalist sympathizers about the theological dangers of Cartesianism.107 He urged there, in line with Arnauld’s remarks, that body can be penetrable due to “the absolute power of God.” Unlike Arnauld, however, Du Vaucel argued that since “the same idea that makes us conceive bodies to be essentially extended makes us conceive of them also as impenetrable,” it must be within God’s absolute power to deprive body of its extension.108 His main point is that the denial of this possibility in Descartes and his followers puts them at odds with Church teachings regarding the Eucharist. He emphasized in particular the views of “Dom Robert des Gabets celebre Religieux de la congregation de Saint Vanne.”109 Du Vaucel insisted against “the celebrated Desgabets” and other Cartesians that since any body with extensive quantity must be impenetrable, Christ’s body must exist without its extension in the Eucharist. Though Descartes certainly would have agreed with Arnauld in rejecting the conclusion that body can exist without extension, there is reason to think that he would have shared Du Vaucel’s scholastic intuitions concerning the connection between extension and impenetrability. For instance, there is the claim at the beginning of “Meditation Five” that we distinctly imagine body in terms of “quantity, which the common Philosophers call continuous, or . . . the extension of the quantity in length, breadth, and depth” (AT 7:63). The suggestion here that extension is identical to scholastic quantity is only strengthened by Descartes’s exchange toward the end of his life with Henry More. More had objected that body cannot be identified with extended substance since God and angels possess a sort of extension that allows them to act in a place. He proposed that what actually distinguishes the extension of spiritual substances from that of bodies is the fact that the former is both intangible and completely penetrable (AT 5:238f, 301–304). In response, Descartes admitted that there is a distinction between the “extension in power” (extensio potentiœ) by which God and angels act in a certain place and the “extension in substance” (extensio substantœ) by which bodies occupy a 107

108 109

Du Vaucel was also concerned about responding to the charge in a 1681 text of the exiled Huguenot Pierre Jurieu that “the theologians of Port-Royal have as great an attachment to Cartesianism as to Christianity” ( Jurieu 1681, 107). Elsewhere, Du Vaucel countered that the “messieurs of Port-Royal,” far from being Cartesian, are “most of them adversaries of Descartes, and . . . [Arnauld] alone, along with M. Nicole, can be said to be Cartesian” (cited in [Rodis-] Lewis 1950a, 145, n. 56). Du Vaucel 1950, 114f. Ibid., 116. Du Vaucel also mentioned the Benedictine Antoine Callois of the Congregation of Saint-Maur.

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place (5:342). Yet he insisted that these spiritual substances can exist apart from all bodies, and so also apart from the extension in power by virtue of the fact that they act through bodies. The result is that this sort of extension “is only a mode in the thing to which it is applied.” By contrast, extension in substance cannot be a mere mode since corporeal substances cannot exist apart from their spatially distributed parts (5:343f). Although Arnauld did not follow More in attributing extension to spiritual substances, he did raise with his English contemporary the possibility of penetrable extension. It appears, therefore, that Arnauld’s views would be subject to Descartes’s objection that extension in power cannot be identified with the attribute of extension. It is true that Descartes conceded to More that both tangibility and impenetrability differ from bare extension insofar as they “have a relation to parts and presuppose the concept of division or limitation” while “we can conceive of a continuous body of indeterminate or indefinite size in which there is nothing to consider except extension” (AT 5:269). However, this concession is no help to Arnauld, who required that a particular body can exist without its impenetrability. Descartes explicitly denied such a possibility when he told More that “it is impossible to understand one part of an extended thing penetrating another equal part without thereby understanding a half part of the extension of it to be taken away or annihilated; but what is annihilated does not penetrate anything” (5:342). Any finite body that is extended in substance must have parts that occupy places to the exclusion of other parts; that is to say, it must have impenetrable parts. Arnauld was not in a position to accept this ontological point, but the “celebrated” Desgabets certainly was.

1.4.3 Impenetrability and Species The assertion in Arnauld’s “Examen” of the possibility of penetrable matter appeared after Desgabets’s death. However, Arnauld’s commitment to this possibility predates the “Examen.” There is, for instance, a 1664 letter from Pontchˆateau that reports Arnauld’s opinion that “the penetration of bodies, which has been accepted from antiquity, does not appear to be impossible for the omnipotence of God” (OA 38:xx). That Desgabets was aware of this opinion is indicated by his unpublished notes on the second edition (1664) of the Art de penser. In those notes, he interpreted the claim in this Port-Royalist text that it is naturally impossible for matter to be penetrated to allow for the possibility of a supernatural separation of impenetrability from Christ’s body in the Eucharist.110 Moreover, he highlighted the assertion there that bodily modes such as roundness are “incapable of subsisting naturally without the body whose roundness it is.”111 He took the use of the 110 111

“Remarques sur l’art de penser,” in MS Epinal 64, 731. The passage is from Arnauld and Nicole 1981, 337f. Compare Armogathe 1969, 75. Arnauld and Nicole 1981, 47.

Robert Desgabets

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Arnauld

Eucharistic species of bread consist in Modes of bread inhere in Impenetrable quantity of bread identical to Matter of bread substantially united with Christ’s soul to constitute Christ’s body

Eucharistic species of bread consist in Modes of bread inhere in Impenetrable quantity of bread subsists apart from Matter of bread annihilated and replaced by Penetrable extension of Christ’s heavenly body

figure 2. Accounts of eucharistic species and transubstantiation

qualifier naturally to imply that there is a conceptual space for miraculous separation in the Eucharist, in this case, the miraculous separation of the accidents of the bread from Christ’s body.112 In response to the case of a separated impenetrability, Desgabets countered, in line with Descartes’s response to More (considered in §1.4.2), that penetrable matter is not even a supernatural possibility since the notion of such matter is itself unintelligible. Desgabets further rejected the possibility of separated accidents as an unwarranted scholastic encroachment on a more orthodox Cartesian view. He explained his rejection of scholastic separability in a response to a Jesuit critic in which he claimed that, by allowing for qualities that can exist apart from their subject, one violates the “fundamental principle” that “there are no qualities of non-entity” (non entis, nullae qualitates) and thereby creates “an abyss and a pit where all our reason is lost” (L 351). Desgabets went on to note that the same kind of abyss is created by his critic’s insistence on the possibility of a void. He concluded that the Jesuit appeal to subjectless accidents and to “the void or negative extension [are] two poles of your philosophical system” (350). It is interesting that Descartes himself argued in the Principles that a void, or an extension containing nothing, is impossible given that “it is completely contradictory that nothing has some extension” (AT 8-1:49). In particular, the admission that nothing can have extension contradicts the tenet, cited earlier in this text, that “nothingness has no affections or qualities” (nihili nullas esse affectiones sive qualitates) (8-1:8). As Desgabets recognized, this sort of principle leaves no room for the position – which Arnauld explicitly endorsed – that after consecration the quantity of the eucharistic elements inheres in no body. (For a comparison of the eucharistic accounts of Desgabets and Arnauld, see Figure 2.)

112

MS Epinal 64, 731.

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Arnauld perhaps would not be too worried about violating such a principle given his argument against Descartes that a belief in divine omnipotence requires an acceptance of the possibility of a void. However, Arnauld did accept Descartes’s account of the eucharistic species in the “Fourth Replies,” and Desgabets held that it is a consequence of such an account that the words of consecration bring it about that Christ’s body “is contained precisely under the same dimensions that contained the substance of the bread, that it is bounded by the same surfaces [superficies] whether internal or external, and that it is in no way deprived of the three dimensions that are necessarily found in all bodies” (L 357). Desgabets was drawing here in particular on Descartes’s claim in the “Fourth Replies,” indicated earlier, that the eucharistic species are nothing more than the surfaces by which the bread and wine affect our senses through contact. In the preceding passage, Desgabets simply added to this conclusion the claim – from the Mesland correspondence – that, after consecration, the surfaces belong to the matter the dimensions of which sacramentally contain Christ’s body. To be sure, Desgabets went beyond such a claim when he insisted in the Consid´erations that the matter of Christ’s eucharistic body is identical to the matter that composed the Host prior to consecration. There is no such assertion in Descartes, who stressed in the Mesland correspondence as well as in his published writings that the eucharistic surfaces would remain the same even if new matter were substituted for the bread and the surrounding air.113 Nonetheless, he did suggest to Mesland that the very same particles that previously made up the bread are informed by Christ’s soul through the power of the words of consecration (AT 4:168). I can find no argument in Descartes for the conclusion that the same particles are present. However, there is a reason for insisting on the continuity of the matter that can be drawn from his own view of the ontological status of surfaces. In the “Sixth Replies,” Descartes claimed that surfaces are just “the kind of place characterized by the Aristotelians as ‘the surface of the surrounding body’” (AT 7:434). This characterization is indeed found in the fourth book of Aristotle’s Physics, which concludes that place is nothing over and above the boundaries of the particular body it contains (A 1:359f ).114 In line with this conclusion, Descartes claimed in the Principles that “the names place and space [loci aut spatii] signify nothing different from the body which is said to be in place [italics added]” (AT 8-1:47). He did admit in this text that place can be considered as something that different bodies can occupy, and so as distinct from any particular body. However, he held 113 114

Compare AT 4:164f, 7:434. The argument in this text is that if place were an extension separable from a particular body, then there would be an infinity of places in the same thing, since the extension identical to the place would have its own place, and that place would have an extension that has a place, and so on.

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that place so considered is a mere abstraction, a “mode of thought” that exists only in our mind (8-1:44f).115 Similarly, Desgabets emphasized in his response to his Jesuit critic that place or space without body “is only real extension considered in general, in the same way that human nature is nothing other than particular humans considered perfectly. But you know the kind is not really distinct from the individual” (L 359). Thus, Desgabets followed Descartes in accepting the broadly Aristotelian view that “extension in general” does not exist external to mind, and that concrete places are identical to the dimensions of particular parts of matter. But such a view has the consequence that the very same surfaces of the bread, considered as concrete places, can persist in the Eucharist only if the matter of the bread persists as well. Here we have an Aristotelian source for the conclusion in the Consid´erations that the matter of the bread remains in this sacrament. It is true that Descartes emphasized to Mesland that the unchanging eucharistic surfaces are to be considered not as modes of the bread but only as modes intermediate between the bread and the surrounding air (AT 4:164f). Therefore, he refrained from tying the identity of the surfaces to the identity of the matter. Yet Descartes failed to recognize the implication of his own view in the Principles that such species can be only “modes of thought.” In contrast, Desgabets is able to escape the implication that the remaining surfaces are mere abstractions since he insisted in the Consid´erations that “after the consecration we have in the Holy Sacrament the matter of the bread under the name of quantity.” His conclusion there is that the accidents of the bread can persist given that these are only “the local dispositions of the parts of matter, which are nothing more than modes” (Con. 6). Thus, because Desgabets held that the same matter of the bread remains in the sacrament, he was able to say that the same concrete modes of the bread also remain. In effect, then, Desgabets appealed to the claim in the Mesland correspondence that the matter of the eucharistic elements is united to Christ’s soul to shore up Descartes’s argument in the “Fourth Replies” that the identification of eucharistic species with bodily modes is compatible with the doctrine that these species remain after consecration. In so doing, he revealed that this argument is more tightly linked to the speculations concerning the Real Presence in the Mesland correspondence than Arnauld or Bossuet – or, apparently, Descartes himself – ever suspected.116 115 116

For the distinction between modes that are “in the very things of which they are said to be modes” and modes that are “only in our thought,” see AT 8-1:27. For a different attempt to connect Descartes’s views in the “Fourth Replies” and the Mesland correspondence, see Laymon 1982, 167–70. For the view that Descartes cannot consistently hold that the species of the elements remain and at the same time hold that Christ’s body and blood are really present, see Watson 1982, 143–45.

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1.4.4 Theologia Cartesiana In §1.2.2, I cited the charge in Arnauld that Desgabets’s account of the Eucharist must be rejected since it is “contrary to all that has been taught in the Church for 600 years.” Such a charge reflects Arnauld’s allegiance to the Augustinian slogan that “what we know, we owe to reason; what we believe, to authority” (quod scimus, debemus ratione; quod credimus, auctoritati).117 As he was well aware, such a slogan is also prominent in Jansenius’s Augustinus. In a book “on reason and faith in theological matters,” which serves as a preface to the second volume of this text, Jansenius argued that scholastic appeals to Aristotelian philosophy in matters of theology are responsible for heretical non-Augustinian accounts of grace.118 From Arnauld’s perspective, Desgabets’s attempt to construct a eucharistic theology based on Cartesian principles was as misguided as the scholastic attempt to provide such a theology based on Aristotelian categories. For him, both are examples of a speculative theology that attempts to “pass off as new articles of faith that which no Council has defined and which cannot be established either by Scripture or by Tradition” (OA 14:621). Arnauld’s preferred alternative is the positive theology found in his and Nicole’s Perp´etuit´e de la foy, which attempts merely to draw out the theological implications of the doctrine of the Eucharist as stated in the Church Fathers. Here we would seem to have a clear contrast between the speculative “theologia Cartesiana” of the Consid´erations and the more properly Jansenist emphasis on positive theology in the Perp´etuit´e. Certainly there is some difference in emphasis here. Whereas Arnauld suggested that the only legitimate use of Cartesianism with respect to revealed truths of faith is to defeat speculative theologies that go beyond Church tradition, Desgabets emphasized the positive role that Cartesian philosophy can play in the explication of the mysteries. More generally, Desgabets’s concern with showing that “there is a perfect accord between natural and revealed truths” (CdC 11), which is evident throughout his writings, seems to conflict with Arnauld’s own insistence in the “Examen” that faith requires that one avoid the “dangerous temptations” of philosophical discussion. On closer examination, however, the distinction between Arnauld and Desgabets is not so clear-cut. An initial complication derives from an important ambiguity in Jansenius’s own view of the relation between philosophy and theology. His language in the Augustinus does suggest at times that it is the use of philosophy per se that is the source of theological error. Even so, in this text, Jansenius also drew on passages in which Augustine himself used 117 118

OA 38:94. Jansenius 1964, 2:col. 1–70, esp. 3–8. For a summary of the discussion in this book, see Abercrombie 1936, 134–36.

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philosophical principles to explicate Church doctrine. Sometimes, at least, the issue for Jansenius seems to have been not simply the use of philosophy but rather the use of a philosophical system that undercuts the authority of Augustine on matters pertaining to salvation.119 Similarly, Arnauld could not have fairly condemned Desgabets simply for drawing on Cartesian philosophy to explicate the mystery of the Eucharist. After all, Arnauld himself was interested in the relation of this philosophy to that mystery, as shown not only by his discussion of the sacrament in the 1681 “Examen” but also by his queries to Descartes on this issue four decades earlier. In the end, then, Arnauld could object only that Desgabets’s use of a specific form of Cartesianism is incompatible with what the Church teaches about the Eucharist. The dispute between Arnauld and Desgabets over the details of revealed truths concerning the Eucharist also does not preclude their agreement that Descartes’s system provides the basis for a natural theology based on reason alone. In response to the decision by the Roman curia to place Descartes’s works on the Index, Arnauld protested in a 1691 letter to the Jansenist critic of Cartesianism, Du Vaucel, that such works contain “the most solid proofs of the existence of God and of the immortality of the soul” (OA 3:398). Likewise, Desgabets praised Cartesian philosophy for establishing “two sorts of truths that can serve as an excellent preparation to receive our mysteries as entirely conformed to wholly good reason,” namely, the truths that “pertain to the existence of God, to the nature of his infinite perfections, [and] to the immortality of our souls” (RD 4:141). Here Arnauld and Desgabets alike stand against the view in Pascal, which Du Vaucel shared, of a Descartes that is “useless and uncertain”120 in matters of religion.121 However, this point of agreement must be qualified given that Arnauld and Desgabets appealed to very different aspects of Cartesianism. As his comments on the Meditations reveal, Arnauld was particularly attracted to the cogito argument and the argument for the distinction of intellect from the senses, features of Descartes’s system that he took to be Augustinian in nature.122 Desgabets also held that the philosophy “of M. Descartes having 119

120

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Thus, Jansenius at times focused his attack on a philosophia scholasticœ deriving from the work of Aristotle that emphasizes the power that the human will and reason have even without the assistance of grace ( Jansenius 1964, 2:col. 5–8). Or perhaps, as Pascal himself seems to have written, inutile et certain; see Carraud 1992, 220–24. The point on which Pascal and other Jansenists insisted, however, is that Cartesian speculation in metaphysics and physics is inutile for salvation. For Pascal’s epigram, see Pascal 1904–14, 12:98. See, for instance, Desgabets’s emphasis, in reading notes on Pascal’s Pens´ees, on “the proofs that philosophy and natural reason supply to demonstrate the greatest truths and particularly the two that must pass as fundamental for all religion, that is to know that our soul is immortal and that there is a God” (“Trait´e de la religion chr´etienne,” in MS Epinal 175, 578f). See, for instance, AT 7:197f, 205.

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been purged of its faults has a particular relation to the true and ancient theology that one reads in . . . the works of Saint Augustine.”123 However, the qualification that this philosophy is acceptable only when purged of its “faults” is particularly significant in this context since one of the principal faults that Desgabets found in Descartes is the assumption that the cogito argument reveals the presence in us of intellectual thought that does not depend on body. Desgabets saw the same sort of fault in Arnauld, drawing attention at one point to the claim in the Art de penser that “the opinion shared by several Scholastic philosophers” who subscribe to the slogan that “nothing is in the intellect that was not previously in the senses” (nihil est in intellectu quod non prius fuerit in sensu) is “absurd and as contrary to religion as to true philosophy.”124 Desgabets’s response to this claim is that human thoughts “are produced and advance in conjunction with the movements with which they are allied and in the same manner that the modes of matter are produced and destroyed.”125 This response serves to counterbalance Desgabets’s report that he has turned away from Aristotelian scholasticism and follows “the noble and Platonic manner in which the Fathers have explicated matters of faith.”126 Indeed, Desgabets himself stressed, in response to the assertion of the superiority of Aristotle to Descartes, that “it is only the Cartesians who can know Aristotle well and give him the praises that he deserves” since they alone can see “the beauties of his works without attributing to him the monstrous faults that those who say they are Peripateticians attribute to him,” faults such as the assertion of “sensible qualities existing in abstracto” (L 368f ). Desgabets was not alone in invoking what could be called an “Aristotle strategy” for defending Descartes. In his Entretiens sur la philosophie, for instance, Jacques Rohault emphasized that the Cartesian identification of matter with extension is consistent with the conclusion in Aristotle that matter in general has “neither a precise shape nor any specific quality” and that these depend on “form, that is to say, the particular determination of this matter.”127 Such an approach is reflected in the 1682 Parall`ele des principes de la physique d’Aristotle & de celle de Ren´e Des Cartes of the French 123 124 125 126 127

MS Epinal 43, 2. Arnauld and Nicole 1981, 43f. MS Epinal 64, 724. Compare the discussion in §4.3 of Desgabets’s defense of this slogan. MS Epinal 64, 3. Rohault 1978, 113. There seems to be a striking contrast, however, with Rohault’s attitudes toward Aristotle in his conferences during the 1660s. Ren´e F´ed´e’s notes on a 15 December 1660 conference indicate, for instance, that Rohault claimed that Aristotle’s definition of matter “is illusory in itself and furthermore, does not permit any inference to be drawn” (cited in McClaughlin 1979, 579). There were practical reasons for this change since Rohault wrote the Entretiens to address the fears of traditionalists at the Sorbonne regarding the Cartesianism of his Trait´e de physique. This concern is clear from a June 1671 letter from Rohault to the syndic of the Sorbonne, in Rohault 1978, 170–78.

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Gen´evofin Ren´e le Bossu, which appeals explicitly to Rohault.128 Already in 1669, Le Bossu advised that Cartesians use the old Aristotelian terminology so that the learned doctors “hear more peacefully and examine with more tranquillity what one proposes to them.”129 Even so, neither Rohault nor Le Bossu went as far as Desgabets in endorsing the broadly Aristotelian thesis that human thought is connected in an essential manner to bodily motion. In accepting this thesis, Desgabets was able to dodge certain theological objections to Cartesianism. Long before Desgabets, Christian thinkers had wrestled with the difficulties of reconciling the Platonic emphasis on the self-sufficiency of the immaterial intellect with the traditional belief in the resurrection of the body. Such difficulties are reflected in Thomas’s attempts to argue that though the human soul can subsist apart from matter, still it is a form that is naturally suited to be united to a body.130 Descartes himself became caught up in these difficulties when Calvinist theologians at Utrecht protested the thesis of one of his disciples that the soul is only contingently connected to the body, and thus that man is a “being by accident.”131 One concern was that such a thesis compromised the dogma of the resurrection of the body, and Du Vaucel later drew attention to this same difficulty when he warned in his “Observations” that Cartesianism seems to weaken a belief in “the substantial union of the soul with the body” that conforms to “faith concerning the resurrection of the bodies of the good and evil” and “the inclination that the blessed retain for their bodies until the day of the resurrection.”132 By the time that Du Vaucel had raised this objection, however, Desgabets had already insisted on an essential union between the human soul and its body on the grounds that “Scripture and Tradition represent the union of the soul and the body to us as a good so natural and so great that the death that interrupts it for a time is regarded as a penalty and the most terrible thing in the world” (RD 5:187). When Arnauld’s opponent Le Moine later emphasized the tension between Cartesian Platonism and the doctrine of the resurrection, Arnauld responded in his “Examen” that all a Cartesian needs for the soul–body union is “the mutual correspondence of the thoughts of the soul with the traces in the brain and the emotions of the soul with the movement of [animal] spirits” (OA 38:141).133 At the same time that Arnauld wrote this

128 129 130 131

132 133

See Le Bossu 1981, 9. Cited in McClaughlin 1979, 574f. See S.Th Ia, 75, 4. This was the conclusion that Descartes’s then-favored disciple Regius drew from his system in a 1641 disputation in Utrecht, and that Aristotelians in the theological faculty vigorously attacked. For a discussion of the “Utrecht crisis” triggered by Regius’s disputation, see Verbeek 1992, ch. 2. Du Vaucel 1950, 117. As in the case of the Eucharist, so here Arnauld cited the version of Cartesianism in Malebranche’s Recherche.

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response, however, Du Vaucel was urging that the view that the union “is only a modification or a mutual relation between two substances or two natures” does not account for “the infinite dignity of the body of J.C. that is filled and penetrated by Divinity, and that becomes the body of a God by the hypostatic union.”134 Somewhat earlier, during the mid-1670s, the Cartesian Oratorian Cyprien de Villecroze had been censured by the regent of the University of Angers for holding that the essence of the soul consists in thought alone on the grounds that the mystery of the Incarnation requires that the essence of man involves the body as well as thought.135 Thus, critics of Cartesianism took the doctrines of the Incarnation and the resurrection to require that the nature of the human soul include in some manner the body to which it is united. In Desgabets’s case, this same requirement is also linked to the doctrine of the Eucharist. Recall again Desgabets’s appeal to the fact that the soul is “united by its essence to a body” in response to Pastel’s objection that Descartes cannot say that Christ’s soul informs the matter of the eucharistic elements (§1.2.2). This appeal indicates that Desgabets’s Aristotelian views were motivated at least in part by his desire to render Descartes’s system compatible with the mystery of the Eucharist. In this respect, the modification is similar to Arnauld’s own appeal in the “Examen” to penetrable matter and the subjectless dimensions of the eucharistic elements. The dispute between Desgabets and Arnauld is not over whether Descartes’s own views need to be reshaped in a manner that accommodates Church tradition; both agreed that they must be. The more subtle disagreement is over what the tradition teaches and what form of Cartesianism best accommodates these teachings. I have argued that with respect to the particular issue of the Eucharist, Desgabets’s modifications of Descartes’s system are superior to those in Arnauld on Cartesian grounds.136 But a consideration of this issue also vindicates Desgabets insofar as it reveals the difficulty in the context of early modern France of detaching Cartesian natural philosophy completely from revealed theology. In particular, the doctrine of transubstantiation had real implications for the conception of material qualities and natural change. Once Louis’s 1671 decree had made the issue of the Eucharist the most prominent topic in the debate over Cartesianism, it simply was no longer possible for Descartes’s followers to duck the question of the impact of his physics on Catholic theology. 134 135 136

Du Vaucel 1950, 118. Babin 1679, 44. More generally, I think that the philosophical apparatus that Desgabets employed in his discussions of the Eucharist is less gerrymandered than the apparatus that Arnauld used in his “Examen.” Compare the distinction in Sylla 1975 between the eucharistic theology of Aquinas, which employs a “‘sublimated’ philosophy which, from a purely natural point of view, does not always make good sense” (367), and the account of the Eucharist in Ockham, which involves views that “make sense in natural contexts” (366).

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1.5 la ville on cartesianism and desgabets Desgabets died in 1678, but the controversy over Cartesian eucharistic theology did not die with him. Indeed, just two years after his death, a work was published with the title, the Sentimens de Monsieur Descartes, by “Louis de la Ville,” the pseudonym of a Caen Jesuit, Le Valois.137 The basic argument is indicated in the subtitle of La Ville’s text, which charges that Descartes’s sentiments “concerning the essence and properties of bodies” are “opposed to the doctrine of the Church and conforming to the errors of Calvin on the subject of the Eucharist.” The charge that Cartesianism leads to Calvinism is familiar, as is the scholastic claim in this text that the body of Christ is present in the Eucharist without its extension. Moreover, Cartesians such as Arnauld and Malebranche provided the standard response that the declarations of the Council of Trent are consistent with the tenet that extension is essential to matter.138 The whole exchange reminded Du Vaucel of the disputes over the Eucharist during the 1670s and led him to issue the warnings in his “Observations sur Descartes” concerning the dangers of associating Port-Royal with an already discredited Cartesianism.139 Nonetheless, the Sentimens is distinctive in at least three ways. The first is that it singles out not only Cartesians such as Rohault, Cally, Malebranche, and Desgabets, but also the Gassendist Fran¸cois Bernier. It is true that in the 1671 “Arrˆet burlesque,” which was written to dissuade the Paris Parlement from condemning the new philosophy, “Cartistes and Gassendistes” were named as the targets of the campaign against anti-Aristotelianism.140 Moreover, one scholastic traditionalist, the Oratorian Jean-Baptiste de la Grange, attacked both Cartesians and Gassendists in his Principes de la philosophie, which received its privil`ege in 1675.141 However, for various reasons, Gassendists were for the most part left alone during the 1670s campaign against the new philosophy.142 In fact, the Sentimens prompted a rare 137 138

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141 142

For biographical details, see Gouhier 1976c, 115–21. Arnauld, who had been exiled in 1679 to the Spanish Netherlands, responded to the Sentimens in an Apologie that he directed against Pierre Jurieu, who had earlier emigrated to the United Provinces. Malebranche responded in a 1682 D´efense that was appended in 1684 to his Trait´e de la nature et de la grˆace. For more on Malebranche’s polemic with La Ville/Le Valois, see OCM 17-1:445–505. Compare Gouhier 1976c. At the beginning of the “Observations,” Du Vaucel noted “a book under the name of Sre. Delaville, in which this argument [for the possible existence of body without extension] is proposed with great force and clarity against the Cartesians” (Du Vaucel 1950, 115). Boileau-Despr´eaux 1747, 3:144, n. 8. The “Arrˆet” is reproduced in Boileau-Despr´eaux et al. 1992. This work was published anonymously, but its authors are indicated in the comment by the son of Jean Racine, Louis, that “Boileau imagina l’Arresty burlesque, qu’il composa avec mon p`ere, et Bernier, le fameaux voyageur, leur ami commun” (Racine 1969, 5:89). The text itself was not actually published until 1682. One principal reason is that prior to 1671 Descartes’s followers produced French editions of his accessible writings and elegant summaries of his system. On the other hand, Bernier produced a cumbersome French summary of the views in Gassendi’s virtually unreadable Latin tomes only in 1678, after his return from a visit to the Mogul empire. For discussion

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Gassendist foray into the Eucharist controversy, with Bernier responding in his 1684 Eclaircissement sur le livre de M. de la Ville. Although he followed the Cartesians in rejecting the scholastic position that body can exist without being extended, Bernier nonetheless protested against the wrong that La Ville does “to Gassendists by not distinguishing them further from the Cartesians.”143 Even so, the points of contrast that Bernier emphasized were not directly relevant to the issue of the Eucharist.144 Moreover, the very fact that Bernier contributed to the controversy over the Sentimens explains the unusual mention of Gassendi in a 1685 royal order against the teaching of new philosophies at the University of Paris.145 La Ville’s text is distinguished not only by its critique of Gassendi but also by the absence of any reference to Jansenius. The French campaign against Cartesianism initially involved no overt link to the Jansenist controversy, primarily because it began soon after the establishment of a “peace of the Church” that prohibited criticism of the Jansenists (see §1.3.2). However, in a 1671 pamphlet, “Plusieurs raisons pour empˆecher la censure ou la condamnation de la philosophie de Descartes,” there is the charge that an anti-Jansenist animus motivates the Eucharist controversies. The author of this pamphlet – most likely Arnauld146 – complained that the effort to condemn Descartes derives from those who “are scarcely fond of the conservation of the peace that the late pope [viz., Clement IX] and the king have so happily established.”147 By the end of the decade, censures of Cartesianism often violated the official prohibition of criticism of Jansenism. On Pierre Bayle’s report, for instance, Pierre Cally was removed from his chair in philosophy at the University of Caen in 1677 on the grounds that he advocated “Cartesianism and Jansenism.”148 In the 1678 resolution that condemns the teaching of Descartes’s physics in the Oratorian colleges, moreover, there is a prohibition of the teaching of Jansenius in theology. That same year, the canons of the Congregation of Saint-Genevi`eve also censured philosophical Cartesianism and theological Jansenism.149 In 1679, however, there was something of a turning point. The death of the duchesse de Longueville that year left Port-Royal without its most

143 144 145 146

147 148 149

of the prominence of Cartesianism over Gassendism, see Lennon 1993, ch. 1, and Brockliss 1995. Bernier 1684, 81. Thus, he stressed his rejection of dogmatic Cartesian claims regarding the bˆete-machine and occasional causes. For more on Bernier’s discussion, see Ariew 1999, 181–87. Jourdain 1862–66, 1:269, n. 1. Although Cousin originally did not identify the author of this pamphlet (Cousin 1855, 6f ), he later noted that “one knows today, by authentic testimony, that this M´emoire is from Arnauld” (Cousin 1970, 303). This attribution is seconded in Bouillier 1868, 1:472. The pamphlet was first reproduced not in Arnauld’s collected works but in Boileau-Despr´eaux 1747, 3:108–54. Cousin 1970, 303f. See the passage from Bayle cited in Bouillier 1868, 1:478, n. 1. Bouillier 1868, 1:478.

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powerful patron. Moreover, Louis’s increasingly bitter political disputes with Innocent XI encouraged him to make his final break with a Clementine peace that protected the Jansenists. Thus, there was a revival of a campaign against the nuns of Port-Royal and their supporters that had been put on hold for a decade. The focus in this revived campaign, and in Louis’s battles with the pope, was on the traditional issues concerning grace and free will.150 As prior to the Clementine peace, so now Cartesianism faded into the background in disputes over Jansenism. La Ville’s text illustrates that after 1679 there also was an attempt to criticize Cartesian eucharistic theology on its own terms, without insinuating a connection to Jansenism.151 The strategy in the Sentimens was successful in the short run, as indicated by the 1685 royal order against the teaching of the physics of Descartes and Gassendi. Nonetheless, the fact that this order was the last of the official French condemnations of Cartesianism to highlight the issue of the Eucharist shows that the strategy failed in the long run. This failure is somewhat puzzling. After all, the controversy over the Cartesian account of the Eucharist did not simply disappear. In 1701, for instance, the Bishop of Bayeux censured a text in which the Cartesian Pierre Cally defended the account of the Real Presence in the Mesland correspondence.152 However, it is perhaps significant that the 1685 royal order preceded by just two months the momentous Revocation of the Edict of Nantes. With the Revocation, which overturned the protection of Calvinism in France, came the need for missionaries to convert the remaining French followers of Calvin, the Huguenots. This need may well have taken precedence over the need to eradicate Cartesianism from suspect religious organizations such as the Oratory.153 More basically, though, Louis does not seem to have been very deeply threatened by Cartesianism once that doctrine was detached from a politically destabilizing Jansenism. This lack of concern would explain the fact 150

151 152

153

Thus, there was the charge that Innocent XI was aiding and abetting heretics who failed to adhere to the Church’s condemnation of Jansenism (see Orcibal 1949, 36f, n. 179). However, the issue of Jansenism may not have been so much a cause of the divisions between Paris and Rome as a symptom of them. The disputes were arguably motivated rather by political battles over Louis’s unilateral extension of the R´egale, which entitled him to the revenues of empty bishoprics, and the 1682 adoption by the French Assembly of the Clergy of “Four Articles” that asserted the limitations of papal authority over the French Church and State. For examples of this attempt before and after the 1680s, see Frassen 1668 and Du Hamel 1705. See Jansen 1939, 1424–26. The censured text was Cally 1700. As in the case of Desgabets’s work, Cally’s text attempted to defend the Mesland account by linking it to the Benedictine Durand of Troarn. For more on Cally’s eucharistic theology, see Vattier 1911–12. For the suggestion that the Revocation saved the Oratory from royal harassment, see Bluche 1990, 395.

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that, when he was told of the condemnation of Cartesianism by the Oratory in 1678, Louis responded that he approved not because “I wished to prevent it from being taught to the Monseigneur, but [because] I do not wish for it to be made the basis for a doctrine.”154 Cartesianism certainly differs in this respect from Jansenism. Even though Louis tolerated the instruction of the Dauphin in the fundamentals of Cartesianism by his pr´ecepteur, Bishop Bossuet, he most certainly would not have abided any teaching of the Jansenist account of grace. That the reasons for this difference are political is indicated by Louis’s comment in his M´emoirs that he dedicated himself from early on “to destroying Jansenism and to breaking up the communities where this spirit of novelty was developing, well intentioned perhaps, but which seemed to want to ignore the dangerous consequences it could have.”155 As we will see in §5.1, there was a move against Cartesianism in 1691 that involved its association with Jansenist theology. Such a move indicates the abandonment of the strategy, evident in La Ville’s text, of overturning Descartes’s system simply by drawing attention to the heretical implications it has for the doctrine of the Eucharist. Beyond the presence of Gassendi and the absence of Jansenius, a third noteworthy feature of the Sentimens is connected to its long appendix “on the pretended possibilities of impossible things, the final stronghold of the Cartesians.”156 La Ville focused in particular on the claim of the “author of the Critique de la Critique de la Recherche de la Verit´e ” – namely, Desgabets157 – that since God is “supremely free and powerful, it would be contradictory to say that there is anything outside of Him possessing any degree of being or of reality that He had not given to it with indifference.”158 Such a claim is supposed to provide a last “stronghold” for the Cartesians by allowing them the out of saying that even though it is impossible that Christ’s eucharistic body can exist without extension, God’s infinite power can nonetheless bring about this impossibility.159 La Ville objected that even if such a move is coherent, the Cartesian position remains prejudicial to the Catholic faith insofar as it concedes the Calvinist point that the Real Presence is an impossibility.160 Moreover, he urged that the admission of “the possibility of impossible things” introduces problems internal to Cartesian philosophy insofar as it undermines the famous cogito argument in Descartes. The main 154 155 156 157 158 159 160

Cited in ibid., 394. Louis XIV 1970, 54. La Ville 1680, 220–90. Compare the brief discussion of the La Ville–Desgabets relation in Scribano 1996, 297f. For further discussion of Desgabets’s views in the Critique de la Critique, see §§2.2, 3.1, and 4.1. La Ville 1680, 221f. La Ville mentioned also the views of Cally in Philosophia catena aurea, a work now lost. Ibid., 226. The view attributed to the Cartesians is that, in the case of Christ’s eucharistic body, God creates an impossible essence that does not include extension. Ibid., 227–32.

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difficulty is that this argument relies on the assumption that not even God can bring about the impossibility of a self that thinks but that does not exist. But such an assumption is open neither to Descartes nor to Cartesians who accept the free creation of essences.161 Our previous discussion clears Desgabets of the charge – implicitly directed against him in the Sentimens – of taking the Real Presence to require that God bring about the impossibility of a body existing without extension. Desgabets’s own unequivocal position is that the extension of the bread is miraculously incorporated into Christ’s body by means of its union with His soul. Indeed, he could hardly have appealed to God’s power to do the impossible in the Eucharist given his claim against supporters of Scotistic adduction theory that God cannot annihilate matter. To be sure, the passage from Desgabets’s Critique cited in the Sentimens indicates that he is guilty of the charge of accepting the difficult position, introduced in Descartes’s 1630 correspondence with Mersenne, that eternal truths “have been laid down by God and depend on Him entirely no less than the rest of His creatures” (AT 1:145) and that God “is the author of the essences of created things no less than of their existence” (1:151). The charge is further supported by Desgabets’s claim in his 1675 “Suppl´ement a` la philosophie de Descartes” that Descartes’s view that “the will of God is the free cause of essences” is in fact “of ultimate importance and [has] great and incomparable consequences” (RD 6:208). For Desgabets, though, one of these consequences is “the immutability of the eternal truths, angels, the soul, [and] matter” (6:209). The particular consequence of the immutability or what he also called the “indefectibility” of matter provides the philosophical foundation for his argument against the Scotists that the matter of the eucharistic elements cannot be annihilated in conversion. Thus, Desgabets understood Descartes’s view of the eternal truths not to provide room for eucharistic impossibilities, as La Ville would have it, but rather to rule them out. Although Descartes spoke of the immutability of created eternal truths, he never inferred to the indefectibility of matter. Still less did he apply his account of the eternal truths to the issue of the Eucharist. In the preface to the “Suppl´ement,” though, Desgabets warned that he was concerned not merely with representing Descartes’s views but also with marking “the places where he has failed to push them as far as he ought to have.” Even more, he proposed to correct Descartes’s philosophy “of some faults,” thus allowing it to receive “the infinite extent that one can give to it” (RD 5:152). Therefore, he distinguished his “first supplement” to Descartes from the “second supplement that MM. de Cordemoy, Rohault, de la Forge, Clauberg and others have offered in the fine works that they have given to the public,” one which

161

Ibid., 272f.

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merely extends Descartes’s principles to phenomena that Descartes himself did not consider (5:156). In light of the remarks in the Sentimens, it is interesting that one of the most crucial “faults” in Descartes that Desgabets proposed to correct concerns “the famous proposition, je pense, donc je suis,” which proposition he took to “have neither solidity nor use” (RD 6:224). However, Desgabets did not follow La Ville in holding that the proposition runs up against skeptical doubt. On the contrary, he insisted that Descartes’s cogito argument fails to take into account the foundational certainty of our knowledge of the existence of the material world. One point that Desgabets made is that the cogito proposition is ineffective without an “intentionality principle” that requires the existence of objects corresponding to our ideas of them. Yet he held that just as this principle reveals that the idea of the res cogitans presupposes the existence of thinking substance, so it reveals that the idea of res extensa presupposes the existence of extended substance. According to Desgabets, then, there is no room for the sort of hyperbolic doubt of the material world that backs Descartes’s own discussion of the cogito. Another point that Desgabets offered against this discussion concerns its suggestion that we can adequately understand the premise je pense in terms of thought alone. He countered that the mere fact that our thought involves succession reveals that it derives from bodily motion. Indeed, Desgabets held that the pervasive temporality of our thought establishes that our soul is not a disembodied res cogitans, but rather something that is by its nature united to a body. It is this point that explains a passage from a 1674 letter in which Desgabets emphasized to his fellow Cartesian Nicolas Malebranche that “I consider the angel to be of a nature much more contrary to the soul than that of being simply distinguished.” He went on to note that the nature of an angel, or any other “pure mind,” consists in pure thought, but that our own soul must be understood to be “a thinking substance, but thinking in a certain manner, that is [with] the thoughts that are its modes naturally demanding to be united to corporeal motions” (OCM 18:84f ). Earlier I drew attention to three philosophical positions deriving from the remarks in the Consid´erations, namely, the indefectibility of substances, which rules out Scotistic adduction, the soul’s essential relation to body, which distinguishes Christ’s soul from a mere “assisting form,” and the intentionality principle, which precludes any substanceless quantity. Now we see that these same three positions are broached by La Ville’s remarks in the Sentimens. The responses to La Ville that I have offered on Desgabets’s behalf allow us to define these positions in terms of the following three doctrines central to his Cartesian system: (1) the appeal to Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of eternal truths to establish the indefectibility of substances, and of material substance in particular (the creation doctrine); (2) the claim that the ideas of mind and body require the existence of mental and bodily

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substances simply by virtue of the fact that they are intentionally related to them (the intentionality doctrine); and (3) the position that all temporal thoughts are connected to bodily motion by means of the soul–body union (the union doctrine). The three doctrines are in varying degrees interrelated. The creation doctrine requires that created material substance have a necessary and atemporal existence that derives immediately from the divine will. This requirement reinforces the consequence of the intentionality doctrine that the idea of material substance cannot represent a possible but nonexistent object. That consequence, in turn, provides additional support for the argument from the union doctrine against the claim in Descartes that the existence of mind is better known than the existence of body. Finally, the union doctrine relies on the distinction, important to the creation doctrine, between atemporal substance and its temporal modes. Desgabets’s Cartesianism goes back to Descartes’s roots insofar as it stresses his foundational position that eternal truths and immutable essences depend on God’s free will. However, his system also includes results that are radically at odds with Descartes’s own views. Desgabets’s three radical doctrines are preserved in the writings of Regis. Indeed, their presence in Regis marks the profound influence of Desgabets on the work of his younger and more famous contemporary. Regis was best known as a popularizer of standard Cartesian physics, but he also was concerned with uncovering the deep implications of Desgabets’s original supplements to Descartes. In Regis’s view, Desgabets provided the material for a comprehensive alternative to a form of Cartesianism in Malebranche that is “idealistic” insofar as it requires that our knowledge of body derives from uncreated ideas in God rather than from the created material world itself. In what follows, I offer a reconstruction of the Cartesian alternative to Malebranche in Desgabets and Regis that relies not only on Descartes’s eternal truths doctrine but also on their own distinctive position that our knowledge of body is grounded in features of an indefectible but freely created material substance.

part ii THREE RADICAL DOCTRINES

2 The Creation Doctrine Indefectible Material Substance and God

One point that emerges from the previous chapter is that Desgabets’s views on the Eucharist were grounded in the philosophical position that matter cannot be destroyed even by God since it is “indefectible.” In the work in which he first argued for this position, however, he also insisted that just as “M. Descartes was correct in what he has said of the immutable nature of [the eternal] truths, notwithstanding their dependence on God,” so one can affirm the indefectibility or indestructibility of matter while claiming at the same time that God has produced matter “with a sovereign indifference” (RD 2:35). These remarks indicate a firm commitment on Desgabets’s part to the doctrine in Descartes of the creation of the eternal truths. Indeed, he spoke of this doctrine as “being of the greatest importance and having great and incomparable consequences” (RD 6:208). In this he was followed by Regis, who placed at the center of his system the thesis that “there is nothing possible or impossible except what God has rendered such by His will” (Syst`eme 1:91). Descartes himself indicated that he took his created truths doctrine to be of central importance. Thus, in 1630, he introduced with great fanfare a treatise on physics that has at its core a treatment of metaphysical topics that includes the claim that mathematical truths “have been laid down by God and depend on Him entirely no less than the rest of His creatures” (AT 1:145). He also emphasized repeatedly thereafter that his doctrine is simply a consequence of the view that God is infinitely perfect, and the Meditations makes clear that that view is important to him.1 It is not without reason, then, that 1

See especially his claim to Mersenne, considered later, that since the power of God surpasses our understanding but the eternal truths do not, we should judge that such truths are “something less than, and subject to, the incomprehensible power of God” (AT 1:150). For the view that it follows from the fact that God is infinitely perfect that He is incomprehensible to us, see the remarks in “Meditation Three” at AT 7:46.

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one French commentator has called his created truths doctrine “the key to Cartesian metaphysics” (la clef de la m´etaphysique cart´esienne).2 Even so, this doctrine is virtually absent from the works that Descartes published during his lifetime.3 Most of what he said about it is contained in scattered correspondence, and what is said there does not make clear why he thought that this doctrine is foundational for his physics.4 In contrast, the remarks from Desgabets cited earlier reveal that he took the created truths doctrine to provide the basis for his thesis of the indefectibility of matter. Regis followed Desgabets in making explicit the role of Descartes’s doctrine in providing metaphysical foundations for physics.5 However, Malebranche was a prominent Cartesian who expressly rejected this doctrine on the Augustinian grounds that eternal truths derive from uncreated features of the divine intellect.6 Admittedly, Malebranche was unorthodox in coupling this position with his own thesis of the “vision in God,” that is, the claim that we see material things in God’s uncreated ideas. Most Cartesians concurred in the judgment of Desgabets, later defended by Regis, that this thesis is more mystical than intelligible.7 Yet Malebranche was among the majority of Descartes’s followers who attempted to purge Cartesianism of the doctrine of the creation of eternal truths.8 Nonetheless, Descartes’s voluntarist doctrine is deeply puzzling, and it is worthwhile to see how it developed in the hands of Desgabets and Regis. This is especially so since these Cartesians addressed fundamental difficulties concerning the created truths doctrine that Descartes himself broached but never fully resolved. There is, of course, an enormous literature that considers problematic features of Descartes’s doctrine. But English-language treatments, at least, tend to focus somewhat narrowly on difficulties concerning 2 3

4 5

6 7 8

Alqui´e 1987, 90. See also Marion 1991. The main exception here is his comments on the doctrine in the Fifth and Sixth Replies, which were published in 1641 with the Meditations (see AT 7:380, 431–33, 435f ). There are also oblique references to the doctrine in the 1637 Discourse (AT 6:38) and in the 1644 Principles (AT 8-1:14). There is a table comparing the various references, in Marion 1991, 271f. See note 20. Pierre Bayle cited Pierre Poiret as a Cartesian proponent of this doctrine, while La Ville’s Sentimens cites, in addition to Desgabets, the Caen Cartesian Pierre Cally. For the references, as well as a general discussion of the reception of Descartes’s doctrine in the early modern period, see Rodis-Lewis 1981b. See OCM 3:84–87, 136f. See CdC 214. For Regis’s critique of Malebranche’s doctrine, see Syst`eme 1:184–88. I discuss certain aspects of Regis’s critique in §2.8. See the discussion of a Cartesianism sans cr´eation des v´erit´es e´ternelles in Gouhier 1978, 156–64. It is noteworthy that the created truths doctrine was not explicitly an issue in the protracted dispute between Malebranche and Arnauld over the proper interpretation of Augustine and Descartes. But compare the discussion in §3.7 of certain claims in Arnauld that seem to rely on this doctrine.

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Descartes’s view of the modal status of created eternal truths. Although Desgabets and Regis also addressed the issue of modality, their development of the created truths doctrine broaches a deeper set of issues concerning the relevance of this doctrine for physics and its metaphysical implications concerning relations between substance and its modes as well as between God and His effects. As a prolegomenon to such an exploration, I focus in §2.1 on three problems arising from Descartes’s own discussion of his doctrine, which I call (for reasons that will become evident) the scope, ontological, and similarity problems. Then I take up Desgabets’s highly original solutions to the first two of these problems. I start in §2.2 with Desgabets’s defense of Descartes’s doctrine in a published response to the objections that Simon Foucher offered against Malebranche. This response misrepresents the position in Malebranche it purportedly is defending; nevertheless, it has the virtue of introducing the distinction, further articulated in Desgabets’s unpublished writings, between God’s uncreated nature and truths concerning the substances He has freely created. In §2.3, I consider Desgabets’s additional conclusion that the latter truths are immutable due to the fact that created substances are indefectible, and then consider in §2.4 his defense of this conclusion in the special case of material substance. This case is important not only because it is connected to the theological remarks in the Consid´erations, but also because it reveals most clearly the manner in which Desgabets took Descartes’s created truths doctrine to provide metaphysical foundations for physics. Desgabets’s discussion of material substance further introduces his quasi-Spinozistic position that material substance has an indivisible existence that places it outside of time, a position that I consider in §2.5. Subsequently, in §2.6, I turn to Regis’s final work, the Usage, and in particular to the manner in which this text uses Desgabets’s account of the divine creation of material substance to modify Desgabets’s own argument for the “indefectibility of motion” in ways that bring that argument into line with the created truths doctrine. Then I show how he went beyond Desgabets in urging that this Cartesian doctrine requires the rejection of the claim, found in Descartes, that we bear an essential resemblance to God by virtue of possessing a faculty of will. Regis’s argument against Descartes appeals to a “causal dissimilarity” principle that is found also in Spinoza. Regis’s quasiSpinozistic views concerning this principle are the topic of §2.7. Section 2.8 focuses on Regis’s attempt to distance himself from the Spinozistic identification of God with material substance. His strategy was to emphasize the result of the created truths doctrine that God is a “supersubstantial” being with perfections that have no correlate in creatures. This argument against Spinoza provides a deep reason for Regis’s rejection of Malebranche’s doctrine of the vision in God. In following Desgabets and Regis, we take a winding path that leads us to points in Spinoza and Malebranche. I do not apologize for the detours since

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I think that they bring us to some topics in early modern metaphysics that have not received the attention that they deserve. Even so, in §2.9, I attempt to lead the way home by briefly reviewing, in light of our investigations, the responses in Desgabets and Regis to the three problems from Descartes that provide our point of departure.

2.1 three problems from descartes 2.1.1 The Scope Problem In a set of 1630 letters to Mersenne, Descartes launched his remarkable doctrine that God has created the eternal truths. In the initial letter, dated 15 April, he encouraged his correspondent “to assert and proclaim everywhere” the doctrine that “the mathematical truths that you call eternal have been laid down by God and depend on Him no less than the rest of His creatures” (AT 1:145). Later, in the 1641 “Sixth Replies,” he indicated that the scope of this doctrine extends far beyond mathematical truths and indeed seems to be without limit since “no good or truth, nothing worthy of belief or action or omission, can be feigned the idea of which is in the divine intellect before His will determines to bring it about that it be such” (AT 7:432). Similarly, in 1648 Descartes told Arnauld in an unqualified way that “every basis of truth and goodness depends on [God’s] omnipotence” (AT 5:224). In a passage from a 1644 letter, presumably to Mesland, Descartes even seems to have indicated specifically that the created truths doctrine applies to truths concerning God. There he provided the proposition “that God might have brought it about that His creatures were independent of Him” as an example of something that does not exist in God prior to His act of willing. The basis for this conclusion, which appeals to the Augustinian dictum that what God sees is so (quia vides es, sunt), is that since “in God seeing and willing are one and the same thing,” there is in Him “only a single activity, entirely simple and entirely pure” (AT 4:119).9 In a seminal article, Frankfurt argues that Descartes’s created truths doctrine has universal scope.10 He further claims that Descartes understood this doctrine to entail a “universal possibilism” on which eternal truths, including truths concerning God, are “inherently as contingent as” or “no more

9

10

The dictum that Descartes cited in his letter is found in the last chapter of the Confessions (see Augustine 1934, 370f ). For Desgabets’s use of Augustine in defense of the created truths doctrine, see the texts cited in note 36. In support of this position, Frankfurt cites not the passage from the Mesland letter but rather the claim in the “Sixth Replies” that there is no priority “in order, or in nature, or in ratione ratiocinata, as they call it, such that this idea of the good impelled God to choose one thing rather than another” (AT 7:432, cited in Frankfurt 1977, 40). However, this passage appears to be restricted to the case of the creation of things outside of God; thus, it does not provide the strongest support for the claim that the scope of Descartes’s doctrine is unlimited.

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necessary than” any other propositions.11 In Frankfurt’s view, Descartes took the apparent necessity of these truths “properly to be understood only as relative to the character of our minds.”12 God created our minds such that we perceive the eternal truths to be undeniable, but He could just as easily have created us and the world and even Himself differently. In defending this view, Frankfurt appeals to another passage from the 1644 Mesland letter. This time, it is Descartes’s claim that since “God cannot have been determined to make it true that contradictories cannot exist together,” it must be the case that “He could have done the contrary” (AT 4:118).13 Taken by itself, this passage does indeed appear to suggest that it is possible that God produce the opposite of what is dictated by the eternal truths. However, the passage is prefaced by the claim that that which God could have made possible “He has nonetheless wished to make impossible.” Moreover, it is followed by the remark “that God has willed that some truths should be necessary is not to say that He willed them necessarily” (4:118). The suggestion in the Mesland letter, then, is that God has willed the truths to be necessary and their opposites to be impossible. Indeed, Descartes elsewhere insisted on necessity in the case of one special eternal truth, namely, the existence of God. For he asserted, in the course of defending his version of the ontological argument in “Meditation Five,” that, in this case, “it is not my thought that brings it about, or imposes any necessity on anything, but on the contrary that the thing itself, namely, the existence of God, determines me by necessity to thinking so” (AT 7:67).14 An alternative to Frankfurt’s interpretation, which nonetheless takes all eternal truths to fall under the scope of the created truths doctrine, has been proposed recently by Jonathan Bennett. Bennett offers on Descartes’s behalf a “conceptualist” account on which the necessity of the eternal truths is to be analyzed in terms of our own mental capacities. To say that a truth is necessary is simply to say that we cannot distinctly conceive the opposite of such a truth.15 Thus, the created truth doctrine amounts to the position that God has created our minds such that we cannot conceive the opposite of any eternal truth. Bennett grants that the claim in the Mesland letter that it is possible that God produced the opposite of the eternal truths cuts against a conceptualist analysis, which requires that the opposite of these truths can be nothing other than impossible given that they are inconceivable. However, he observes that Descartes’s more common position is that the impossibility of the opposite is merely a function of

11 12 13

14 15

Frankfurt 1977, 42. Ibid., 45. Cited in ibid., 43. Frankfurt also cites Descartes’s claim to Mersenne that God “was free to make it true that all the radii of the circle are equal, just as He was not to create the world” (AT 1:152). For further reasons why Descartes must resist universal possibilism, see Curley 1984, 571–74. Bennett 1994, 647.

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our minds. Such a position is connected to Descartes’s comment to Arnauld that “I do not think we should say of anything that it cannot be brought about by God,” but “I merely say that He has given me such a mind that I cannot conceive” the opposite of the eternal truths since “such things involve a contradiction in my conception” (AT 5:224).16 Bennett clearly rejects the attribution to Descartes of any sort of universal possibilism. Indeed, in his view, Descartes accepted rather the opposite; all eternal truths are necessary in a conceptualist sense. In one respect, however, Bennett’s reading is close to Frankfurt’s. For both, the perceived necessity of the truths is tied to the constitution of our minds. The difference is simply that Frankfurt takes this sort of perceived necessity to be merely apparent, whereas Bennett takes it to be that in which Descartes’s necessity consists. The remarks from “Meditation Five” cited earlier seem to count against the claim that there is no necessity apart from what we perceive. After all, Descartes insisted there that God’s existence has a mind-independent necessity that imposes itself on our thought. More generally, he appears to have accorded eternal truths concerning God a special status that they cannot have on the accounts in Frankfurt and Bennett. Thus, Descartes proclaimed in one of his 1630 letters to Mersenne that “the existence of God is the first and the most eternal of all possible truths and the one from which alone all others proceed” (AT 1:150).17 Moreover, he closed out his initial discussion of the created truths doctrine by pointing out that the “essence of created things” is nothing other than eternal truths that are “no more necessarily attached to [God’s] essence than are other created things” (1:152f ). Here the created truths doctrine would seem to be restricted to whatever is not necessarily attached to God’s essence, and thus not include those truths that are so attached. Even if the necessity of created eternal truths is bound up with the manner in which God creates our mind, the suggestion in these passages is that the necessity of truths concerning God’s essence does not derive from His will but rather serves as the uncreated ground for the necessity of the created truths.18 What is required at this point is some clear principle for distinguishing truths concerning essences not necessarily attached to the divine essence from truths concerning the divine essence itself.19 There is no such principle in Descartes. In fact, there is even some confusion in his writings about

16

17 18 19

Ibid., 656–61. Bennett also mentions passages in which Descartes stressed that our “nature” compels us to accept clear and distinct perceptions when we perceive them. See, for instance, AT 7:69, cited in Bennett 1994, 666. It is interesting that this same letter stresses the unity of God’s intellect and will. Perhaps the suggestion, then, is that such unity does not preclude the primacy of truths concerning God. For the view that Descartes allowed for uncreated eternal truths, see Wells 1982. As emphasized in Wilson 1978, 124, and Curley 1984, 596f.

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whether the created truths doctrine has unlimited scope. A further problem is that Descartes did not offer an ontology that allows for truths and essences that are detached from God and yet also eternal and immutable.

2.1.2 The Ontological Problem Though Descartes claimed repeatedly that (at least some) eternal truths and essences are created, he said very little about what precisely he took God to do in creating them. In his 1630 correspondence with Mersenne, Descartes did compare these truths to “laws of nature” that depend on the divine will as much as other creatures do (AT 1:145). The analogy survives in the 1641 “Sixth Replies,” which states that God is the efficient cause of the eternal truths in the same way that a king is the “efficient cause of a law, although the law itself is not an entity existing physically [ens physice existens], but is merely what they call a moral entity [ens morale] [italics added]” (AT 7:436). The suggestion in these passages that eternal truths have a status akin to natural laws perhaps indicates why Descartes had planned to treat his created truths doctrine in a treatise on physics.20 Unfortunately, though, he said almost nothing about the sense in which the truths are moral entities, or about how precisely God produces such entities as their efficient cause.21 Even so, Descartes did say something about the ontological status of eternal truths. He did this in the Principles, where he introduced an ontology that divides objects into “either things, or affections of things, or else eternal truths that have no existence outside thought” (AT 8-1:22). Apart from God, there are “only two ultimate classes of things: First, intellectual or thinking substance; and secondly, material things, i.e. those which pertain to extended substance or body” (8-1:23). The affections of these things are either the attributes (i.e., the invariable qualities) of thinking and extended substances or the modifications (i.e., the variable qualities) of those substances (8-1:26). By contrast, the eternal truths are neither extra-mental things or affections of things, but rather they only “reside within our mind” (8-1:23).22 20

21

22

Compare Garber’s alternative hypothesis that Descartes took the doctrine to reconcile his exclusion of the vacuum with God’s omnipotence (Garber 1992, 154). In support of this hypothesis, Garber appeals to Descartes’s 1648 exchange with Arnauld, even though Arnauld, rather than Descartes, introduced the issue of God’s omnipotence in this exchange (see §1.3). In contrast, Descartes was the one who introduced the comparison of eternal truths to laws or“moral entities.” Earlier I attempted to link Descartes’s ens physice/ens morale distinction to the account of law in Su´arez; see Schmaltz 1991, 136–45. However, I now suspect that my account there does not do full justice to Descartes’s claim that created truths and essences are no more attached to the divine essence than other creatures are. For an objection to my earlier views along these lines, see Nolan 1997 (cf. notes 24 and 27). For a more complete explication of this taxonomy, see Chappell 1997.

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In a passage from the 1630 Mersenne correspondence cited earlier, Descartes claimed that created essences are “nothing other than the eternal truths.” Given his official ontology, the implication here would be that such essences also reside only within our mind. Descartes provided a further indication of the nature of these essences in a passage dating from soon after the initial publication of the Principles. There he warned that people draw an insufficient distinction between things that exist outside of our thought and ideas that are in our thought. Thus, when I think of the essence of a triangle and the existence of a triangle, the two thoughts, as thoughts, even taken objectively, differ modally, in the strict sense of the term mode ; but the case is not the same with the triangle existing outside of my thought, in which it is manifest that essence and existence are not able to be distinguished; and it is the same with all universals [italics added]. (AT 4:349f )

In this passage, the essence of a triangle is said to be distinct from a material triangle only in the sense that the thought of the essence differs “objectively” from the thought of the material object. Presumably, this objective difference is a difference in the “objective reality” or the content of the thoughts.23 If so, the suggestion here is that the essence of the triangle is simply the content of the thoughts about that essence. One difficulty with this suggestion is that it seems to make the essences as episodic as the particular thoughts concerning them. However, one could propose that the essences are to be identified not with the contents of occurrent thoughts but with an enduring mental feature that conditions those thoughts. Indeed, when he introduced his created truths doctrine to Mersenne, Descartes indicated that such truths are “all inborn in our minds just as a king would imprint his laws in the hearts of all his subjects if he had enough power to do so” (AT 1:146). Insofar as truths and their related essences reside only in the mind, then, they must be identified with the innate mental structures that compel us to conceive the world in a particular manner. Thus, we can take the famous claim in “Meditation Five” that there is a “true and immutable nature” that grounds essential truths concerning a triangle (AT 7:64) to refer to innate features of our thoughts concerning the triangle.24 So far we have an account of eternal truths and essences that is roughly in line with the conceptualist analysis of modal notions that Bennett 23

24

I am drawing here on the distinction in Descartes between the “formal reality” of ideas as operations of mind and the “objective reality” in virtue of which the idea represents objects; see AT 7:40f and 161. See Nolan 1997. Nolan rightly takes exception to my earlier suggestion in Schmaltz 1991 that Descartes’s claim in this text that true and immutable natures “do not depend on my mind” commits him to the Platonic view that such natures exist external to human minds. For reasons indicated in note 27, however, I cannot accept Nolan’s conclusion that Descartes could adequately account for such natures simply in terms of our innate ideas.

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proposes on Descartes’s behalf.25 But this account inherits the problems that Bennett’s analysis creates for Descartes. As we have seen, Descartes wanted to set God’s essence apart from the other created essences that are detached from this essence. Given his ontological argument, the divine essence cannot be identified with any feature of our mind, however enduring or innate. The indication in Descartes is that this eternal essence is, in fact, identical to the supremely perfect being that exists external to our mind. There is no objection here to a conceptualist analysis of eternal essences other than God’s. However, there is some question whether such an analysis can do full justice to Descartes’s initial claim in his 1630 correspondence that God has produced the essences “from all eternity” (AT 1:152). Here the point cannot be simply that God’s act of producing the essences occurred from all eternity; after all, it was a settled view that all of God’s actions are eternal. Rather, his position seems to be that the essences themselves have existed from all eternity. There is some question about what sort of eternity is supposed to be involved here. Descartes himself indicated a temporal notion of eternity when he contrasted God’s creation of the world “in time” with its counterfactual creation “from all eternity” (AT 7:432). But even if it is granted that the human mind is immortal, Descartes surely would not have denied that this mind and all of its innate features have a temporal beginning. Matters are even worse, however, if the eternity is supposed to be nondurational. Descartes touched on the nature of this sort of eternity when he wrote to Arnauld in 1648 that since “our thoughts display a successiveness that cannot be found in divine thoughts,” our minds cannot be said to have a duration that is “entirely simultaneous [tota simul] like the duration of God” (AT 5:193).26 If the essences are supposed to be eternal in the sense of having a simultaneous existence, then surely they must be distinct from any feature of our essentially temporal mind.27 Perhaps it will be objected that I am being too particular about the notion of eternality. Why not simply take the claim that the essences are eternal to indicate the settled nature of our innate mental structures? We still have the problem of the independence of God’s essence. But even if we set aside that worry, there is a further difficulty regarding the immutability of the essences that are identified with certain mental structures. There seems 25 26 27

Curiously, however, Bennett himself downplays the connections between Descartes’s innatism and his views on created truths; see Bennett 1994, 662f. For more on the important exchange between Descartes and Arnauld on this issue, see §4.5. Nolan urges that Descartes took the eternality of created essences to indicate the incomprehensibility of God’s power (Nolan 1997, 184–86). Yet Descartes typically appealed to divine incomprehensibility to explain not the eternity of created essences but rather the absolute freedom and indifference of the divine will (this is so, for instance, in the passage that Nolan himself quotes in ibid., 186). The problem of the eternal existence of essences seems to concern the nature of what the divine will has created and not the nature of that will.

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to be no guarantee, in particular, that God will not change the essences by altering the relevant structures. In his initial 1630 letter to Mersenne, Descartes attempted to preclude the possibility of changes in eternal truths when he noted that even though God can change them “if His will can change,” nonetheless we judge His will to be as eternal and unchangeable as the truths themselves (AT 1:23). However, in a passage from a 1678 discussion, Malebranche isolated the central weakness in this line of argument when he asked, “Do we clearly see that God could not have willed certain things for a certain time, for a certain place, for certain people, or for certain kinds of being – given, as some would have it, that He was entirely free and indifferent in His willing?” (OCM 3:132). Just as God’s eternal and immutable will has produced creatures that are temporal and mutable, so it might have made what we take to be eternal truths to be contingent and variable. In our case, the worry is that this same eternal and immutable will could produce mutable essences by creating a mental structure that varies over time. Since Descartes himself never grappled with this problem, we will need to look beyond his writings for a solution to it.28

2.1.3 The Similarity Problem In “Meditation Four,” Descartes concluded that it is by virtue of having a will that “I understand myself to bear in some manner the image and likeness [imaginem et similtudinem] of God.” He argued that, although he recognizes limitations in his intellectual faculty that allow him to conceive of a greater faculty of this sort, “it is only the will, or freedom of choice [arbitrii libertas], which I experience in me to be so great that I apprehend no idea of any greater.” Descartes did admit that God’s will is greater than his own “both by reason of the knowledge and power that are joined to it and render it more firm and efficacious, and also by reason of its object, in that it extends to more.” However, he claimed – evidently on the grounds that knowledge and power are merely “joined” to the will and that its object is only extrinsic to it – that the divine will “does not seem to be greater [than mine] considered in itself formally and precisely” (AT 7:57). It is interesting that instead of saying positively that his will is without limitation or infinite, Descartes restricted himself to the negative point that he cannot apprehend an idea of a greater will.29 This negative point seems to allow for the possibility that there is, in fact, a greater will that differs in kind 28

29

Bennett offers the “Kantian” solution that “mental identity depends on how our thoughts hook into one another along the time line, so that no thinker could survive a conceptual change of the threatened kind” (Bennett 1994, 664f ). Later I explore a different solution in Desgabets that does not stray as far from Descartes’s concerns. There is a 1639 letter to Mersenne in which Descartes spoke of the human will as “infinite”; see AT 2:628. This claim may be careless and, in any case, is not found in“Meditation Four.”

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from his own, though one which does not have an idea we can apprehend. While such a possibility is not mentioned in “Meditation Four,” it is broached in Descartes’s own response to certain objections to the account of human freedom in this text. Thus, when critics took exception to the claim there that “indifference” or lack of determination in one direction as opposed to another does not belong to the perfection of the will on the grounds that it detracts from God’s freedom (AT 7:416f ), Descartes countered in his “Sixth Replies” that “the indifference that belongs to human freedom is very different [longe alia] from [the indifference] of divine [freedom]” (7:433). He explained that human indifference “does not belong to the essence of human freedom” since it involves an ignorance of some truth or good that would lead our mind in one direction rather than in another. By contrast, Descartes noted in a passage quoted earlier that God’s supreme perfection requires that He be indifferent in such a way that no truth or good “can be feigned the idea of which is in the divine intellect before His will determines to bring it about that it be such” (7:432). The relation between God’s will and our own, therefore, must differ from the relation that holds between infinite and finite substance, at least as Descartes conceived of the latter relation. He observed in a 1649 letter to Clerselier that since infinity is part of “the very essence of substance taken absolutely and bounded by no defects,” substance taken absolutely has “actually infinite and immense, true and real perfections.” Descartes also noted that in conceiving of finite being, one must “take away something from this general notion of being,” and thereby introduce “defects” that “in respect of substance are accidents” (AT 5:355f).30 Thus, the “likeness” between God and creatures is to be understood in terms of the fact that God is substance in accord with the essence of substance “taken absolutely,” while creatures are substances in a more derivative sense since they possess imperfections not included in this essence. Yet, given Descartes’s claim in “Meditation Four” that the human will is perfect in its own kind, the difference between divine and human freedom emphasized in the “Sixth Replies” could not derive from the fact that God has some perfection that pertains to the essence of freedom in general but that we do not possess. The indication in the latter text is rather that the essence of divine freedom differs entirely from the essence of human freedom. The created truths doctrine also is at odds with another feature of the argument in “Meditation Four.” When he introduced the doctrine in the 1630 Mersenne correspondence, Descartes emphasized that the fact that God has produced the eternal truths follows from the fact that “willing, understanding and creating are in God one single thing, without one 30

I take Descartes to be further explicating here his claim in “Meditation Three” that “my perception of the infinite, that is, God, is, in some way prior to my perception of the finite, that is, myself” (AT 7:45).

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preceding the other, even in reason [ne quidem ratione]” (AT 1:153). Later, in the Principles, he drew attention to the fundamental difference between the case of God, where “there is always a single identical and perfectly simple act by means of which He simultaneously understands, wills and accomplishes everything,” and our own case, where intellect and will involve “operations that are in a certain sense distinct from one another” (AT 8-1:14). However, this disanalogy between God’s mind and our own seems to undermine the claim in “Meditation Four” that God has an infinite form of our limited intellect. Given that intellect and will are identical in God, we can no more conceive of our intellect in terms of the essence of the divine intellect than we can conceive of our free will in terms of the essence of divine freedom. But then not only our will but also our intellect differs in kind from God’s. One quick way around all these problems would be to reject the created truths doctrine. Yet in writings that span the period from 1630 to 1649, Descartes consistently insisted that such a doctrine is required in order to retain the incomprehensibility required by God’s infinite perfection.31 Thus, it seems that he could not have easily laid aside the doctrine. But then there is an unresolved problem in his system since such a doctrine is in tension with his official position that we are created “in the image and likeness of God.”

2.2 desgabets’s critique : necessary truths and god’s essence 2.2.1 Desgabets’s Critique In the midst of the French controversies over Cartesian eucharistic theology, which we considered in Chapter 1, there was a brief epistemological interlude that started with the publication in May 1674 of the first volume (containing the first three of six books) of Malebranche’s Recherche de la v´erit´e.32 In response to this volume, a canon of the Sainte Chapelle de Dijon, Simon Foucher, published in January 1675 a short Critique de la Recherche de la v´erit´e.33 At one point in his text, Foucher considers Malebranche’s purported claim that there are “necessary truths immutable by their nature 31

32 33

Compare the emphasis in the first of the 1630 letters to Mersenne on the fact that we esteem God’s greatness all the more since we cannot grasp it (AT 1:145) and the claim in a 1649 letter to More, which contains his last word on the subject, that a finite mind cannot set limits to an infinite power (AT 5:272). As is clear from the chart in Marion 1991, 270f, the appeal to the incomprehensibility of God’s power is found in nearly every text in which Descartes mentioned the created truths doctrine. For further background to the reception of Malebranche’s text, see §3.1. On the history of the exchange between Foucher and Malebranche and the eventual involvement of Desgabets, see Watson 1966 and Gouhier 1976b.

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and because they have been determined by the will of God,” a claim which Foucher took to derive from Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths (Crit. 25–32).34 The objection offered to this claim is that it is certain that [God] wills things that are subject to change when he determines creatures to exist or to cease to be, in the vicissitude of time; thus, if God had fixed these truths only for some centuries, his will would be no less immutable, just as it is no less when he produces everyday the admirable changes which constitute the beauty of the universe. (30)

The immutability of the divine will, therefore, cannot guarantee that necessary truths will never change. For Foucher, such a consequence reveals the superiority of skeptical modes of thought over the views of “the Peripatetics, the Cartesians, and all Dogmatists” (31). The objection that Foucher offered against Malebranche – namely, that the immutability of the necessary truths does not follow from the immutability of the divine will – is virtually the same as the objection that Malebranche offered in 1678 against Descartes (see §2.1.2). Even earlier, in a 1675 response to Foucher, Malebranche insisted that truths concerning the communication of motion, which are determined to be immutable by God’s will, are entirely distinct from truths such as those in mathematics, which are immutable by their own nature and apart from His will (OCM 2:488f ).35 The response to Foucher was published after Desgabets had written his own Critique of Foucher’s Critique. There he simply assumed, with Foucher, that Malebranche accepted the doctrine that necessary truths derive from God’s immutable will. Desgabets thus took himself to be defending Descartes and Malebranche alike in supporting this doctrine. The main reason for his own acceptance of the doctrine is indicated by the remark in his Critique that the view that necessary truths depend on the divine will is “absolutely necessary to conserve the rights of God and to evade false and blasphemous doctrines” (CdC 72). He held that those who follow Descartes in affirming the dependence of necessary truths on the divine will simply “have embraced with their whole heart” the “great principle of saint Augustine: The nature of a thing is one and the same as the will of God [Uniuscuiusque rei natura voluntas Dei ]” (74).36 34 35 36

For this claim in Malebranche, see OCM 1:63a. Malebranche revised the relevant passage in later editions of the Recherche (as indicated in OCM 1:63a). Desgabets cited this quotation from Augustine frequently. The quotation itself is probably a paraphrase of the claim in De Civitate Dei that “certainly the [divine] will is the nature of the whole thing whose author it is” (voluntas tanti conditioris conditae rei cujusque natura sit) (Augustine 1928, 1:504). Reacting to the appeal to this same quotation in a (now lost) work of Pierre Cally, the 1672 Philosophiae catena aurea, La Ville (Le Valois) objected in his Sentimens that Augustine is concerned in this passage “only with the ordinary state of things that have

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This use of Augustine reveals an important difference from Malebranche since Malebranche himself later invoked the Augustinian view of divine illumination to counter Descartes’s created truths doctrine. He appealed in particular to the position, which he claimed to find in Augustine, that we are enlightened directly by a universal Reason in God that is itself informed by His uncreated ideas of creatures.37 Therefore, Malebranche took Augustine to provide the means to refute the position, which Desgabets attributed to this Church Father, that the natures of things derive from God’s will. Clearly, Desgabets was misguided in seeing Malebranche as an ally in his attempt to defend Descartes’s created truths doctrine. However, the Critique does address the central objection to this doctrine in Foucher and Malebranche when it claims that “the immutability of essences and the necessity of truths does not come precisely from the immutability of the divine decree, but rather the immutability of all these things comes from the indivisibility of their existence, which has no extension” (CdC 84). Here Desgabets rejected the assumption in Foucher and Malebranche that the immutability of created truths could derive only from the immutability of the divine will that creates them. He offered the alternative view that the immutability of these truths is grounded rather in created objects that have an “indivisible existence.” There are two important results here. The first is the restriction of Descartes’s doctrine to necessary truths concerning created objects distinct from God. The second is the consequence that the created objects on which immutable necessary truths depend are “indefectible” by virtue of having an indivisible existence that not even God can eliminate. I discuss each of these results in turn.

2.2.2 Necessary Truths and God’s Essence In his Critique, Desgabets asserted, in defense of Descartes (and Malebranche!), that there is neither nature, nor essence, nor reality, nor conceivability, nor truth among creatures that God has not made or established with a sovereign indifference: thus, before we conceive that He has freely determined to make and establish things and truths, there is nothing conceivable other than His unique essence, and we must not listen to those who say that before His free decrees and before His indifferent action He already necessarily saw determined natures and essences that had by themselves a real possibility that they did not owe to Him and that distinguish them from chimeras and beings of reason. (CdC 74)

37

been changed” and not the essence of those things (La Ville 1680, 281). See the similar objection to the Cartesian use of this text in Rodis-Lewis 1982. See OCM 3:129f. In this text, Malebranche cited passages from the Confessiones and De libero arbitrio.

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The identity of the critics to whom we should not listen is indicated in Desgabets’s first philosophical work, the “Trait´e de l’ind´efectibilit´e,” which begins with the admonition that one avoid “the faults of the philosophy of the Schools” by following the view of “a celebrated author of our times” who has “established first truths in physics and metaphysics and the laws observed in corporeal nature on the consideration of divine perfections” (RD 2:19). Taken in isolation, certain remarks in the passage from the Critique can be understood to attribute to the scholastics the view that natures or essences have a reality that depends in no way on God. Indeed, Desgabets himself indicated in his “Suppl´ement” that his opponents claim that necessary truths concerning creatures hold “independently of God” (RD 6:248).38 However, the standard scholastic position, as set out in Thomas, is that such truths cannot so hold since they depend on uncreated ideas in the divine intellect. This position is reflected in the claim of Malebranche, drawn explicitly from Thomas, that “God’s ideas of creatures are . . . only His essence, insofar as it is participable or imperfectly imitable, for God contains every creaturely perfection, though in a divine and infinite way” (OCM 3:149).39 Even so, this line in Thomas and Malebranche conflicts with the main conclusion in the passage from the Critique insofar as it entails that the natures and essences of creatures have a possibility independent of free and indifferent divine volition. Indeed, Desgabets argued against this alternative directly in the “Trait´e” when he considered the position that God’s act of creation is guided by essences that reflect the manner in which the divine essence “can be participable in an infinity of ways by creatures.” Echoing Descartes’s remarks to Mersenne, Desgabets responded that “there is nothing subsisting or existing, neither true nor intelligible, that has a necessary relation to [the] divine essence” and that God “has made all that with a supreme indifference without it having been necessary that there were any essences or truths that we know.” These essences and truths do not preexist in divine perfections, but derive ex nihilo from God’s “eternal good pleasure and sovereign indifference.” Rather than bearing an intelligible connection to the divine essence, then, creaturely essences are swallowed up in what Desgabets called rather dramatically the “abyss” (abˆıme) of divine perfections (RD 2:33). Though Desgabets claimed to be following a line that Descartes had already laid down, his remarks mark an advance over Descartes insofar as they indicate clearly and consistently that the divine essence and its perfections are outside the scope of the created truths doctrine. We can illustrate the difference here by considering the different ways in which these two appeal to Augustine. Descartes suggested that an Augustinian stress on the unity of 38 39

There is a similar suggestion in Descartes. Compare AT 1:149 and 7:380. See Curley 1984, 583–88. Malebranche was drawing here on Thomas’s account of divine ideas in S.Th. Ia, 14–15.

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God’s intellect and will indicates that even truths concerning God fall under the doctrine.40 In contrast, the Critique makes clear that the Augustinian dictum that the nature of a thing is the same as the divine will is to be restricted to essences or natures of beings distinct from God’s own “unique essence.” As we have seen, Desgabets’s view that the divine perfections are distinct from the essences of creatures runs counter to the Thomistic position in Malebranche that God knows creatures through knowing His own perfections. Indeed, such a view indicates that God’s knowledge of His own essence differs in kind from His knowledge of creaturely essences. Desgabets insisted on this sort of difference when he claimed in his “Suppl´ement” that prior to the act of creation there is “neither object, nor metaphysics, nor any other knowledge (science) that is that of God,” but that at that instant God does have “for an object His own perfections” deriving from “the generation of the divine Word.” Thus, “the power of God, as identified with his other absolute perfections” differs from that same power “as it is related to [creatures].” Considered absolutely, divine omnipotence is “in Himself before creatures,” while considered as relative to particular creatures, it must be “concealed in the free decree that produces them” since creatures “have being and conceivability only depending on His will” (RD 6:245f ). Nonetheless, Desgabets insisted that after God has decreed, the opposite of what He has decreed is no longer possible. Indeed, he appealed to this point in objecting to Descartes’s own suggestion that God could have willed the opposite of the eternal truths.41 In the Critique, he took Descartes to task for saying that God could have changed the essences of things, prevent that two and two be four, and other such things that one can regard only as chimerical, and in which nevertheless he defends himself only in saying that we must not be astonished that God can do things that are incomprehensible to us although it should be very clear to us that He can do them. (CdC 79)

In the “Trait´e,” Desgabets indicated that what was bothering him was the implication that there are certain impossible essences that God could have created but did not. He held that to posit such essences is to suppose that there is some reality independent of God’s essence and of the essences He has created. To hold that all created reality derives from God’s indifferent will, one must say not that “God could have acted otherwise and made the contrary of what He has made,” but only that He “could in a divided sense not have established them” (RD 3:79). The suggestion here is that we can admit that God could have refrained from creating any essences instead of creating the ones that He did create (that is, could have so refrained in a 40 41

But see note 17. My remarks here are indebted to the discussion in Cook forthcoming, though see the disagreement mentioned in note 42.

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“divided sense”), but that we cannot say that He could (again, presumably, in a divided sense) have created essences that are now impossible. One can understand Desgabets’s worries about positing impossible essences that are independent of the divine will. Still, he did claim in the “Trait´e” that God has “the power to act otherwise than He acts in the same instant He gives being to creatures” (RD 2:19). The indication here seems to be that God could have not only refrained from creating anything but also produced a different sort of reality.42 Perhaps his main point against Descartes, however, is simply that we must not speak as if there are impossible essences that God could have actualized but did not. Even though God could have produced different essences ex nihilo, He did not do so, and thus these essences are now nothing. Given His act of creation, not even God can conceive a reality conditioned by different essences.43 We must now face the question of what God actually does in creating eternal truths or essences. In the “Trait´e,” Desgabets repeated the suggestion in Descartes that these truths and essences are akin to “laws that have been established with a supreme power and indifference” (RD 3:79) and that are “moral” rather than “physical” beings (RD 2:34). We will discover that this comparison is not especially helpful for Desgabets since he took the eternal truths to differ in crucial ways from natural laws such as those that govern motion (see §2.6). In this same text, however, he also attributed to Descartes the conceptualist position that God’s creation of these truths “consists only in that He has determined intelligent creatures to conceive in a certain immutable manner the things that they clearly conceive” (RD 3:79). Certain remarks in the “Suppl´ement” seem to indicate that Desgabets himself favored such a position, as when he spoke on his own behalf of the eternal truths as “being effectively only thoughts” (RD 6:232) or, more specifically, as “being only in [the understanding] of intelligent creatures, and especially of humans” (RD 7:270). In his published Critique, moreover, he anticipated the objection that the immutability of the truths precludes their identification with particular mutable thoughts by proposing that the truths be identified rather with “the manner in which the understanding is determined to know things, whether we think of them actually or simply have the power to think of them” (CdC, 75). We still seem to have the worry, raised by Foucher and Malebranche, that God could change the underlying power to conceive of the world in a certain

42

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Compare Desgabets’s claim that God has “the power to make and to establish things as He will, without any restriction or limitation” (RD 4:145). This evidence creates difficulties for Cook’s conclusion that Desgabets allowed only for the counterfactual case in which God refrains from creating anything (see Cook forthcoming). Compare Descartes’s view that God’s creation of immutable essences can be understood in terms of the fable where Jupiter establishes the Fates but subsequently binds himself to them (AT 7:380).

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manner. In the passage from the Critique, however, Desgabets addressed such a worry when he noted that “it is necessary to add the correspondence that the object has with the thought and the thought with the object” (CdC, 75). He further explained in the “Suppl´ement” that eternal truths in our mind “are true only by the relation of conformity that it has to the thing that [is as] it is really and immutably” (RD 6:232). These remarks broach the doctrine in Desgabets – present in his “Trait´e de l’ind´ef´ectibilit´e des creatures” – of the “indefectibility” or the indestructibility of the creatures that serve as the objects of our thoughts concerning created eternal thruths.44

2.3 the indefectibility of substance Though the title of Desgabets’s “Trait´e” refers generally to the indefectibility of creatures, the text itself indicates that the doctrine does not apply to all creatures. In particular, it distinguishes between “successive and modal beings,” which have a temporal existence, and “substantial and permanent beings,” which have an existence that “has no relation to time” (RD 2:34f ). While modal beings have a temporal existence that they can lose, substantial beings have an atemporal existence that they can never lack.45 The conclusion here regarding substance is a strong one. In the “Trait´e,” Desgabets insisted that such beings “can in no way be annihilated, not even as one ordinarily says by the omnipotence of God” (RD 2:21). Once God has created substantial beings, not even He can destroy them. This is a startling conclusion, to be sure, but it seems to be unavailable to someone who, like Desgabets, emphasizes the complete dependence of creatures on God. Such an objection was offered to Desgabets himself at a series of conferences at Commercy on his version of Cartesianism.46 In the course of one session, the host of the conferences, the Cardinal de Retz, protested on behalf of other assembled Cartesians that the position that Desgabets claimed to borrow from Descartes, namely, that “the will of the Creator is the nature of each thing, that is to say that each thing is what God has willed it to be,”47 undercuts his own conclusion that not even God’s absolute power can annihilate a substance that is by its nature indefectible. The objection is that one who 44

45 46 47

In the seventeenth century, the French term ind´efectibilit´e is found primarily in discussions of the indestructiblity of the Church and the faultlessness of its official doctrines; see Dublanchy 1939. In using this term, Desgabets no doubt wanted to indicate not only the indestructibility of substance but also its resistance to any sort of change or corruption. This position is better reflected in the alternative title of some copies of the “Trait´e,” which refers to “l’ind´efectibilit´e des substances” (see RD 1:xxiii). On these conferences, see the remarks in §I.1. Compare Desgabets’s favored quotation from Augustine cited at note 36. Retz took the claim itself from a summary of Desgabets’s views in the “Trait´e”; see the ninth proposition on R 329.

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accepts Descartes’s voluntarism would do better to claim that God alone is indefectible, or at least to refrain from asserting that “men have the power to examine what God can and cannot [do]” (R 326–28).48 While the surviving record of the Commercy conferences contains no direct response from Desgabets to Retz’s objection, a rejoinder is indicated in the summary of propositions from his “Trait´e” that was an object of discussion at the conferences. One of the propositions drawn from that work is that “it implies a contradiction to say that God can annihilate, since this would be to make and not to make at the same instant” (R 329). The corresponding view in the “Trait´e” is that God cannot annihilate an atemporal substantial being since to do this would be to create such a being and at the same instant to refrain from creating it.49 In the case of “modal and successive beings,” change is possible since these beings have a temporal duration. It is consistent with the eternity of the divine will that a modal being exist at t1 and cease to exist, say, at t 7 , since God could will at the same instant that the being exist at t1 but cease to exist at t 7 (this was the point of the objection to Descartes’s created truths doctrine in Foucher and Malebranche). Since substantial beings are not temporal, however, they must either exist or fail to exist all at once.50 Mustn’t this be for Desgabets an illegitimate limitation on God’s power? I think not. In his view, the only truths subject to God’s will are those concerning creaturely essences that go beyond truths accessible by means of His prevolitional consideration of His own essence. The truth that God cannot act and refrain from acting at one and the same eternal instant seems clearly to pertain to His essence rather than to the essences of creatures. While Descartes himself may have suggested at times that even the law of contradiction is subject to God’s power,51 Desgabets’s position is perfectly compatible with the claim that God can know prior to any act of creation that this law holds for His own will. 48

49 50 51

The tension presumed here between Desgabets’s voluntarism and his doctrine of the indefectibility of substances is similar to a tension that one critic of Cartesianism later found in Descartes. In his 1689 Censura philosophiæ cartesianæ, Pierre-Daniel Huet claimed that it is an implication of Descartes’s physics that God “cannot destroy [matter] and reduce it to nothing,” and he concluded that “it is remarkable that the power of God is restricted by him who asserted that God can bring it about that twice two is not four, and that one and the same thing simultaneously both is and is not” (Cpc 144f ). For more on Huet’s critique of Descartes, see §§5.1 and 5.2. See RD 3:63f. See RD 2:52–58. See for instance the claim in Descartes’s 1644 letter to Mesland, quoted in §2.1.1, that God “cannot have been determined to make it true that contradictories cannot be true together, and therefore . . . He could have done the opposite” (AT 4:118). This claim is applied in particular to the case of truths concerning triangles, so it might be thought that Descartes meant to limit the point to eternal truths that constitute creaturely essences. However, after making this claim, Descartes also suggested that even the proposition “that God might have brought it about that His creatures were independent of Him” is subject to God’s power.

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Desgabets’s conclusions regarding the indefectiblity of substance may not seem to be directly relevant to the issue of necessary truths broached in Foucher’s Critique. However, the debate here concerned the status not only of necessary truths but also of immutable essences. In the “Trait´e,” Desgabets indicated that such essences are themselves indefectible substances when he stipulated that essence will be nothing other than substance considered in itself according to its intrinsic and essential attributes without relation to time or to other creatures that one does not consider when one regards substance in this state of abstraction. And existence will be nothing other than this same substance insofar as it is engaged in the universe and subjected to time that gives it not an absolute being, but being in a certain manner, or rather in one time rather than another, which adds something real although extrinsic to substance taken separately. Thus matter considered in itself will be the essence of corporeal things, which will receive its existence when it will be clothed in its modes, which give it a particular and determinate manner of being. (RD 2:27)

Given this stipulation, God creates the immutable essence of matter and the necessary truths associated with it by creating a material substance that “considered in itself ” has no relation to time and so is not subject to temporal change. This identification of material substance with its essence is somewhat reminiscent of Descartes’s own claim, in a passage cited in §2.1.2, that the essence and the existence of a material triangle cannot be distinguished “outside of thought.” Indeed, Desgabets himself offered his definition of essence in response to the doctrine in “the school of St. Thomas” affirming “the real distinction between essence and existence” (2:27). However, Desgabets is distinguished from Descartes in identifying essence and existence only in the case of substantial being. This restriction allowed Desgabets to say, what Descartes never could, that the essence of matter has an atemporal existence that sets it apart from particular bodies existing in time. The identification of essence with indefectible substantial being is not restricted to the case of matter. But though he insisted generally on the indefectibility of substance, Desgabets noted in his “Suppl´ement” that he preferred to discuss the case of material substance “since it is commonly believed that corporeal things are better known than spiritual [things]” (RD 6:236). This preference is also reflected in the earlier “Trait´e,” most of which is devoted to a consideration of the material world.52 I will have something to say in Chapter 4 about Desgabets’s complex and somewhat problematic account of indefectible spiritual substances. However, Desgabets himself emphasized in a 1674 letter to Malebranche that “the indefectibility of creatures is something infinitely more than the simple immortality of the soul,” 52

Thus, Chapters 2 and 4–7 focus for the most part on the indefectibility of matter. It is not until Chapter 12 that Desgabets considered issues that pertain only to spiritual substances.

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as illustrated principally by “the advances I have made in the subject of the sciences” (OCM 18:85). I argue that even though Desgabets was concerned about defending Descartes’s advances in the sciences against the views of the atomists, he offered a metaphysical account of the material world that is in certain respects closer to Spinoza than to Descartes.

2.4 metaphysical foundations for physics In notes to his edition of the record of the Commercy conferences, Victor Cousin observed that “if Dom Robert, in metaphysics, is a disciple of Descartes revolting against the principles of his master, he is not so in physics. There he is a faithful Cartesian.”53 The division between physics and metaphysics is perhaps not quite as sharp as Cousin observation suggests. After all, Desgabets defended not only the rejection in Descartes’s physics of atoms and the void, but also the metaphysical principle underlying this rejection, namely, that the nature of material substance consists in extension. Even so, it can be said on Cousin’s behalf that Desgabets’s acceptance of this principle involves a revolutionary metaphysical account of material substance and its modes.

2.4.1 Cartesian Physics Desgabets’s loyalty to Descartes’s physics is evident in a 1666 letter to Clerselier, which I cited in the Introduction, where he objected that Cordemoy’s defense of atomism “notably strengthens the camp of Gassendi, which already seems only too likely to support itself and overcome that of Descartes.”54 Over a decade earlier, Desgabets had taken sides in the battle between Descartes and Gassendi, claiming in his “Trait´e” that one must not follow Gassendi in accepting the view of Democritus and Epicurus that “one can explain [rendre raison] all the phenomena in nature by the contact and the various motions of atoms in imaginary space extended to infinity.” Desgabets protested that even Gassendists must admit that atoms are not “absolutely indivisible pure mathematical points” and thus that they have some quantity “that is divisible at least externally” by God or angels. But then it is only a short step to Descartes’s conclusion that “one can break or divide intrinsically bodies that are extrinsically divisible.”55 For Desgabets, the Gassendist assumption of “imaginary spaces” is sufficiently refuted by Descartes’s argument that since any distance between bodies must inhere in a substance, there can be no space devoid of body. Thus, imaginary space can be only “a pure nothing” with absolutely no basis in reality (RD 2:30). Desgabets concluded that one can avoid the pitfalls of the 53 54 55

Quoted in R 345. In Prost 1907, 158. On Descartes’s argument against atomism, see the texts cited in Introduction, note 29.

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Gassendist hypothesis of atoms in imaginary space by holding with Descartes that “extension in length, breadth and width is the first attribute of matter, or of corporeal substance,” and so that “in the idea of . . . space this same extension is contained and nothing else” (2:28). In the “Trait´e,” Desgabets emphasized Descartes’s position that “it implies a contradiction that God create a new part of matter, and that in the whole universe one could find room to place a mite that is composed of new matter” (RD 2:29). He was drawing here on Descartes’s argument in the Principles that there cannot be a “plurality of worlds” since “that matter whose nature consists in being extended substance already occupies absolutely all the imaginable space in which these other worlds would have to be located; nor can we find within us an idea of any other matter” (AT 8-1:52).56 Thus, one could find no room for a mite composed of different matter for two reasons, the first of which is that the matter of our world already fills all conceivable spaces, and the second of which is that we have no idea of any other matter. After endorsing Descartes’s claim that God cannot add to the matter He has created, however, Desgabets offered the further point that He also cannot take away from it. He urged in the “Trait´e” that it is not possible for the least atom to be annihilated and reduced to nothing since there being a void in nature and each body rightly filling its place, there would be no means to reestablish the continuity of all the parts of the world. But I do not think that what one says of the least parcel of matter need not be said also of the whole world, which by this means finds itself perfectly indefectible. (RD 2:29)

It might be thought that the annihilation of “the least atom” is impossible simply because it is impossible to have a gap in matter. This seems to be suggested, at least, by the stipulation that “each body rightly fills its place” after the annihilation. Yet it is difficult to see how this line of argument would also rule out the annihilation of the whole of the material world. After all, in this case, there would be no gap that disrupts the continuity of parts. However, we can link this case to the case of the annihilation of the least material parcel by means of the argument in Descartes against the plurality of worlds. The nature of matter as extended substance dictates that there is only one matter that “occupies absolutely all imaginable spaces.” In the case of the annihilation of the least material parcel, the space formerly occupied by that parcel would be an imaginable space that is not occupied by matter. There is no way to “reestablish the continuity” since there is no other possible matter that could occupy this space. But the annihilation of the whole material world also renders it false that matter occupies all imaginable spaces, and in particular, the spaces it occupied prior to its annihilation. The annihilation 56

Compare Desgabets’s assertion in the “Trait´e” that “it is not possible that God now create a world that differs with regard to its matter, since He has created an extension [that is] without limit and that contains all matter” (RD 2:29).

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of matter as a whole is, therefore, as inconsistent with the Cartesian essence of matter as the annihilation of the least parcel. In Chapter 1, I noted that Desgabets’s rejection of the Scotistic claim that the Eucharist involves the annihilation of matter is grounded in his thesis of the indefectibility of substance. But this thesis has implications that go beyond what is needed for the rejection of this claim. Strictly speaking, the Scotistic account requires only the possibility of the annihilation of portions of matter, and not the possibility that matter as a whole is annihilated. However, Desgabets’s reasons for holding that the least material parcel cannot be annihilated also led him to conclude that matter as a whole cannot be annihilated. This conclusion seems to have an analogue in Descartes’s claim, in the “Synopsis” of the Meditations, that “body taken in general” is incorruptible “by its own nature” (AT 7:14). However, a closer examination reveals that this claim rests on metaphysical foundations that Desgabets was concerned about overturning. It is at this point that we see the Desgabets who, as Cousin put it, is “the disciple of Descartes revolting against the principles of the master.”

2.4.2 Revolutionary Metaphysics Let us begin with a more complete statement of Descartes’s argument in the “Synopsis.” He claimed there that absolutely all substances, or things which must be created by God to exist, are by their own nature incorruptible, and cannot ever cease to be unless they are reduced to nothing by God’s denying his concurrence to them; and also to be recognized [is] that body taken in general [in genere sumptum] is a substance, and in the same way also never perishes. (AT 7:14)

Some commentators have understood the reference here to “body taken in general” to indicate that Descartes was committed to the conclusion that strictly speaking there is only one material substance.57 However, Descartes spoke elsewhere of “extension considered in general” (consideratur extension in genere) as the particular extension that composes various bodies but “has the same size and shape, and keeps the same position relative to external bodies that determine that space” (AT 8-1:46f). The suggestion here is that body in genere is body considered not in globo, but rather generically, or in abstraction from the particular bodies it composes.58 Moreover, the suggestion that there is only one material substance conflicts with the view in Descartes – in a passage cited in §1.2.1, in connection with his discussion of the Eucharist – that modes cannot be parts of a substance (AT 7:433). Given the exhaustive nature of his substance/mode 57 58

See, for instance, [Rodis-]Lewis 1950b, ch. 2, and Gueroult 1968, app. 10. See Laporte 1950, 187f.

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ontology, the category of substance would be the only one under which he could place the parts of matter. Indeed, in a 1642 letter, Descartes protested against the appeal to indivisible atoms by noting that since he can consider “the two halves of a part of matter, however small it may be, as two complete substances,” it follows that “they are really divisible” (AT 3:477).59 Given his own defense of Descartes against Gassendist atomism, it may seem that Desgabets is committed to the conclusion here that material substance is a concatenation of distinct substantial parts. It also appears to be significant that Descartes’s account of matter parallels his account of space. I noted earlier that Desgabets’s own view of the eucharistic species starts from the Aristotelian position in Descartes that extra-mental spaces are simply the dimensions of particular parts of matter, and thus are mere modes of those parts (see §1.5.3). On this position, though, there seems to be no sense to the claim that extra-mental space is something beyond the sum of all particular concrete spaces. So also, it appears to make no sense to say that material substance is something beyond the collection of all parts of matter, especially given Desgabets’s argument against Gassendi that extra-mental space is not distinct from the parts of matter that occupy it. However, the reasons for Desgabets’s departure from traditional Cartesian ontology are indicated by his remark in the “Trait´e” that particular bodies give existence to “matter considered in itself” or “the essence of corporeal things” by giving it “a particular and determinate manner of being” (RD 2:27). In addition to these bodies, there must be the single essence that they all “determine.” The fact that the particular bodies are determinations of this essence reveals, in turn, that they are modal rather than substantial beings. Thus, Desgabets spoke in the “Suppl´ement” of “all modes of matter and all their possible combinations, that is to say, all particular bodies taken formally” (RD 6:237). The crucial question here is why one must hold that there is in the material world a single essence to which the parts of matter give a particular and determinate existence. Those who follow Malebranche in taking the essence of matter to reside in an archetypal divine idea need not appeal to anything beyond the parts themselves. However, this position was not open to Desgabets, who was committed to the view in Descartes that creaturely essences are created beings. He thus required, as did Descartes, an essence of matter that is detached from God’s own essence. Desgabets differed from Descartes, however, in making room for such an essence by distinguishing 59

In his 1687 correspondence with Leibniz, Arnauld followed this line in Descartes when he claimed that a particular body such as a piece of marble “is not a single substance but many substances mechanically joined together,” and that it is “of the essence of matter not to have true unity” (in Leibniz 1965, 2:86f).

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the single substantial being that serves as the essence of matter from the various bodies that are only modal beings. Descartes’s “body in general,” which is composed of distinct substantial parts, thus differs in one crucial respect from Desgabets’s substantial material being, which is identical to a single essence of matter. Desgabets indicated a second important difference when he criticized Descartes for giving both an “extended duration” and a “defectibility” to substances (RD 2:29). The fact that Descartes gave both to material substance is indicated by the claim in the “Synopsis” passage that this substance is incorruptible unless destroyed by God’s denying His concurrence. It is just because material substance has an extended duration that it depends on God’s “concurrence” and would cease to exist without it. This position is clear enough from Descartes’s argument in “Meditation Three” that since His existence “can be divided into innumerable parts, each of which in no way depends on the others,” He requires at each moment “some cause that as it were creates me afresh at this moment, that is, conserves me” (AT 7:48f ). Just as Descartes could not continue to exist without the conserving power of “some cause” and, ultimately, God, so material substance could not continue to exist if God withdrew His conservation or concurrence. Desgabets responded to this line of argument in “Descartes a` l’alambic,” a short work discussed at the Commercy conferences.60 In the first part of this text, he protested that Descartes’s remarks in “Meditation Three” confounded “the successive duration of our life with our substantial being.” His conclusion was that while Descartes was correct in holding that “the parts of our life need to be conserved, it is false that there are any parts in our substantial being, and that [this being] needs to be conserved” (L 322). The changing aspects of our life require conservation, but our atemporal substantial being must be created all at once. In the Critique, Desgabets applied the distinction here to the case of material things when he noted that matter can lose “the being that one calls secundum quid, such as the being of wood, fire, air, etc., which remain always in the real power of matter,” but that it is impossible for it to lose its “being purely and simply” (CdC 77f ). Particular bodies are modal beings that can and do come into and go out of existence. However, the single matter that these bodies determine is a substantial being with a “pure and simple” existence that, once created, cannot be destroyed. In this respect, Desgabets’s material substantial being does not differ from the essence of matter; indeed, I have noted his explicit identification in his “Trait´e” of essence with “substance considered according to its intrinsic and essential attributes” (RD 2:27). 60

The fact that “Alambic” uses the third-person mode of presentation (“Descartes says . . . ” then “Desgabets says . . . ”) raises the possibility that the text itself is a summary that was composed by someone other than Desgabets.

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Desgabets’s material substantial being, therefore, has a twofold indivisibility that distinguishes it from Descartes’s “body in general.” Unlike body in general, this substantial being cannot be divided into substantial parts. Rather, the various parts of matter are merely “modal beings” that “determine” it. And unlike body in general, the material substantial being has an indivisible existence that cannot be divided into temporal parts. However, the reasons for Desgabets’s departures from Descartes’s metaphysics can be found in Descartes himself. Most relevant here is Descartes’s indication to Mersenne in 1630 that his created truths doctrine provides metaphysical foundations for physics. Desgabets’s acceptance of this doctrine led him to search for the created ground for the truth in Cartesian physics that the same matter fills all imaginable space. What is required here is something corresponding to a single material essence that rules out any sort of annihilation. This essence is not provided by Descartes’s own material substance, which not only is divisible into parts but also has a temporal existence that allows for its annihilation. As a replacement, Desgabets offered the created but atemporal material substantial being that all temporal material parts determine. In offering this replacement, Desgabets indicated more clearly than Descartes ever did how the created truths doctrine is supposed to provide metaphysical foundations for Cartesian physics. Desgabets’s revolutionary metaphysics is related not just to Descartes’s created truths doctrine but also to the views of Spinoza, who was a prominent critic of this doctrine. Indeed, I think that we can best appreciate the significance of this new metaphysics by considering it in light of the argument in Spinoza that it follows from the Cartesian rejection of the void that material substance is indivisible and eternal. Despite these connections to Spinoza, however, Desgabets’s metaphysics can be at most quasi-Spinozistic given his rejection of a monism that identifies God with material nature.61

2.5 quasi-spinozistic indivisibility In his “Suppl´ement,” Desgabets claimed that material parts, as modes of matter, have “a being of existence [ˆetre d’existence] distinguished from that of essence [de l’essence], since [the former] gives to matter considered as particular bodies an order [rang] among other things of the world and establishes in a determined time what one can express by what is called esse in rerum Natura.” The existence of particular bodies in rerum Natura requires a dynamic relation among various parts of matter. Motion initially creates the bodies, and further motions bring about any changes in their 61

Desgabets also rejected Spinozistic claims concerning the unity of thinking substance and the identity of thinking and material substance. On Desgabets’s assertion of substance dualism, see §4.1. I take Desgabets’s views to be in line with Regis’s rejection of the unity of thinking substance, which rejection is considered in §4.7.

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properties, including, ultimately, the separation of parts that brings about their destruction. Thus, by virtue of motion, a body “has its duration and its parts extended and divisible to infinity, that begins, continues, and ends, that can be produced and destroyed, to give and take away as one wishes” (RD 6:249). This mutable “being of existence” is to be contrasted with the unchanging “being of essence” of a body specified by “that which is contained in its definition” (6:248). This bodily essence is grounded not in the mutable existence of particular material parts but rather in the immutable fact that “matter is actually divisible and formable in all possible modes” (6:240). In this way, bodily essences derive from an essence of matter that is identical in turn to a material substance that “has neither succession, nor time, nor duration, neither earlier nor later, neither beginning nor end of existence” (6:249). This distinction between the temporal being of existence and the atemporal being of essence is anticipated in Spinoza’s “Metaphysical Thoughts,” the appendix to his 1663 Descartes’s “Principles of Philosophy”. There Spinoza distinguished between “being of essence” (esse Essentia), which is “nothing but the manner in which created things are comprehended [comprehenduntur] in the attributes of God,” and “being of existence” (esse Existentia), which is “the essence itself of things outside of God, considered in itself.” The essence of creatures as “contained” (continentur) in God is said to share in God’s eternal existence, in which “there can be nothing which is before and after” (G 1:238f ). By contrast, the existence of created beings has a duration that “is conceived as being greater or lesser, and as composed of parts” (1:244). There is no evidence that Desgabets read the “Metaphysical Thoughts,” or indeed knew anything about its author.62 Even so, the similarities between his position and the one Spinoza presents are striking. The core distinction in both is between atemporal being of essence and temporal being of existence. Of course, Desgabets himself could not have identified the being of essence with the manner in which creatures are comprehended in God. But we can abstract for the moment from the relation between essences and God and focus on the distinction between atemporal essence and temporal existence in the case of substance and its modes. Even so, the remarks in Spinoza’s text do not reflect Desgabets’s own position that this distinction applies only to particular modes of matter and not to created material substance itself. Yet in a letter roughly contemporaneous with this text, Spinoza did restrict the essence/existence distinction to modes. Spinoza sent this so-called “Letter on the Infinite” to Lodewijk Meyer, the editor of 62

The Opera posthuma containing Spinoza’s Ethics was published in 1677, just before Desgabets’s death the following year. There is no reason to think that Desgabets ever read either Spinoza’s 1663 summary of Descartes’s Principles or the 1670 Tractatus (or, if he read the latter anonymous text, that he knew that Spinoza was its author).

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Descartes’s “Principles” and the author of its preface, in 1663.63 There Spinoza was concerned about explaining the difference between an infinity that is absolutely indivisible and an infinity that is divisible into parts. The former he identified with substance, which has an existence that is indivisibly eternal since it is identical to its essence. The latter he took to pertain to modes of substance, which have a duration that one can “conceive as greater or less” and “divide into parts” since they have an existence that is distinct from their essence (G 4:54f ). Here Spinoza offered the view – missing from the “Metaphysical Thoughts” – that divisible duration is a feature only of the modes of substance and not of eternal substance itself. Desgabets accepted the position here that divisibility is restricted to the modes of material substance. Moreover, his discussion suggests something similar to the argument in the “Letter on the Infinite” against the position that “Extended Substance is put together of parts, or bodies, really distinct from one another.” As we have seen, Desgabets deviated from this position in Descartes insofar as he held that parts of matter are only modal beings that give a determinate temporal existence to a single, atemporal material substance. In his letter, Spinoza also urged that even though the modes of extended substance have a temporal duration divisible into parts, the substance itself, considered “as it is in itself,” has an indivisible eternity (G 4:56). For both Desgabets and Spinoza, then, a proper view of material substance reveals that it has an indivisible and thus atemporal existence. There is a further connection to Desgabets in the famous scholium to the fifteenth proposition from the first part of the Ethics, in which Spinoza responded to the claim that corporeal substance is divisible by nature. He countered that if this substance could be divided into really distinct parts, then it must be the case that one part can be annihilated, “the rest remaining connected with one another as before.” Spinoza concluded, however, that “since there is no void in nature (on which elsewhere), but all its parts must so concur that there is no void, it follows that they cannot be really distinguished, that is, that corporeal substance, insofar as it is substance, cannot be divided” (G 2:59). The case that Spinoza was imagining here is strikingly similar to Desgabets’s own case of the annihilation of “the least atom” with “each body rightly filling its place.” Spinoza and Desgabets both dismissed the possibility that there could be an annihilation that breaks the continuity in the parts of the material world. Admittedly, the arguments in Desgabets and Spinoza are not precisely the same. Desgabets was concerned, as Spinoza was not, with providing grounds for rejecting the possibility of the annihilation of the material world as a whole. By the same token, Spinoza was concerned, as Desgabets was not, with showing that material substance cannot be composed of really 63

Compare the foundational study of the “Letter on the Infinite” in Gueroult 1968, app. 9. There is an English translation of this appendix in Gueroult 1973.

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distinct parts.64 Nonetheless, Spinoza did hold that extended substance has a necessary existence that cannot be destroyed. And Desgabets did accept that particular bodies are just modes that give a “a particular and determinate existence” to matter “considered in itself,” that is, as the essence identical to material substance. Indeed, this characterization is reminiscent of Spinoza’s own stipulation in the Ethics that a particular body is “a mode that in a certain and determinate way expresses [exprimit] God’s essence insofar as He is considered as an extended thing” (G 2:84). The difference, of course, is that Desgabets would have insisted on detaching extended substance from God’s essence. My suggestion here is that particular bodies are for Spinoza, as for Desgabets, determinate expressions of an indivisible and atemporal essence. But this suggestion competes with the alternative view in Jonathan Bennett that Spinoza offered a “field metaphysic” on which bodies are “adjectival on” space in the sense that claims about bodies are reducible to claims about the different ways in which regions of space are qualified. In this view, bodies are not expressions of an eternal essence but alterations of a single space.65 Bennett argues that his field metaphysic interpretation is supported directly by the section of the scholium from the first part of the Ethics that I cite above. In particular, he claims that Spinoza rejected the possibility of the creation of a void through the annihilation of body on the grounds that such an event would require the annihilation of space. Thus, the annihilation of a body is to be redescribed as “an alteration – a qualitative change in something which stayed in existence throughout.” Bennett points out that the field metaphysic requires just such a redescription since it entails that all changes in bodies are reducible to qualitative changes in regions of space. His conclusion is that the attribution of the field metaphysic to Spinoza “is confirmed by the fact that it yields this reading of the vacuum argument.”66 One problem for Bennett’s interpretation is that the textual evidence he cites reveals Cartesian assumptions common to Spinoza and Desgabets that are not in line with the field metaphysic. As Bennett notes, the argument against the void cited in the Ethics scholium is the summary of Descartes’s argument that Spinoza presented in Descartes’s “Principles”. Yet in this summary, there is an appeal to the conceptualist position in Descartes – which Desgabets defended against the Gassendists – that space insofar as 64

65 66

The argument in Spinoza draws on the view in Descartes that there is a real distinction between two objects just in case we can “clearly and distinctly understand one without the other,” and thus can understand each to exist without the other (AT 8-1:28f ). Given this view, it should be the case that one part of matter can be annihilated while all the others remain in the same condition. Since this is not possible, the parts of matter are not really distinct. Bennett 1984, 92–96. Ibid.,102f.

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it differs from particular bodies and their relations “is not anything in re, but depends on our thought” (G 1:182).67 Thus, there is no appeal here to a field-metaphysical reduction of divisible bodies to space and its qualities. Indeed, the reduction runs in the opposite direction, from extra-mental space to particular bodies and their qualities.68 Spinoza admittedly must confront the question – broached as well by Desgabets’s remarks – of how Descartes’s argument against the void, with its reduction of space to divisible matter, could possibly be reconciled with the thesis of the indivisibility of material substance. But here we can fall back on the view, which I find in Spinoza, that particular bodies are expressions of the same essence. That the essence so expressed must be indivisible is indicated by the result in the Ethics that there is “something common to all bodies, and which is equally in the part and in the whole” (G 2:118). This result is significant given the traditional scholastic position that a form that is as fully present in each part of a body as it is in the whole of it is not divided when the body is.69 By alluding to this position, Spinoza indicated that the essence expressed by divisible bodies must itself be indivisible. In light of his remarks in the “Metaphysical Thoughts” and the “Letter on the Infinite,” however, it follows from the fact that this essence is indivisible that it has an existence that lacks temporal duration. Thus, we have in Spinoza a clear line from the premise, which he shared with Desgabets, that no part of matter can be annihilated to the conclusion, which Desgabets also accepted, that the essence of matter is both indivisible and outside of time.70 The distinction between the indivisible essence of matter and its divisible manifestations is reflected in Spinoza’s most mature work, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus.71 There he distinguished between God’s “absolute essence,” or that essence considered “without reference to created things,” and God “insofar as He is conceived of in relation to created things, or manifested through them” (G 3:169). Such a distinction helps to explain Spinoza’s reaction to the charge, which his correspondent Henry Oldenburg reported to him, that the Tractatus confuses God with nature. He 67 68

69

70 71

For a more complete defense of this reading of Spinoza’s summary, see Schmaltz 1999a. Moreover, in Descartes’s “Principles”, Spinoza defined motion in terms of the transfer of one body from the vicinity of other bodies (G 1:181–83), just as Descartes’s did (in AT 8-1:53), and not, as Bennett would have it, in terms of qualitative changes in regions of space (Bennett 1984, 88–92). For this traditional view, see Aquinas 1975, 2:213–15. Thomas cautioned that while the substantial forms of “perfect animals” are indivisible in this way, other forms such as the accidental form of a house are divisible because they are present only in the whole and not in each part. I hope to further defend this interpretation of Spinoza in future work. Though this text was first published (anonymously) seven years prior to the publication of the Ethics in 1677, it is clear from Spinoza’s correspondence that he had finished a substantial draft of the latter text by the time that he started work on his Tractatus. For more on the relation between these two texts, see the editorial remarks in Spinoza 1985, xiii, 349–51.

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told Oldenburg that critics who take this work to hold that “God and Nature (by which they understand a kind of mass or corporeal matter) are one and the same” are going “totally the wrong way” (G 4:307). Though Spinoza did not explain to Oldenburg precisely how he differed from those who identify God with nature, it is clear enough from his distinction in the Tractatus that he was rejecting the identification of God as the absolute essence of extension with the mass or corporeal matter that exists in particular bodies.72 My argument here is that what Spinoza held about God applies as well for Desgabets’s material substance (see Figure 3). The similarities between the views of Spinoza and Desgabets provide some support for the observation of the nineteenth-century scholar Am´ed´ee Hennequin that “the system of Dom Robert on the indefectibility of substances fills a gap in the history of philosophy” since it “establishes the transition from the discourse on the Method to the Theologico-Politicus,” and thus “helps in understanding the saying of Leibniz: ‘Spinozism is only an immoderate Cartesianism.’”73 But there remains a significant gap between Spinoza and Desgabets given that the former consistently identified the indivisible and eternal essence of matter with God as extended substance, while the latter insisted that material substance has an atemporal existence that is detached from God and is the product of His indifferent will. This gap is connected in turn to differences over divine creation. When faced with the claim of critics that extended substance is created by God, Spinoza himself retorted in the Ethics: “By what divine power could it be created? They are completely ignorant of that. And this shows clearly that they do not understand what they themselves say” (G 2:57). While Spinoza deplored the invocation of an incomprehensible power of divine creation, Desgabets gloried in an “abyss of divine perfections” opened up by Descartes’s created truths doctrine. In embracing this implication of the doctrine, Desgabets was followed by Regis, who developed Desgabets’s views in ways that make even more apparent the gap that separates God from what He has freely created.

2.6 regis’s usage : creation and indefectible motion In the 1704 Usage de la raison, Regis set out his own account of divine creation in opposition to the view of the “Scolastiques” that conservation is “the same action in substance as creation” since it is merely the continuation of “the action by which substances are produced.”74 He responded that creation

72 73 74

For a similar reading of Spinoza’s letter to Oldenburg, see Beltr´an 1995. Quoted in R 218f. For the “scholastic” conclusion (which some schoolmen in fact opposed) that conservation is neither really nor modally distinct from creation, see Opera 25:791. For references to scholastic texts opposing this conclusion, see Des Chene 1996, 325, n. 87.

Three Radical Doctrines

108 Descartes

Spinoza

Desgabets

Shape, motion (modes) inhere in Parts of matter (distinct substances, all of which share the same essence) distinct from and created by

Shape, motion (modes) together with Parts of matter (modes)

Shape, motion (modes) together with Parts of matter (modes)

“express in a determinate way”

God’s indifferent will

Divine attribute of extension = God’s eternal essence as extended substance

give a “particular and determinate” existence to Essence of matter = material substance that is “separated from time” distinct from and created by

God’s indifferent will figure 3. The relation between material substance and its modes

and conservation must differ intrinsically since the former produces only “the absolute being of substances,” while the latter is restricted to “the modes that diversify substance by motion” (Usage 334).75 This response is reminiscent of Desgabets’s argument against Descartes that divine conservation of a “successive duration of our life” that derives from motion must be distinguished from His creation of our “substantial being.” The connection to Desgabets is more evident in Regis’s further conclusion that divine creation produces a substance that is “indefectible” since it has an existence that is “simple and indivisible” (325–28). Even his argument for this conclusion is straight out of Desgabets, namely, that “it is contradictory [repugne] that in the same instant [God] has willed to create and destroy” (328).76 Moreover, Regis adopted Desgabets’s view that God creates eternal truths by producing substantial beings external to Himself (see §2.3). In the Usage, he started with the distinction, clearly present in Desgabets (though not so clearly in Descartes; see §2.1.1), between eternal truths concerning the divine nature, which are “immutable and necessary with an absolute necessity and immutability,” and eternal truths concerning the nature of created things, which “are the consequences of the divine will” and thus have only “a hypothetical necessity and immutability” (Usage 276). He also followed Desgabets in expressing the Cartesian doctrine of created eternal truths in 75 76

This is a version of Regis’s earlier distinction between creation and generation; see Syst`eme 1:101. Compare Regis’s argument in the earlier Syst`eme, which is less closely linked to the argument in Desgabets, that the indefectibility of body and mind follows from the fact that God produces these substances “by an immutable will” (Syst`eme, 1:101).

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terms of God’s creation of substances and modal essences. In Regis, the claim is that “God has given the possibility to modal things by the same action by which He has created the substances of body and mind, capable of being variously modified.” Thus, God creates the possibility that bodies have various shapes by creating matter with a nature that is such that matter can take on those shapes. By the same token, it is impossible for minds to have shapes or bodies to have thoughts “only because God has willed to make mind and body with such a nature that mind is not susceptible of shape, nor body of thought, and thus for the rest” (272).77 The Usage argues that the possibility of modes can be explained in terms of the creation of substances since this possibility “consists in the power that substances have to receive certain modes” (Usage 271). God, therefore, need only establish the nature of substances to determine essences that delimit possibilities concerning modes. In this respect, modal essences differ from the existence of modes, the latter of which “arrive in the world according to the laws of motion” and thus depend not only on the divine will but “also and immediately on secondary causes” (272f ). There is, of course, a resemblance here to the distinction in Desgabets between the “being of essence” and the “being of existence” of particular bodies (see §2.5). Furthermore, the assumption in Regis that modes can arrive in the world only when produced by motion is shared by Desgabets. Yet there is no emphasis in Desgabets on the fact that what results from the laws of motion depends on secondary causes rather than the divine will. Indeed, his “Trait´e” asserts that the force that causes motion is simply the immutable action by which God moves bodies (RD 3:86f ). The claim here is that “bodies have no moving force [force motrice], since it is God who continues to move with the same force that [He had] at first” (3:88f).78 This claim in the “Trait´e” anticipates the occasionalist conclusion in Malebranche that “the moving force [la force mouvante] of bodies is therefore not at all in the bodies that are moved, since this motor force is nothing but the will of God” (OCM 2:313). In his text, Desgabets appealed to this sort of occasionalist view in support of his own doctrine of the “indefectibility of motion.” His argument is that such indefectibility follows simply from the immutability of God’s moving force. This argument is obviously influenced by 77 78

See the similar argument in Syst`eme, 1:102–105. Compare Desgabets’s even stronger claim that “it is a truth well established that bodies cannot move one another, and that it is God who produces all motions in the world without exception” (L 346). Such a claim may seem to conflict with Desgabets’s desire to hold that the human soul is a true cause of motion in the body to which it is united. However, Desgabets indicated at one point that since the soul merely “determines and changes the course of motions that are already in the world,” it can be said that all motions “can be regarded as proceeding from the sovereign power of God” (CdC 211). See Schmaltz 1994 for a discussion of the similar account of mental causation of motion in the writings of other Cartesians.

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Descartes’s own view in the Principles that God is the “primary cause” of motion that conserves the quantity of motion by means of the same immutable act by which He created it (AT 8-1:61f ). Moreover, Descartes indicated in a 1649 letter to More, in line with Desgabets’s remarks, that the conservation of motion is actually a conservation of the “force that impels [ bodily] parts” (AT 5:405). There is some controversy among scholars over whether Descartes anticipated the view in Desgabets that this force exists in God, or whether he held rather that it exists in bodies or nowhere at all.79 Yet, it is fairly clear that Descartes took the conservation of motion to derive immediately from the divine perfection of immutability, which entails that God act “in a manner that is always utterly constant and immutable” (AT 8-1:61). In this respect, Descartes anticipated Desgabets’s conclusion in the “Trait´e” that the indefectibility of motion is “founded on the simplicity and the immutability of God, who is always disposed to act in a constant and uniform manner” (RD 3:87). In the “Trait´e,” Desgabets introduced his discussion of the indefectibility of motion by noting that a consideration “of the nature and the cause of local motion could lead us to a certain truth approaching that of the indefectibility of substances” (RD 3:85). However, his remarks indicate one fundamental difference between the two kinds of indefectibility. In the case of substances, indefectibility derives from God’s free creation of atemporal essences. By contrast, in the case of motion, indefectibility does not require any atemporal essence distinct from God but rather derives directly from God’s immutable act of conservation. In a recent article, Michael Della Rocca suggests that there is, in fact, a parallel between Descartes’s own views on God’s causation of motion and His creation of eternal truths. I noted the suggestion in Descartes that eternal truths are akin to natural laws. In Della Rocca’s view, however, the analogy runs the other direction. His claim is that Descartes intended to ground the laws of motion in natures that are analogous to the divinely produced essences that ground the eternal truths.80 An initial difficulty with this claim, which Della Rocca does not mention, is that the continuous conservation of motion seems to differ from the eternal creation of essences.81 However, he notes another problem, namely, that the conclusion that God gives bodies a specific nature that grounds the laws of motion conflicts with the 79

80 81

For the view that Descartes took force to exist in God, see Hatfield 1979. For the view that he took it to exist in bodies, see Gueroult 1980 and Gabbey 1980. For the view that he denied that force exists anywhere, see Garber 1992, 297– 99. Della Rocca 1999, 62–70. In particular, Della Rocca cites passages where Descartes explained the laws of motion in terms of a tendency of bodies to persist in the same state. Compare Broughton’s claim that for Descartes “what makes eternal truths true is God’s timeless decree; what makes [the laws] of motion true is God’s preservation of the world from moment to moment by the same activity by which he created it” (Broughton 1987, 212).

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official doctrine in Descartes that extension alone constitutes the nature of body.82 This last difficulty would also seem to preclude such an analogy in Regis. Prior to the Usage, he suggested that features of motion that go beyond what follows from the nature of extension derive directly from God. I have in mind in particular his position several decades earlier, in the 1690 Syst`eme de philosophie, that “moving force” (force mouvante) is “nothing other than the will that God has to move matter” (Syst`eme 1:306). In this text, he distinguished this force from “formal motion” (mouvement formel ), the latter of which is only modally distinct from the body moved (1:303f ). One complication is that this text also attempted to distinguish between the force of motion and the force of rest by claiming that “the former is always conceived in the body that moves, and the latter is always conceived as external to the body that is at rest” (1:308). The implication here that moving force resides in the body that causes motion quite clearly conflicts with the occasionalist position in Desgabets that force resides in God rather than in bodies. However, Regis had to confront the obvious objection – which he called “without dispute the greatest that one can form concerning the nature of motion and rest” (1:309) – that the identification of moving force with the divine will entails that this force is equally external to body in the cases of motion and rest. His response was that there is a difference between the two cases since God “wills directly, and as one says par soy,” that the moving body apply its moving force while He “wills only indirectly, and as one says par accident,” that this force be applied to a body at rest. Since the former sort of will is “active” (Actives) and the latter only “passive” (Passives), there is a real difference between the cases of motion and rest (1:309). It is not at all evident that the distinction between God’s active and passive will adequately addresses the objection that moving force can be found in God alone. Furthermore, the very notion that God’s will could be passive is problematic. Yet what is most relevant for our purposes is that Regis attempted to explain the difference between the forces involved in motion and rest by appealing to the nature of the divine will. In this respect, the position in the Syst`eme is similar to the view in Desgabets that the nature of motion is determined directly by God. But then Regis would seem to be committed, with Desgabets, to the conclusion that there is a significant difference between the eternal truths, which are grounded in an atemporal intermediary created by God, and the conservation laws, which derive directly from the divine will. In the Usage, however, Regis provided an account of motion that closes this gap. There he repeated the distinction in the Syst`eme between formal motion and moving force, but he also emphasized that moving force in God

82

Della Rocca 1999, 69. For Descartes’s official doctrine, see AT 8 -1:25.

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produces not the particular motions in bodies but rather “the substance of formal motion,” a “substance” as immutable as the divine will itself.83 Thus, just as in the case of matter there is a difference between immutable substance and its mutable modes, so in the case of formal motion there is a difference between that motion as “immutable with respect to its substance” and as “something changing with respect to its modes” (Usage 296). Regis admitted that talk of the substance of formal motion is odd since it would seem that “one cannot conceive that formal motion which is a mode can be considered as a substance.” However, he responded that as substances are said to be permanent beings only since they are produced immediately by the will of God, which is immutable, for the same reason formal motion can be considered as a substance because it proceeds immediately from the same will. It is for this reason that formal motion cannot ever change either with respect to its nature or with respect to its quantity. (Usage 296f )

We can understand the view here to be that, in creating formal motion, God “superadds” to the nature of matter a further nature that grounds the conservation of motion. Thus, motion itself and the essences of bodily modes are unchangeable for the same reason, namely, that they derive from permanent beings created by God that exist outside of time and thus are not subject to change. Here we have a way of preserving the analogy, which Della Rocca finds in Descartes, between God’s conservation of motion and His creation of the eternal truths. What saves the analogy is Regis’s view in the Usage that certain features of motion follow not from the nature of extended substance but rather from “substantial” formal motion. Desgabets accepted the assumption here that the indefectibility of motion does not follow from the nature of matter alone. Since he wanted to retain the official Cartesian view of matter, however, he concluded that in this case indefectibility derives directly from the divine will. By contrast, Regis settled on the position that the constancy of motion derives from a created essence in just the way that eternal truths do. This difference from Desgabets raises the question of why Regis was so concerned about denying that the indefectibility of motion derives directly from God. I believe that a good part of the answer lies in Regis’s attempt to provide a unified account of divine causation. Descartes himself suggested that God acts as an efficient cause both in the case of the production of 83

In the Usage, Regis appealed to the fact that God’s will causes only the substance of formal motion to respond to the objection that “the will of God being immutable, it cannot immediately produce motion, seeing that motion is something successive and changing” (296). Though this response seems to indicate that he accepted the premise behind this objection, elsewhere in this text he claimed that God can produce particular changes that pertain to the “order of grace” (274).

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motion and in the case of the creation of eternal truths.84 In Regis’s mature view, however, efficient causality is constrained by the principle that requires that an effect differ from its cause in what it receives from that cause. His conclusion was that in all cases of creation, God produces an essence that differs entirely from His own. Though he claimed to borrow the principle backing this conclusion from scholastic philosophers, his own use of the principle is closer to the use of it in Spinoza. In particular, Regis followed Spinoza in taking such a principle to reveal that God differs from the beings that depend on Him with respect to both essence and existence. The result stands in marked contrast to the suggestion in Descartes of the traditional scholastic doctrine that creatures stand in an “analogical” relation to God.

2.7 quasi-spinozistic causal dissimilarity In the Usage, Regis introduced the principle that “effects differ from their causes only in what [the former] receive from [the latter].” He argued in his text that such a principle – call it the dissimilarity principle – requires that “effects that receive only existence from their cause differ also from their cause only in existence, and that those that receive essence and existence differ totally.” His conclusion there is that, given this principle, the fact that God is the cause of both the essence and the existence of creatures reveals that “God and creatures have nothing in common but the name” (Usage 407). The dissimilarity principle is rather unfamiliar in a Cartesian context. Indeed, it appears to conflict with a principle that is familiar from Descartes’s Meditations, namely, that “the efficient and total cause” must contain “formally or eminently” everything that is found in its effect (AT 7:41). Regis also accepted a version of this principle. In particular, he consistently held as axiomatic that “the exemplary cause of ideas must formally contain all the perfections that the ideas represent.”85 However, this version differs from Descartes’s own principle insofar as it does not include the possibility of “eminent” containment. Another difference is that Descartes’s principle concerns efficient causality, whereas Regis’s principle is restricted to exemplary causes. For Regis, an efficient cause is that which produces its effects either by its own power, as in the case of the primary cause, God, or by the help of the primary cause, as in the case of created secondary causes (Usage 403).86 In contrast, an exemplary cause is not that which produces the effect but rather that which serves as the model for its production. Thus, the 84

85 86

Compare AT 7:436, which asserts that God is the efficient cause of the eternal truths, and AT 8 -1:15f, which restricts a consideration of God’s action in nature to His role as the efficient cause of all things. Compare Syst`eme 1:77, and Usage 235. Compare Syst`eme 1:125.

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building that serves as the model for the work of the architect is an exemplary cause of that work. So also, “all objects on which are formed the ideas of the soul” are exemplary causes of those ideas (406).87 This view that there is a similarity between exemplary causes and their effects did not prevent Regis from asserting in the Usage that the dissimilarity principle governs all efficient causality. He held that such a principle also is endorsed in the writings of “the Philosophers,” that is to say, the scholastics (Usage 407). And indeed, there is a scholastic discussion in Suarez’s Disputationes of the axiom, which is said to “pertain to the very condition [rationem] of acting,” that there is a dissimilarity (dissimilitudo) between an efficient cause and its effect.88 However, Su´arez himself did not fully embrace the “truth,” which Regis took “the Philosophers” to accept, that “effects differ from their causes only in what they receive from” those causes (407). His position is simply that the object that receives an effect initially must lack the effect it is to receive, while the agent must initially possess in some manner the effect that it is to cause in another.89 More importantly, Su´arez could not have been comfortable with the conclusion in Regis that since God causes both the essence and existence of creatures, “God and creatures have nothing in common but the name” (Usage 407). This conclusion indicates that Regis conceived of terms as applying to God and creatures in what the scholastics called an “equivocal” manner. In his Disputationes, however, Su´arez followed Thomas in explicitly rejecting the position that the terms apply only in this way.90 His own official position in this work, again in line with Thomas, is that God bears an “analogical” relation to created substances by virtue of the fact that the former “subsists substantially and essentially per se” and thus “has the complete ratio of substance” while the latter are “not subsisting by an essential act but only by aptitude [per aptitudine].”91 The analogical relation is said to be similar to the relation between substance and accidents. Just as being pertains primarily to substances and secondarily to the accidents that depend 87 88

89 90 91

Compare ibid., 1:181f. I do not mean to suggest here that Su´arez was Regis’s source, but I think that we can take his discussion to reveal the sort of scholastic causal principle that Regis had in mind. For a more comprehensive comparison of the views of Su´arez and Regis on these matters, see Schmaltz 2000b. Opera 25:670f. Notice that on Su´arez’s understanding, the principle complements Descartes’s causal principle. Opera 26:13r. Compare S.Th. Ia, 13, 5. Su´arez’s argument, which he borrowed from Thomas, is that equivocity precludes any sort of knowledge of God. Opera 26:314r. Marion claims that lurking beneath the surface of Su´arez’s text is the view of Thomas’s opponent, Duns Scotus, that we can conceive of God and creatures in terms of a common or “neutral” concept of being (Marion 1991, chs. 5–6). Though I cannot consider here Marion’s intricate argument for this claim, I simply mention my suspicion that the common concept of being that he finds in Su´arez does not differ fundamentally from a Thomistic concept that applies primarily to God and only derivatively to creatures.

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on substances for their existence, so subsistence pertains primarily to God, who subsists essentially, and secondarily to created substances, which have a mere aptitude to subsist and so depend on God for their existence.92 For Su´arez, then, the implication in Regis that God bears a merely equivocal relation to creatures is unacceptable. In contrast, the emphasis in the Usage on equivocity is reinforced by the argument in Spinoza’s Ethics for the conclusion that even if God has an intellect “it must disagree with our intellect both as to its essence and as to its existence, and cannot agree with it in anything but name” (G 2:63). This argument is contained in a scholium where Spinoza cited as axiomatic the principle that “what is caused differs from its cause precisely in what it has from the cause” (causatum differt a sua causa præcise in eo, quod a causa habet). To illustrate this principle, Spinoza noted that a man can cause only the existence of another man, not his essence, which is “an eternal truth.” Although the two agree in essence, apparently as shown by the fact that neither can exist without that which is essential to human beings,93 they nonetheless disagree in existence, as shown by the fact that each can continue to exist without the other. Thus, the effect differs from the cause in what it receives from its cause, namely, its existence. By appealing to the implication in the Ethics that God is the cause both of the existence and the essence of our intellect, Spinoza was able to infer that God’s intellect differs totally from our own and “cannot agree with it in anything but name” (G 2:63).94 There are several parallels in this passage to the discussion in the Usage beyond the obvious resemblance of Spinoza’s causal axiom to Regis’s dissimilarity principle. For instance, Spinoza’s remarks concerning the two men are reminiscent of the claim in Regis’s text that “the quality of being a rational animal that is the essence of a man belongs equally to [convient e´galement au] father and son, because if it would perish in one, it would be destroyed in the other, whereas the existence is proper to one independently of the other” (Usage 407). Even more importantly, Spinoza’s argument for the conclusion that God’s intellect agrees with our own only in name is structurally equivalent to the argument in Regis that since “it is certain that our will receives its essence and its existence from the will of God,” it must be the case that “the will of God differs totally from ours, that is to say, it has nothing in common with [our will] but the name” (167f ).

92 93

94

Opera 26:322v. The analogy is found in Thomas; see Aquinas 1975, I:147f. I take this to be the implication both of the official definition of essence as “that which being given the thing is necessarily posited, and which being taken away the thing is necessarily taken away” (G 2:84) and of the suggestion that there is a “human nature in general” that several individuals share (G 2:50f ). For a discussion of this argument, that emphasizes the strength of Spinoza’s commitment to a version of the dissimilarity principle, see Schmaltz 2000b.

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Spinoza once complained to a correspondent that in order to distance themselves from him, “the stupid Cartesians” (stolidi Cartesiani) never ceased “to denounce my writings everywhere, and still continue to do so” (G 4:299).95 In light of this complaint, it is no surprise that instead of noting the anticipations in Spinoza of his views on causation, Regis emphasized instead his differences with this bˆete noire of the Cartesians. Thus, he drew attention in his own “R´efutation de l’opinion de Spinosa” – a work appended to the Usage – to the fact that the result in his work that “God is the cause of all creatures, by this reason alone, that there is nothing in common between them” conflicts with the requirement in Spinoza that causes have something in common with their effects (“R´ef.” 919). In the Ethics, Spinoza did, in fact, take such a requirement to follow from the axiom that things with nothing in common with each other cannot be understood through each other, when this is taken together with the further axiom that knowledge of an effect “depends on or involves” knowledge of its cause (G 2:47). Though Regis did not emphasize the point, there is the obvious problem of how such a requirement can be reconciled with the conclusion in the Ethics that God’s intellect differs from our own in both essence and existence.96 But Spinoza required only that God as cause must be conceived through the same attribute of thought in terms of which our own intellect must be conceived. Even so conceived, God must be distinguished from our intellect insofar as this attribute constitutes His essence. Indeed, the mere fact that the essence of our intellect is an effect conceived through a divine attribute serves to distinguish it from that attribute, which cannot be the effect of anything. The result here, in accord with Spinoza’s version of the dissimilarity principle, is that our intellect differs from its cause by virtue of the essence that it receives from that cause.97 Regis did allow, in a partial concession to Descartes, that most efficient causes “eminently” contain their effects.98 He insisted, however, that there 95

Spinoza had in mind Cartesian sympathizers in the Dutch universities. On French Cartesian critiques of Spinoza, principally in the work of Regis and dom Fran¸cois Lamy, see Verni`ere 1954, 1:240 –59. 96 One of Spinoza’s correspondents, the German count Ehrenfried Walther von Tschirnhaus, noted the problem in comments transmitted to Spinoza through the mediation of Georg Herman Schuller (G 4:275). Compare Spinoza’s response in G 4:278. 97 Compare the similar reading of Spinoza in Koyr´ e 1961 and Gueroult 1968, 291– 95. 98 Regis granted in particular that “equivocal” causes eminently contain their effects by containing their genus, and that “univocal” causes eminently contain their effects by containing their genus and difference (Usage 407). He does not explain here why this sort of containment counts only as eminent and not as formal, but presumably the fact that the cause does not contain everything it produces in its effect precludes formal containment. Earlier in this text, Regis dismissed as “absurd” the claim that a watch that is an efficient cause of an idea that represents it as containing several wheels itself formally contains several wheels (238), though the reasons for the dismissal are not entirely clear to me.

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is an exception in the case of God since He contains His effects “neither formally nor eminently” (Usage 407). Thus, Regis could not accept even the minimal sort of connection between God and His effects that Spinoza required. The relevant differences with Spinoza are particularly evident in his critique of the claim in the Ethics – from the same part of that work that contains the discussion of causal dissimilarity – that God alone is a cause that is free since He alone produces effects solely from the necessity of His nature. In the Usage, Regis distanced himself from such a claim by noting that he does not “give to God the same freedom that Spinoza attributes to it” since he holds that God’s effects derive from His will rather than from His nature (176). What is distinctive in Regis’s position is his insistence that divine indifference renders God “absolutely independent of [external] things, in such a manner that it is contradictory that God knew the good or the truth of an object before He had produced the object mediately or immediately by His will” (173).99 In making this point, Regis returned to Descartes’s claim that since God has created the eternal truths “it is certain that these truths are no more necessarily attached to His essence than are other created things” (AT 1:152). Given his requirement that effects be conceived through a divine attribute, Spinoza was forced to restrict the dissimilarity principle to the point that the attribute that God’s effects conceptually presuppose cannot itself be conceived in terms of those effects. In contrast, Regis appealed to this principle precisely for the purpose of detaching God’s effects from His essence. So detached, however, the effects no longer have any internal feature that connects them conceptually to their divine source. Regis indicated the need to qualify this result when he distinguished in the Usage between God’s “absolute attributes” (attributs absolus), such as His eternity, immutability, and simplicity, and His “respective attributes” (attributs respectives), such as His goodness, justice, and mercy. The former are said to “pertain to God considered in Himself ” and “regard only God,” whereas the latter are said to be “related to creatures” or to “suppose existing or possible creatures to which they are related” (Usage 201).100 This distinction corresponds to Desgabets’s own distinction between God’s omnipotence as “identified with His other absolute perfections” and that omnipotence “as it is related to creatures” (see §2.2.2). For both Desgabets and Regis, God’s respective attributes (relative perfections) are to be conceived in terms of

99

100

The phrase “mediately or immediately” must be understood in light of Regis’s view that the existence of substance follows immediately from the divine will, but that the existence modes follow immediately from other modes and only mediately from the divine will; see Usage 272f. Compare the somewhat different account of the absolute/respective distinction in Syst`eme 1:88.

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the essences that derive from His indifferent will. By contrast, absolute attributes (perfections) are logically prior to and conceptually independent of created essences. Regis’s conclusion that creatures have no internal feature that links them conceptually to God is to be understood in terms of absolute features of God. Descartes may seem to have supported the implication here that there is merely an equivocal relation between God and creatures when he emphasized in the Principles that since substance is “nothing other than a thing which so exists that it depends on no other thing in order to exist,” God alone can be said to be a substance. The conclusion in this text is that “the name of substance does not apply univocally, as they say in the Schools, to God and to other things, that is to say, there is no signification in the name that can be distinctly understood to be common to God and creatures” (AT 8-1:24). Nonetheless, Descartes’s remarks elsewhere indicate a sympathy not for Regis’s equivocity but rather for a Su´arezian sort of analogy between God and creatures. Thus, he referred in “Meditation Three,” in terms reminiscent of Su´arez,101 to his conception of the stone as a “substance or thing that is apt per se to exist” (substantia sive rem quae per se apta est existere) (AT 7:44). He noted further there, also in line with Su´arez’s remarks, that God is to be conceived by contrast as a being who has not a mere aptitude to exist but rather “the power of existing per se” (vim habeat per se existendi) (7:50). Although Descartes himself rarely used the term analogia,102 his remarks do seem to signal a commitment to the position in Su´arez that God is related to creatures “not univocally, but analogically.”103 Indeed, we have seen in §2.1.3 Descartes’s conclusion in “Meditation Four” that the resemblance of creatures to God is especially clear in his own case since it is “above all in virtue of the will that I understand myself to bear in some way the image and likeness of God” (AT 7:57). Yet Regis indicated that such a conclusion is tenuous from a Cartesian perspective when he drew attention in the Usage to the implication of the created truths doctrine that “the will of God differs totally from ours, that is to say, it has nothing in common with [our will] but the name” (Usage 167). This implication seems to require that our will differs from God’s not merely in degree but in kind. Even more, on the created truths doctrine, all creaturely essences must be cut off from the divine nature given that they are effects of God’s wholly indifferent will. In recent work, Jean-Luc Marion draws on related features of 101 102

103

Compare the passage cited in this chapter at note 91. However, Descartes did claim that the positive cause of God’s existence “can be referred by analogy to efficient causes [per analogiam ad efficientem],” and that talk of God causing perfections in Himself is “derived by analogy [analogia] with the notion of efficient causation” (AT 7:240, 242). But see also the reading of these passages in Marion 1991, 428 –44, which emphasizes their deviation from the views of Thomas. Opera 26:314fr. For a similar view, see Beyssade 1996. Compare the alternative to this position in Marion 1996, but also the critique of this alternative in Schmaltz 2000b.

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the created truths doctrine in claiming that Descartes’s writings make manifest “the disappearance of analogy” in the modern period.104 Yet it seems to me that this disappearance is less evident in Descartes than it is in his French disciple, Regis.105 As is clear from the discussion in §2.6, this disappearance in Regis involves the detachment from the divine essence not only of creaturely essences but also of “indefectible motion.” The significance of the detachment of motion is indicated by his claim in the Usage that his own view that God has “this sovereign power that renders Him absolute master of all things that are outside of Him” distinguishes him from those who hold that “the simplicity of the laws of motion oblige [God] to produce, despite Himself, monsters and other repugnant things” (Usage 278). The contrasting position is that of Malebranche, who argued that God cannot prevent evils in nature by “particular volitions” (volont´es particuli`eres) given that Wisdom constrains Him to act through “general volitions” (volont´es g´en´erales) that express simple and immutable laws of motion.106 Regis urged that Malebranche’s position is “repugnant to the idea of God” since it requires that He is necessitated with respect to the immutable essences of things. As in the case of his response to Spinozistic necessity, Regis countered here that these essences “have nothing in them that precedes [God’s] will” and “have reality only because He wills that they be” (278). On his view in the Usage, what God has freely created in the case of indefectible motion is an essence external to Him from which such indefectibility follows. Desgabets inferred the indefectibility of matter from the nature of God’s creation of material substance or, what was the same for him, the essence of matter (see §2.4). However, his commitment to Descartes’s own position that the conservation of motion derives directly from immutable divine attributes prevented him from offering a similar account of indefectible motion. In contrast, Regis’s revisionary implication in the Usage that God superadds formal motion to the essence of matter allowed him to provide a unified account of the indefectibility of matter and motion. His final position is that God differs in essence and existence from both matter and motion since, in 104 105

106

Marion 1991, 23. This thesis is anticipated in the discussion of Descartes’s inversion m´etaphysique of the scholastic doctrine of analogy in Gouhier 1962, 221–32. Regis, in fact, provides a clear counterexample to the recent claim by one student of Marion that figures such as Arnauld, Bossuet, and F´enelon, “like everyone else at the end of the seventeenth century, lacked the means or the audacity to contemplate in philosophy the proposition that essences cannot be attributed univocally to God and to creatures” (Carraud 1996, 104; emphasis in original). From the 1680 Trait´e de la nature et de la grˆace, at OCM 5:29–37. In both the Syst`eme and the Usage, Regis rejected the claim that God acts by volontez generales on the grounds that God cannot possess a will either that concerns particulars only indirectly or that remains indeterminate until determined by particulars. However, he also argued against the claim that God acts by distinct volontez particulieres by appealing to divine simplicity (cf. Syst`eme 1:92f and Usage 169f ).

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each case, He produces a “substantial” or “permanent” being that is in no way contained in His absolute attributes. Admittedly, the emphasis in Regis on the merely equivocal relation between God and creatures is counterbalanced to some extent by other aspects of his thought. In the Syst`eme, for instance, he stipulated that God is “a substance that thinks perfectly” (Syst`eme 1:86), and he claimed there that we have only a “bounded and limited thought” while God has “thought considered in itself and without restriction” (1:92). This view of God, which is reflected in certain remarks in the Usage,107 is especially striking in light of Descartes’s comment in a 1647 letter that God “is a mind, or a thing that thinks” and that “our soul’s nature resembles His sufficiently for us to believe that it is an emanation of his supreme intelligence, a ‘breath of divine spirit’” (AT 4:608).108 These aspects of Regis’s thought indicate that he was, in a sense, less radical than Spinoza, who consistently held that God cannot be conceived to be akin to a particular intellect. Nonetheless, Regis did caution in the Syst`eme that we must not judge God as we judge ourselves since we are constrained to follow a certain order in thought, while God “is not obliged to be ruled by this same order, since this order is nothing other than His own will” (Syst`eme 1:92). More generally, he claimed in this text that it would follow from the differences between God and creatures that “the term Substance would be equivocal with regard to God, to Body, and to Mind; the term Being also” (1:88). Regis reintroduced the old scholastic language of analogy in the Usage, but he explicitly rejected the Thomistic view behind that language that creatures “participate” in the divine nature. His main objection there to such a view is that since the divine nature is indivisible, it is “incapable of being communicated by parts, as Spinoza has supposed” (Usage 212). We will discover that Regis offered a similar objection to the conception of the divine nature in the work of Malebranche. However, this line of argument is somewhat superficial. After all, Malebranche attempted to ward off the charge of Spinozism by appealing to the indivisibility of the idea of extension by which God knows the material world. Moreover, we will discover that in his Usage, Regis explicitly conceded the Spinozistic claim, considered in §2.5, that matter is indivisible insofar as it is “considered as substance.” Regis’s best strategy in that text was to distinguish himself from Spinoza by stressing not God’s indivisibility but rather His “supersubstantiality.” This emphasis on divine supersubstantiality provides a deep reason for his rejection of Malebranche’s claim – itself directed against the Cartesian created 107 108

See, for instance, the comment toward the beginning of this text that we know “the thought that constitutes the nature of God” by means of our own “imperfect thought” (Usage 41f ). Compare Descartes’s claim in a 1637 letter that an idea of “intellectual nature in general,” “if considered without limitation, represents God, and if limited, is the idea of an angel or a human soul” (AT 1:353).

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truths doctrine – that both divine and human knowledge of the nature of matter is grounded in an “intelligible extension” contained in God’s own essence.

2.8 malebranche, spinozism, and god’s supersubstantiality In his 1690 Syst`eme, Regis objected to Malebranche that it is a consequence of his identification of God with “all being” or with “universal being” that “all beings would be integral parts or subjective parts of God.”109 He then noted that divine simplicity militates against the view that God is composed of integral parts “as a watch is composed of wheels and springs,” and that the view that God is composed of subjective parts transforms Him into “a universal nature, which exists only in the understanding that conceives it” (Syst`eme 1:187). There is no explicit mention of Spinoza here, but the fact that Regis had Spinoza in mind is indicated by his later criticism of the view of “Spinoza and his disciples” that God is “All-being” (Tout-ˆetre) in the sense that He is “nothing other than an assemblage of all bodies and of all minds,” which invokes again the point that God can have neither integral nor subjective parts (Usage 159). In a 1693 response to Regis, Malebranche refused to reply to “a reader stupid enough to attribute to me the impiety that you combat under my name” (OCM 17-1:305). However, he did confront the charge of Spinozism even prior to the publication of Regis’s Syst`eme, in 1683, when Arnauld objected that Malebranche’s account of intelligible extension tends toward the Spinozistic identification of God with the material world.110 Malebranche replied to Arnauld by insisting on the differences between ideal and real extension (OCM 6:232). After Regis’s death, moreover, Malebranche returned to this line of response in a 1713–14 correspondence with a former pupil, Jean Jacques Dortous de Mairan.111 Addressing Mairan’s initial request for the location of a paralogism in Spinoza’s reasoning in the first part of his Ethics, Malebranche initially noted the confusion of the intelligible idea of the material world with the material world itself.112 After observing 109

For this identification in Malebranche, see OCM 1:435.

110

See OA 38:517. Shortly after his correspondence with Malebranche, in 1718, Mairan was admitted to the Acad´emie des sciences as an associ´e in geometry, and in 1741–43 he served as the secretary for this body. For more on Mairan, see the introductory remarks in Malebranche 1995, 62–67, along with the works on Mairan cited in the bibliography. There is a foundational study of the Malebranche–Mairan correspondence in Moreau’s long introduction to Malebranche 1947. For more recent discussions, see Watson 1996, which defends Mairan’s accusation of Spinozism, and Ablondi 1998, which defends Malebranche against this accusation. OCM 19:855, in response to Mairan’s request in OCM 19:853f.

111

112

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that he failed to find this confusion in Spinoza, Mairan charged that it is Malebranche’s own account of intelligible extension that involves such a confusion.113 Mairan subsequently weakened this charge to a considerable extent when he conceded to Malebranche that an intelligible extension identified with God’s idea of extension can be distinguished from its object.114 However, he continued to object that the intelligible extension identified with the ideatum of the divine idea must be as necessary, infinite, and indivisible as Malebranche took the idea itself to be.115 In Mairan’s view, there remains for Malebranche the dilemma that one who rejects the Spinozistic claim that the object of God’s idea of extension is in God is left with the theologically suspect position that “there is something that is not in God and that does not constitute His essence, which exists necessarily, which is infinite, eternal, indivisible, etc.” (OCM 19:862). Malebranche attempted to resist the particular claim that the object of God’s idea of extension is indivisible by drawing on the view, found in Descartes (see §2.4.2), that the matter that serves as ideatum for the divine idea is not itself a single indivisible substance but only a collection of distinct substantial parts that are themselves endlessly divisible into further substantial parts.116 However, Mairan countered with the position, found in Spinoza (see §2.5), that it is only matter considered as “bodies, or different modifications of extension” that is divisible, and not matter considered as “extended substance properly speaking, which is neither such nor such a body, which is conceived equally in all bodies, and which is common to all of them” (OCM 19:893). Thus, he noted that when an apple is divided, “it is not extension properly so called that I am dividing, but only the apple. The knife, the air, or any other thing of the sort that I put between its parts, is only extension which differs from it only modally” (19:903). Even when the apple is divided, the essence of extension through which this apple is conceived cannot itself be divided. But since, for Mairan, “there is no real distinction outside the understanding between the proper being of a substance and its essence” (19:874), the result here is that extended substance “properly speaking,” that is, the essence of extension, is itself indivisible. Malebranche agreed that the essence of extension is indivisible. However, he was committed to the conclusion in Descartes that material substance 113

114 115 116

As Mairan noted at one point, he was setting aside the second part of the Ethics, De mente humanæ, and focusing on its first part, De Deo (OCM 19:904f ). Thus he was not able to consider a passage from the second part that provides perhaps the most direct support for Malebranche’s objection, namely, the claim that just as “extended substance and thinking substance are one and the same substance, which is now comprehended under this attribute, now under that,” so “a mode of extension and an idea of that mode are one and the same thing [res], but expressed in two ways [modus]” (G 2:90). See, for instance, OCM 19:906. In §3.5, I consider one of the arguments that Mairan invoked in support of this objection. See OCM 19:865, 885f, 909f.

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itself is the divisible subject of bodily modes. Such a commitment served to reinforce his position that this substance is distinct from its essence as expressed in the divine idea of extension, that is, in God’s own intelligible extension. In contrast, Mairan argued for the identity of intelligible extension (i.e., the ideatum of God’s idea of extension) with material substance by appealing to the principle that substance is identical to its extra-mental essence. Such a principle seems to be indicated by Descartes’s own ontological remarks (see §2.1.2), and I have argued that it is explicit in Desgabets’s writings (see §2.3). In theUsage, Regis adopted elements from Desgabets’s thought that conflict with the view in Descartes and Malebranche that matter is nothing over and above the collection of its substantial parts. For instance, the identification in this text of particular parts of matter with modes of material substance is at odds with the insistence in both Descartes and Malebranche that parts cannot be modes.117 Moreover, Regis followed Desgabets in rejecting the Cartesian commonplace that material substance is divisible by nature. He countered that material substance cannot be divisible “as substance” since then “all substances could be divided, and one could divide intelligent substance, which cannot be said” (Usage 289f ). Regis further rejected the position that “extension considered in itself” is divisible on the grounds that extension is divisible only as quantit´e, that is, “in relation to a particular size,” and not as essence (292f ). He argued that if the division of body involved the division of its essence, then as all division carries a change to the thing divided, when one divided body its essence would be changed; which does not happen, because reason makes us see that whatever division that one supposes in quantity, the essence of body remains always the same, and that one can say of each part of quantity after the division that it retains the whole essence of body. (282)

On this argument – which is present, though not as prominent, in the Syst`eme 118 – material substance qua essence of matter is indivisible even though the particular parts that compose its quantity are themselves divisible. Admittedly, some of Regis’s remarks in the Usage seem to indicate that there is nothing in extra-mental matter beyond its divisible quantit´e. One of his arguments there for the indivisibility of the essence of matter relies on the premise that this essence “exists only in thought, and by abstraction” (Usage 291). This premise derives from the “famous maxim,” cited earlier 117

118

For the identification, see Usage 258. Compare the anticipation in the claim in the Syst`eme that even though “extension, which is the essential attribute of bodies, never corrupts itself,” still the modes of extension “which make it that it is such or such a body, perish” (Syst`eme 1:266). There is a discussion of this passage in §4.7. There is only a quick summary of the argument in the Syst`eme, at 1:282, but an entire chapter is devoted to it in the Usage.

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in this text, that “universals are only in the mind” (Universalia sunt tantum in mente) (217). Regis’s conclusion was that while “singular and existing extension is divisible into actual parts,” extension considered as a “universal nature” is not so divisible because it has no actual existence external to mind (292). On this position, extension as essence would seem to have the same status that Descartes took a space distinct from bodies to have, namely, something that exists not in re but merely in thought. However, Regis must allow that the essence of matter is something more than an abstracted universal given his acceptance of the claim in Desgabets that essences are “nothing other than actually existing substance” that is itself “indefectible” (Usage 327). Moreover, it is clear that actually existing material substance cannot be identified with its quantity given the position in the Usage, again borrowed from Desgabets, that this substance has a “simple and indivisible” existence that is distinct from the divisible duration of particular bodies (343). Regis’s most considered view, therefore, appears to be that the essence of matter is not simply a universal insofar as it is identical to a material substance that has an indivisible existence external to mind.119 In any case, the identification of the essence of matter with material substance is prominent in Regis’s discussion in the “R´efutation de Spinosa”. This appendix to the Usage is billed as a rejection of the substance monism in the first part of the Ethics. However, it concedes the claim in Spinoza’s text that not even corporeal substance can be divided, “for the reason that by corporeal substance, we understand nothing other than extension considered as having neither shape nor determined size; and it is evident that such an extension is indivisible” (“R´ef.” 929). Regis did emphasize against Spinoza that extended substance is divisible with respect to the attribute of quantit´e (923). As already indicated, however, quantit´e is simply extended substance considered “in relation to some particular size that determines it,” which is distinct from this substance considered “in itself ” (Usage 282).120 In the end, it is difficult to discern any deep disagreement with the position in Spinoza that extended substance is indivisible with respect to its substance and divisible with respect to its particular modes. The Spinozistic aspects of Regis’s account of material substance undermine to a considerable extent his charge that Spinoza took the divine nature to be communicated by its parts. Indeed, Regis’s conclusion that extended substance “considered as substance” is indivisible seems to be at odds with Descartes’s own argument against divine materiality in the Principles, on which it follows simply from the fact that “the nature of body includes 119 120

For more on how Regis could reconcile his views of substance and universals, see §5.4.3. This section distinguishes, in particular, among extended substance considered in itself (Corps), considered in relation to the various forms it receives (Matiere Premiere), and considered in relation to a particular size (Quantit´e ). Compare Regis’s earlier distinction between Matiere Premiere and Quantit´e in Syst`eme 1:283–85.

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divisibility” and that “being divisible is an imperfection” that “God is not a body” (AT 8 -1:13). It is true that Regis offered against Spinoza the point, found also in Descartes, that God cannot have any modes since if He “could receive modes, He would not exclude all negation” (“R´ef.” 908).121 But here it is not divisibility that separates God from material substance, but merely the capacity to lack certain modes at certain times (thus the reference to negation in the passage just quoted). The point that God cannot receive modes is connected to the position in Regis, which distinguishes him from both Descartes and Spinoza, that God is not a substance. In response to Spinoza’s definition of God as absolutely infinite substance, Regis insisted that “it is the essence of substance to have the power to receive modes, and it is the essence of God not to be able to receive any of them” (“R´ef.” 908). Earlier in this text, Regis objected to Spinoza’s claim that substance can be conceived through itself by citing the result “in the first Part of the first Book that the term of Substance is the correlative of that of Mode, and by consequence that substance cannot be conceived without appeal to mode, no more than mode can be conceived without recourse to substance” (905). He seems to have had in mind here the stipulation in that section of the Usage that “substance denotes the power to receive certain modes.” He appealed to that stipulation to defend the claim that God must be “something more excellent than substance” and, consequently, must be supersubstantiel (Usage 156).122 This adjective reappears in the “R´efutation,” where Regis argued that Spinoza’s assumption in the Ethics that all things are “distinguished from each other either by attributes of substances or by modes of those attributes” does not apply to God simply because “God is neither substance nor mode, neither essence nor accident, but a Being superior to all beings, which we have called for this reason l’Etre supersubstantiel ” (“R´ef.” 920). Regis’s position stands on its head Descartes’s argument in the Principles that the term “substance” does not apply univocally to God and creatures since God alone can be a substance in the strict sense of being that which is independent of everything else. For Regis, this term cannot apply univocally to God and creatures since creatures alone can be substances in the strict sense of being that which is capable of receiving modes. One might wonder why we should explicate the notion of substance in terms of the creaturely capacity to receive modes rather than, as in Descartes, in terms of God’s

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The corresponding point in Descartes is that “we say properly not that there are in God modes or qualities, but only attributes, since in Him no variation is understood” (AT 8-1:26). Regis’s stipulation that substance has the power to receive modes may seem to conflict with his claim elsewhere in the Usage that Corps, or matter considered “in itself,” is distinct from Matiere Premiere, or matter considered “in relation to the modifications that it receives” (Usage 281f ). However, he indicated there that this distinction involves merely two different ways of conceiving one and the same “extended substance that is the essence of bodies.”

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supreme perfection. I suspect that Regis’s own response would be connected to Descartes’s created truths doctrine. For Regis, it seems, the notion of substance that we explicate must be accessible to our reason; it is our notion, after all. However, Descartes insisted in discussions of the created truths doctrine that God cannot be limited to what we can conceive. Thus, he told Arnauld in a 1648 letter that he would say not that God cannot create a mountain without a valley, but rather that “He has given me a mind such that I cannot conceive a mountain without a valley” (AT 5:224). In Regis’s view, though, it would follow from the fact that the divine nature cannot be hemmed in by our mind that we cannot conceive of substance in terms of this nature. Instead, we are restricted to what our mind can comprehend, namely, the indivisible essences that God has freely created. This aspect of Regis’s thought sheds some light on his differences with Malebranche. Both Malebranche and Regis accepted the conclusion in Descartes that we clearly and distinctly conceive the essence of body to consist in extension alone. Yet, Malebranche insisted that we can be certain of the truth of this conception only if we believe that it is grounded in necessary features of God’s own “universal Reason.” For this reason, he concluded that Descartes’s doctrine that eternal truths issue from God’s will rather than His intellect yields a kind of skepticism, particularly concerning our knowledge of body (OCM 129–36).123 In contrast, Regis rejected the claim that there is a universal reason that is “coeternal and consubstantial” with God on the grounds that “human reason has nothing in common with [the reason] of God,” and that God Himself does not have a mind like our own but is instead a “supersubstantial mind” (Usage 158). Although Malebranche is not explicitly mentioned here, he clearly is the target, just as he is the target of the argument later in this text that God does not see creatures in His perfections, because it has been proved that the perfections of God have nothing in common with creatures, and by consequence that they cannot represent them; we must say only that God sees creatures in His will, insofar as it is by his decree that he produces them and conserves them. (169)

Regis concluded from the fact that there are no creaturely essences prior to God’s free decision to create them ex nihilo that God has nothing in common with creatures, a result that is reinforced by his own dissimilarity principle. His deepest objection to Malebranche’s account of intelligible extension, therefore, is not that it requires the Spinozistic view that bodies are parts of God. Rather, it is that such an account simply ignores the unbridgeable gap that separates God’s supremely perfect nature from the essence of matter that He has freely created.124 123 124

The restriction to knowledge of body is explained by Malebranche’s view that we have access only to God’s idea of body, and not to His idea of mind. On this view, see Schmaltz 1996. It is interesting that in a 1693 response to the work of dom Fran¸cois Lamy, Arnauld argued against the Malebranchean identification of God with “universal being” by claiming that

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Admittedly, Malebranche qualified the claim that “God contains in Himself in an intelligible manner the perfections of all the beings He has created or that He can create” when he noted that God contains these perfections only “eminently” and in a manner that we cannot comprehend (OCM 3:136).125 As I have indicated, however, Regis went further in claiming that God can contain His effects “neither formally nor eminently.” God must know creatures through His own will since there is nothing in His nature or essence that can represent them. In this way, Regis’s doctrine of the supersubstantiality of the divine mind amplifies the emphasis in Desgabets on the abyss of divine perfections. It is interesting that Desgabets himself took Malebranche to task for claiming at one point that reason cannot demonstrate that God is a mind rather than some being more perfect than a mind.126 He urged that, given the principle that all ideas correspond to their objects, the fact that we have an idea that represents God as a supremely perfect mind reveals directly that God is a mind.127 As noted earlier, Regis also suggested at times that we adequately conceive of God as a perfect mind. Nonetheless, he emphasized more than Desgabets the result of the created truths doctrine that God’s thought differs fundamentally from our own. Moreover, Regis indicated more clearly than Desgabets ever did that this doctrine conflicts with Malebranche’s conclusion that the natures of creatures are contained in God’s own ideas.128

2.9 radical solutions to descartes’s problems We started with Descartes’s unusual created truths doctrine but have ended with the even more unusual emphasis in Regis on the supersubstantiality of God. Along the way, we encountered what is, from Descartes’s own perspective, a revisionary ontology in Desgabets and Regis that posits atemporal substances and their temporal modes. In offering this ontology, however, the radical Cartesians were attempting to get to the root of problems with Descartes’s doctrine. An initial problem is that Descartes himself was not clear on the scope of his doctrine. Desgabets clarified matters when he

125 126

127 128

“the term being, sine additio, is equivocal” (OA 40:198). For the context of this argument, see Moreau 1994. Unlike Regis, however, Arnauld did not connect this line of argument to Descartes’s created truths doctrine. Compare OCM 6:118f. For a discussion of this point in Malebranche, see Schmaltz 2000a. See CdC 181f. Malebranche’s claim occurs in a section of the Recherche that warns against the presumption of thinking that the only substances there could be are minds or bodies; see OCM 1:470 –73. See Chapter 3 for more on this principle and its importance to the relation between the views of Desgabets and Malebranche. There is no mention of the Cartesian doctrine, for instance, in Desgabets’s discussion of Malebranche’s vision in God, in CdC 198 –216.

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distinguished between God’s prevolitional knowledge of His own essence and His postvolitional knowledge of the essences that derive from His indifferent will. Desgabets further indicated how the essences so derive when he identified them with created substances that exist outside of time and thus are incapable of change. Having made this identification, however, he needed to modify the traditional understanding of the relation between substances and their modes in a quasi-Spinozistic manner. The fact that Desgabets had no knowledge of Spinoza would explain his lack of concern with drift of his thought toward the conclusions of this reviled thinker. In contrast, Regis not only knew Spinoza’s views but also was sufficiently worried by them to devote an entire section of the Usage to their refutation. Even so, this refutation endorsed a Spinozistic argument for the indivisibility of material substance that Desgabets had anticipated. To distinguish God from material substance, Regis could no longer rely on Descartes’s strategy of appealing to the divisibility of matter. His new strategy was to draw attention to the consequence of Descartes’s created truths doctrine that created material substance differs entirely from God. Here it is the doctrine of God’s supersubstantiality that blocks the Spinozistic identification of God with material substance. Desgabets and Regis could have avoided the radical entanglements with Spinozism had they simply restricted themselves to a conceptualist analysis of created truths doctrine. In this way, they could have explained the immutability of necessary truths simply by appealing to the immutability of our thoughts concerning such truths. Essences could, in turn, just be reduced to the truths. On such an analysis, however, it is difficult to see how one could explicate Descartes’s own claim that his doctrine provides metaphysical foundations for physics. In contrast, Desgabets and Regis provided a metaphysical interpretation of this doctrine that is clearly relevant to issues in physics. Desgabets linked the doctrine explicitly to the thesis of the indefectibility of material substance, while Regis went even further in linking it to the thesis of the indefectibility of motion. Another problem with conceptualism, which Foucher and Malebranche both emphasized, concerns the possible mutability of the features of our minds that ground the immutability of the eternal truths. Desgabets and Regis attempted to address this problem by grounding this immutability in something distinct from our mutable perceptions. This solution reveals that they were committed at a deep level to a realism that places the ground of the immutable truths we perceive in a world external to our perception. In this respect, they were similar to Malebranche, who also rejected any reduction of immutable truths to our own perceptions. However, we have seen how Regis appealed to Descartes’s created truths doctrine in order to reject the conclusion in Malebranche that immutable truths are grounded directly in God’s own ideas. Here he followed Desgabets in holding that these truths derive instead from essences that are created substantial beings. Both

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concluded, in particular, that truths concerning extension are grounded in a created extended substance. Desgabets and Regis held that such a substance provides the basis not only for truths concerning extension but also for our own perception of those truths. From the fact that there is this sort of relation to our perception, they drew the further epistemological conclusion that we can know the existence of extended substance simply by reflecting on the nature of that perception. Here they set themselves in opposition to Descartes, who claimed in the Meditations that experience can afford no immediate knowledge of the existence of an extra-mental world. In the next chapter, we will consider the argument against such a claim in Desgabets and Regis that derives from the principle in their writings that our ideas of the external world bear an essential intentional relation to extra-mental objects. Our discussion of Desgabets’s creation doctrine began with his reaction to Malebranche in the Critique, and it emphasized throughout issues pertaining to Malebranche and Spinoza. Our treatment of Desgabets’s views on ideas and intentionality will also start with his Critique. Malebranche will again loom large, while Spinoza will make a cameo appearance.

3 The Intentionality Doctrine Ideas and Extra-mental Objects

In his “Suppl´ement” to the Meditations, Desgabets noted that “there is an extreme difference between the thoughts of M. Descartes and mine” regarding the thesis that one can conceive what does not exist. According to Descartes, “although a thing never had any existence and never will be a thing, we can know it and conceive it very distinctly, provided that it is less perfect than us.” In contrast, Desgabets insisted that “the least things as well as the greatest must be existing and conceivable before being conceived.” He explained this fundamental difference by appealing to the fact that Descartes “believes that thought is equally thought, whether it has for an object being or nothingness,” whereas he himself holds that “ideas suppose their object in conformity with [the] principle that it suffices to think of a thing . . . to have a demonstrative proof of its existence” (RD 6:254). In this text, Desgabets indicated that the principle that an idea demonstrates the existence of its object is “the most simple, the best known and the most necessary of all principles” (6:223). It does not seem too much to call the difference here between Descartes and Desgabets “extreme.” Indeed, Desgabets indicated in the “Suppl´ement” that his account of ideas establishes that “it is impossible to reasonably doubt the existence of corporeal substance” and thereby “happily reverses the whole machine of the first two Meditations of M. Descartes” (RD 6:225). Desgabets’s recommendation is that one bypass the skeptical opening of the Meditations and simply start with an investigation of what he took to be “the most necessary of all principles” concerning the intentionality of ideas. On one historiographical account, popularized in the work of Richard Rorty, Descartes’s initial focus on the problem of external world skepticism set the problematic for modern philosophy.1 Given such an account, Desgabets’s opposition to even posing this kind of skepticism is a radically 1

See Rorty 1979.

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anti-Cartesian and, indeed, antimodern aspect of his system. However, Desgabets urged that his opposition follows from features of Descartes’s own system. There is a similar understanding in Regis, one of the most prominent Cartesians in late seventeenth-century France. It is true that, in the 1690s, Regis was concerned with defending the certainty of the claims in the first two Meditations against the objections of the main French critics of Cartesianism (see §5.2). By the time of the 1704 Usage, however, he attempted to distance himself from the view in Descartes that experience can reveal immediately only the existence of mind as a thinking thing. This shift in Regis’s position provides evidence, beyond that provided by his discussion of the creation doctrine (see §2.6), of the profound influence of his other principal teacher, Desgabets. It might be thought that this influence is of little significance, given the initial implausibility of the claim common to Desgabets and Regis that ideas of the external world establish immediately the existence of extra-mental objects. However, the claim is more plausible once it is understood that Desgabets and Regis typically took the objects involved here to be essences that provide the grounds for truths concerning external objects. Even more, their realism concerning essences is connected – in a manner that has hardly begun to be explored – to Malebranche’s famous debate with Arnauld concerning the nature of ideas. In §3.1, I begin my own discussion of Desgabets’s views on ideas and essences with his presentation of them in a published response to the skeptical objections that Simon Foucher offered against Malebranche. Malebranche did not appreciate this response, which he took to misrepresent his own position. But although it is fair to say that there are misrepresentations in Desgabets’s text, his discussion there of our idea of extension rests on a kind of realism that has a counterpart in Malebranche. In §3.2, I consider more directly Desgabets’s principle behind his realism, namely, that all ideas conform to their objects. I call this the intentionality principle.2 Desgabets presented this principle as part of a “cartesianized” version of a traditional scholastic direct realism, but he also offered it as a development of the rule in Descartes that all clear and distinct perceptions are true. As I indicate in §3.3, however, his discussion reveals an antipathy toward the account of the “objective reality” of ideas in Descartes that Arnauld defended in his polemic with Malebranche. Regis later endorsed Arnauld’s identification of representative ideas with the objective reality of our perceptions, but he also accepted a variant of the claim in Desgabets that the intentionality principle shows that there is an object of our perceptions of the material world that exists external to those perceptions. This is a particular application of what I call the object argument. A related use of 2

Beaude labels it “un principe d’intentionalit´e” (Beaude 1979, 6), but it has also been called the “representation principle” (see Cook 2002).

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this argument appears in Malebranche, who joined Desgabets and Regis in rejecting Descartes’s suggestion in “Meditation Three” that we can be the source of our ideas of corporeal things. Toward the end of Chapter 1, I defined the intentionality doctrine as the thesis that the ideas of mind and body require the existence of the substances to which they are intentionally related. Such a doctrine goes beyond both the intentionality principle and the object argument insofar as it makes a specific point about the nature of the external object of our ideas. What is further required for this doctrine is the claim in Desgabets and Regis that the very conceivability of a substance and its modes presupposes the actual existence of that substance. Their argument, which I call the essence argument, is that it is impossible that essences of creatures have a “purely possible” existence that is not grounded in an existing created substance. I consider this argument in §3.4, as well as a response to the argument that is provided by the position in Malebranche that the essence of extension can be contained in God’s idea of extension even though no extended substance actually exists. As I indicate in §3.5, Desgabets and Regis had quasi-Spinozistic reasons connected to their creation doctrine for resisting such a position. These reasons provide a Cartesian basis for their opposition to the claim in Descartes that the existence of res cogitans is more evident than the existence of res extensa. Such a claim constitutes the first of two main “faults” that Desgabets found in the Meditations. I set out an account of this fault in §3.6 that draws on my discussion of the essence argument and then consider in §3.7 how that argument provides the first (but only the first) step in Desgabets and Regis toward a realism that takes the existence of the material world to be necessary for its appearance to us in experience.

3.1 desgabets’s critique : ideas, essences, and extension In §2.2, we considered the criticisms of Descartes’s created truths doctrine in Foucher’s Critique of Malebranche’s Recherche de la v´erit´e. Foucher’s text considers various “suppositions” and “assertions” from Malebranche’s text that purportedly are contrary to his own method for finding the truth.3 3

The suppositions are (1) that the mind is indivisible and immaterial, (2) that there are necessary truths, (3) that truths of faith are true, (4) that there is a pure intellect, (5) that ideas represent objects external to us, (6) that ideas represent without being similar to what they represent, and (7) that we know by sense that extension exists external to us. The assertions are (1) that it is the will and not the intellect that judges, (2) that consent must be given to propositions only if the refusal of consent causes “an interior pain and secret reproaches from reason,” (3) that certain probabilities taken together can constitute evident demonstrations, (4) that judgments from the senses are all false, (5) that there may be certain beings that are neither bodies nor minds, and (6) that we can know the essence of the soul and of matter. In §2.2, we considered Foucher’s discussion of supposition (2), and in §4.1 we will consider his discussion of supposition (4). What is most relevant here is his views on suppositions (5)–(7).

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Foucher raised his objections from the perspective of a moderate Academic (as opposed to a more extreme Pyrrhonian) skeptic; indeed, his Critique is written in the form of a “Lettre par un Academicien.”4 One skeptical argument that is particularly prominent there is directed against the Cartesian view in Malebranche that we perceive bodies by means of ideas. Foucher urged that since Malebranche held that these ideas are modes of mind, and since on his Cartesian view mind is a substance distinct in nature from body, no ideas can resemble bodies, and thus no ideas can represent their true nature (Crit. 44–50). In his response to Foucher, in a 1675 “pr´eface” added to the second volume of the Recherche, Malebranche complained that his critic had written against his method even though he had not presented any in the first volume of his text. The main problem here was that Foucher was under the mistaken impression that this volume constituted the entire work, an impression no doubt fostered by the fact that it does not explicitly announce a successor and that it ends definitively with the word “FIN.” However, Malebranche protested that even if one excuses this mistake, still Foucher cannot be excused for misunderstandings of claims in the first volume. He emphasized, for instance, that he had devoted a section of the third book of the Recherche to a refutation of the view, attributed to him by Foucher, that ideas that represent bodies exist in our own mind. His caustic conclusion is that “when one Critiques a book, it seems to me that it is necessary at least to have read it” (OCM 2:496). Malebranche ended the “pr´eface” by noting that perhaps “those who would insult me would find themselves ill-treated by some invisible hand; because I cannot prevent it from being the case that the love of truth leads some spirits, who have more grace than me, from defending a work in which they had no part” (OCM 2:499). There is reason to think that the “invisible hand” belonged to Desgabets.5 We know from his correspondence with Malebranche that Desgabets had read the Recherche with some care by the end of 1674.6 In a 1677 letter, moreover, Desgabets recalled that it was “two years ago” that “I made the Critique de la Critique of these books [of the Recherche] and having given copies to different people someone arranged that it be published in Paris without my involvement” (OCM 18:126). As in 4

5 6

The full title is Critique de la Recherche de la verit´e. Ou` l’on examine en mˆeme-temps une partie des Principes de M r Descartes. Lettre, par un Academicien. Whereas Pyrrhonian skepticism traditionally called for a balance of judgment that yields a quiescence or ataraxia, Foucher followed the Academic skeptics in emphasizing that even though we cannot know essences, we can have fallible probable opinions concerning appearances. For more on Academic skepticism in Foucher and more generally in early modern thought, see Neto 1997. As first suggested in Gouhier 1976b, 97. On the history of the Desgabets–Malebranche relation, see Robinet 1974. See OCM 18:80, n. 2, which indicates the chronology of Desgabets’s initial contact with Malebranche.

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the case of Desgabets’s Consid´erations (see §1.1), so also his Critique was published anonymously and, apparently, without his consent. One can surmise that Malebranche was informed of the imminent publication of an anonymous response to Foucher on his behalf, and that he decided to ally himself publicly with it even before he had seen a copy of it. That he regretted this decision upon actually reading Desgabets’s text is apparent from his terse comments in an “avertissement” added to the second and third editions (published 1676 and 1678, respectively) of the second volume of the Recherche.7 There he claimed, with reference to Desgabets’s Critique, that while one might well believe “that I had some part in his work, I believe that I must say that although I am very satisfied with his person, I am not extremely content with his book.” Then he added, echoing the comment that he had directed against Foucher, that “those who trouble themselves to defend or to combat others must read their works with some care in order to know their sentiments well.” In contrast to the case of Foucher, Malebranche did attempt to soften the blow by adding that his Recherche “does not merit that the person of whom I speak, who certainly has much spirit and merit, defend it or critique it” (OCM 2:500). This comment no doubt reflects his admiration for Desgabets’s work on the front lines of the French battles over Cartesianism. Even so, Malebranche could not hide his disappointment concerning his fellow Cartesian’s discussion of the Recherche. A good portion of Malebranche’s disappointment derives from his expectation that Desgabets would provide a detailed response on his behalf against Foucher’s attack. But while Desgabets showed great respect for Malebranche in his Critique, he also noted explicitly in its preface that “I will abandon the author of the Recherche as well as of its Critique when it appears to me that they have made some errors” (CdC 20). It was, therefore, unfair of Malebranche to suggest that Desgabets was concerned primarily with defending his views.8 Even so, there are grounds for the charge of misrepresentation. As we have seen, in §2.2.1, Desgabets followed Foucher in taking Malebranche to be a defender of Descartes’s doctrine of created eternal truths. Moreover, he adopted Foucher’s mistaken assumption that Malebranche identified representative ideas with mental modifications. Thus, he took himself to be siding with Malebranche in arguing against Foucher that the dissimilarities between ideas in our mind and objects external to it do not preclude the conclusion that the former represent the latter (CdC 115–22). It is true that certain remarks in the first volume of the Recherche explain why Desgabets and Foucher may have thought that Malebranche endorsed the traditional Cartesian view that 7 8

Both the “pr´eface” and the “avertissement” were excluded from the fourth (1678) and subsequent editions of the Recherche. Thanks to Monte Cook for indicating to me the need to make this point.

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representative ideas are modifications of mind.9 However, Malebranche had some right to protest against Desgabets, as he did against Foucher, that the explicit argument in the Recherche that we see bodies by means of ideas that exist in God indicates clearly enough that he rejected such a view. A further misunderstanding in Desgabets is connected to Foucher’s discussion of the supposition in Malebranche that extension exists external to our mind. Foucher cited, in particular, the claim in the first book of the Recherche that even though we sometimes falsely imagine that certain bodies are present, as in the case of delirium, “we are not deceived in believing that [extension and its modifications] have an existence that is real and independent of our mind, although it is very difficult to prove it demonstratively.”10 Foucher protested that there can be no demonstration of the extra-mental existence of extension since our sense experience reveals the existence only of certain modifications of our soul (Crit. 79). Malebranche responded testily that he was not obliged to offer a proof of the existence of extension in the first book of the Recherche since the purpose of that book was “only to combat the errors of the senses with regard to sensible qualities” (OCM 2:497).11 Even so, Desgabets rushed to Malebranche’s defense by claiming that the existence of the material world follows from the principle, which serves as “the foundation of the certitude of all our thoughts,” that there is “a correspondence between our ideas or thoughts and the objects of which one thinks” (CdC 123f). This “demonstration” is not initially compelling. An immediate counterexample seems to be provided by the case of delirium that Malebranche mentioned in the passage from the Recherche cited in Foucher’s Critique. However, Desgabets recognized a distinction between indefectible matter, which is a “substantial being” that has an atemporal “being of existence” that cannot be annihilated, and particular bodies, which are “modal beings” that can fail to possess any being of existence (see §2.3). He allowed that even modal beings have an atemporal “being of essence,” but he also held that this being is not ultimately distinct from the being of essence of the actually existing substance on which it depends (see §2.5). Thus, Desgabets’s foundational principle in no way requires that the particular objects that we perceive even in a state of delirium must have a being of existence. The principle requires only that they have a being of essence grounded in the substance of which they are modifications.12

9 10 11 12

See the passages cited in Watson 1966, ch. 4. Cited in Crit. 62. For the passage, see OCM 1:122. The title of the first book is, in fact, “Des erreurs des sens.” Compare the claim in the Critique that “if one thinks of a substance, for instance, matter, it really exists”; however, if one thinks of particular things such as enchanted palaces, mountains of gold or future voyages, these exist only in the sense that “there is a matter that is actually divisible and configurable in all the particular ways that one can imagine” (CdC 65f ).

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In the passage cited by Foucher, however, Malebranche insisted that there is “no necessary connection between the presence of an idea to the human mind and the existence of the thing this idea represents” (OCM 1:121). Furthermore, in one of the “Eclaircissements” that was first published with the Recherche in 1678, he argued, contrary to Descartes’s own view in “Meditation Six,” that reason can provide no argument for the existence of the material world that has the force of a mathematical demonstration.13 Never generous to his critics, Malebranche failed to mention that such a claim, in effect, grants the substance of Foucher’s skeptical position. Yet in granting this position, Malebranche revealed how far his own view was from Desgabets’s defense of it. Nevertheless, both Desgabets and Malebranche opposed Foucher’s own skeptical doubts concerning our understanding of immutable essences. Foucher noted that since the “new philosophers” (les Nouveaux) agree with the Pyrrhonians “that individuals have nothing that is immutable and that they are subject to continual vicissitudes,” it is difficult to see what could ground the necessity of the necessary truths. The changing individuals would not seem to provide the requisite ground. But if the essences are simply identified with our own ideas, then it would seem that “their immutability is only an appearance” and that knowledge of these essences “would exclude us entirely from knowledge [connoissance] of the true state of things” (Crit. 26f ). The skeptical point here – in line with the general tenor of Foucher’s remarks in his Critique – is that we are limited to appearances that do not reveal the immutable foundation of necessary truths. Malebranche and Desgabets rejected the identification of truths or essences with changing creatures. While Malebranche ridiculed the notion that necessary truths are “certain little beings, which are born and which die at all moments” (OCM 2:488), Desgabets emphasized that immutable essences are distinct from “particular things that depend on motion and that have a succession of days and years that God gives and takes away as He wills” (CdC 84f ). Desgabets held that the reality of such essences follows from the fundamental principle that ideas of extra-mental objects reveal the nature of something that actually exists external to us. He concluded that it is Foucher who is the radical Pyrrhonian skeptic in denying this principle. We have seen that Malebranche rejected the assumption in Desgabets that representative ideas are “in us.” As we will discover, however, he allowed that something akin to Desgabets’s principle is required to block the skeptical 13

Malebranche’s claim is introduced in OCM 3:62–64. Here Malebranche also argued, in line with the original claim in the Recherche, that we are not deceived in believing that extension exists, that the belief on faith that the Scriptures are the word of God provides a basis for a demonstrative argument for the existence of the material world. For a discussion of early modern reactions to the different arguments for the existence of the material world in Descartes and Malebranche, see McCracken 1998.

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conclusion that we are limited to our own perceptions and thereby have no knowledge “of the true state of things.”

3.2 the intentionality principle In his Critique, Desgabets insisted against Foucher that the fact that the first operation of the mind is always conformed to its object, that is to say, that one cannot think of nothing, absolutely reverses Pyrrhonism and brings to an end all that there is in the Skeptics and Academicians in the world, and solidly establishes the foundations of all the sciences. (CdC 58)

Here the principle that “the first operation of mind” always conforms to its object – which I have called the intentionality principle – is equated with the principle that one cannot think of nothing, or alternatively that in thinking one must think of something. The reasoning is that one can think only if one thinks “of ” something, and that one can think of something only if there is an object to which the thought is intentionally related. Without the object, there is no thought of that object, and thus no thought. Desgabets claimed that his intentionality principle is so obvious that even “infants and those that one introduces to logic know the truth of this principle” (RD 6:223). In the preceding passage, however, the principle is stated in terms of the notion – surely obvious neither to infants nor to novices in logic – of the “first operation of mind.” In the Critique, Desgabets indicated that he borrowed this theoretical notion from the scholastics.14 On the scholastic view in Thomas, which derives in turn from Aristotle’s De Anima, there is a distinction between an immediate intellectual grasp of “simple essences,” which cannot be false, and a discursive combination and division of concepts of different essences on the part of reason, which can involve falsity.15 The corresponding distinction in Desgabets is between a first mental operation – which he also called a “simple conception” or “simple idea” – that must conform with its object and subsequent “judgments” that go beyond such an operation, and so can fail to so conform (CdC 56). The additional requirement in Desgabets that the first mental operation conform to a particular object that is “real and existing” (62) is perhaps also connected to the later scholastic position, deriving from the work of Scotus and Ockham, that “intuitive” (i.e., nondiscursive) intellectual cognition presupposes an existent and present singular.16 In any event, there is in Desgabets a variant of 14 15 16

See the reference to “what one calls in the schools the first operation of mind” (CdC 56). See S.Th. Ia, 85, 5–6. Thomas cited here Aristotle’s position in De Anima, A 2:685. Thomas distinguished between an immediate intellectus and a discursive ratio (S.Th. Ia, 58, 3), and he denied that we have an intellectus of singulars (ibid., Ia, 86, 1). Later thinkers introduced the notion of an immediate cognition that is intuitive, and Scotus and Ockham insisted against Aquinas and orthodox Thomists that we have an intuitive cognition of singulars; see

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the scholastic “direct realist” view that we have a cognition of the external world that involves some sort of direct or unmediated contact with an object external to us.17 Despite these surface similarities, Desgabets’s direct realism differs significantly from the form of this realism in the scholastics. One difference is that Desgabets took the objects of simple ideas to be not traditional Aristotelian substances and their qualities but rather essences identified with atemporal substantial beings. The difference is connected to what I called (in §2.4.2) Desgabets’s “revolutionary” Cartesian metaphysics. Another difference derives from his acceptance of “the great discovery of Descartes concerning the nature of pretended sensible qualities,” and in particular of the result of that discovery that qualities such as sounds, tastes, and colors are “next to us, are effectively our sentiments, our perceptions, our thoughts, passions in the soul of which it is the subject and the immediate object” (RD 5:164f ). At Commercy, Desgabets’s Cartesian critics poked fun at his claim that “the soul is the object of the senses” by referring to “the green souls [ˆames vertes] of which the Reverend Father has spoken to us from time to time” (R 242). The joke caught on outside of Commercy.18 When Desgabets said that the soul is the object of our perception of sensible qualities, however, it seems that he was primarily concerned with making the Cartesian point that the qualities we perceive do not resemble anything external to the soul. Such a point marks a fundamental departure from the view of Aristotle and later scholastics that in the case of “proper sensibles” such as color and sound, the senses correctly reveal the nature of their external object.19 Desgabets also departed from the scholastic position that acts of assent and dissent pertain to the intellect rather than to the will. In his Critique, Desgabets addressed such a view in the course of responding to Foucher’s objection to Malebranche that consent to evident propositions does not involve an act of will.20 There he insisted with Malebranche on Descartes’s own position – which has no clear scholastic precedent – that it is the faculty

17 18

19

20

Boler 1982. Desgabets himself spoke at times of knowing particular substances intuitivement; see, for example, CdC 48 and RD 6:221. For the claim that there are various forms of direct realism in the early modern period, see Yolton 1984. Yolton mentions Desgabets only in passing. See, for instance, a 1677 letter in which Mme de S´evign´e noted to her Cartesian daughter, Mme de Grignan, that “si votre p`ere Descartes le savait, il empˆecherait votre aˆ me d’ˆetre verte, et vous seriez bien honteuse qu’elle fˆ ut noire, ou de quelque autre couleur” (S´evign´e 1972–78, 2:299). For more on the dispute among the Cartesians over the “painted soul,” see Schmaltz 1996, 82–84. Compare Deprun 1973. See S.Th. Ia, 85, 6, which draws on the position in De Anima, at A 2:665. According to both Aristotle and Thomas, error is possible only with respect to “common sensibles” such as size and shape. This is Foucher’s objection to the first “assertion” that he found in Malebranche; see note 3.

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of will that contributes assent or dissent to judgment (CdC 138f ).21 For Desgabets, one particular virtue of the new Cartesian position is that it allows for all error in judgment to be attributed to the contribution of the will. Desgabets’s account of judgment also serves to connect his intentionality principle to the “general rule” in Descartes that “whatever I clearly and distinctly perceive is true” (AT 7:35). Descartes indicated that all our perceptions are clear and distinct when considered in themselves, and that they become confused or obscure only when they are conjoined with judgment. Thus, he noted in the Principles that the perception of pain is “clear” in the sense of being “present to the attentive mind” but fails to be “distinct,” or contain only what is clear, because one judges that the pain resembles something in the painful part of the body (AT 8-1:22). In line with this point, he concluded that pain and color “are clearly and distinctly perceived when they are regarded merely as sensation or thoughts” but are not so perceived “when they are judged to be real things existing outside our mind” (8-1:33). On the position here, all of Desgabets’s simple ideas would count as clear and distinct perceptions simply by virtue of the fact that they are uncontaminated by false judgments. It is, therefore, understandable that in his “Suppl´ement,” Desgabets presented his intentionality principle as a version of Descartes’s truth rule. He held that a new version is required since Descartes himself “has not worked to see through the meaning of this principle, which would go infinitely farther than he has taken it.” In particular, Desgabets criticized Descartes for failing to see in “Meditation Three” that his truth rule establishes not only that the existence of God follows from the fact that we have an our idea of Him, but also that “the ideas that we have of the least of things” suffice to establish the existence of their objects (RD 6:218f ). This use of the intentionality principle to derive the existence of objects of all of our ideas I have called the object argument. The object argument assumes that the content of our simple ideas is determined by their intentional objects. As we have seen, Desgabets indicated that no external object is required in the case of ideas of sensible qualities. In this case, the content of the ideas is determined by internal features of the perceptions.22 However, he urged that, in the case where the object cannot be reduced to such features, the Cartesian truth rule requires that this object 21

22

For Foucher’s objection, see Crit. 82. For the position in Descartes that it is the will that assents or dissents in judgment, see the “Fourth Meditation,” at AT 7:56f. In 1706, the Jesuits formally condemned the Cartesian proposition that “judgment and reasoning are acts not of intellect but of will” (prop. 27, in Ariew 1994, 6). It is true that Desgabets’s claim that “all our thoughts or ideas, which I take for the same thing, always have a real object that is such external to the understanding as it is represented by thought” (RD 6:220) suggests that all simple conceptions conform to external objects. In the Critique, however, he asserted only that “simple conception is always true and conformed to its object” (CdC 56; cf. 58), without requiring that the object be external to mind.

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exist external to us. One relatively straightforward case here would be our simple (or distinct) idea of extension.23 Desgabets argued that since sensible qualities cannot be reduced to modes of extension, the fact that such qualities are identical to states of our soul suffices to show that our soul is not extended (cf. §4.2). But then our simple ideas of extension and its modes could not have as their object some internal feature of our perceptions. The conclusion is that the object of these ideas must, in fact, exist external to our soul. This conclusion anticipates to some extent the claim in Malebranche, which he introduced in one of his 1678 “Eclaircissements” to the Recherche, that our soul “does not contain intelligible extension as one of its modes because this extension is not perceived as a mode of the soul’s being, but simply as a being” (OCM 3:148). In this text, Malebranche further contrasted the case of our perception of this “intelligible extension” with our perceptions of “pleasure, pain, taste, heat, color, all our sensations and all our passions,” where the objects of perception are simply “modifications of our soul” (3:150). With Desgabets, then, Malebranche held that our perception of extension, unlike our perception of sensible qualities, presupposes the existence of some object external to our soul.24 Malebranche introduced the notion of intelligible extension after the publication of the Critique, and so Desgabets had no opportunity to comment on this notion in that text. Moreover, he was not in a good position to appreciate the relation to Malebranche that I have emphasized since he followed Foucher in taking the Recherche to endorse the more traditional Cartesian thesis that representative ideas are only modifications of our mind. In fact, Arnauld later defended such a thesis in response to the claims in Malebranche concerning intelligible extension. But although Desgabets and, later, Regis were closer to Arnauld than to Malebranche in denying that our idea of extension is anything distinct from our thought, both were closer to Malebranche than to Arnauld in holding that our thought of extension must be intentionally related to an object external to our mind.

3.3 objective reality and the object argument In his polemic with Malebranche, Arnauld responded to the discussion in the “Eclaircissements” concerning God’s intelligible extension by defending the position that our soul contains the extension it perceives. In terms that 23

24

In fact, however, Desgabets held that it follows from the intentionality principle more generally that “if we think of matter, or mind, of God, etc. all that is real and exists in the manner in which we conceive it” (CdC 62). Malebranche’s text also makes the point, not found in Desgabets, that our conception of extension is clear while our conception of the sensory states of our own soul is confused. For a discussion of this additional point, see Schmaltz 1996, ch. 2.

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he borrowed from Descartes, Arnauld insisted in his Vrayes et fausses id´ees (1683) that our perception represents extension by virtue of the fact that extension is present “objectively” in that perception (OA 38:253f ).25 In the course of his discussion, Arnauld indicated an alternative understanding of Desgabets’s intentionality principle in just these terms. There, he endorsed the principle itself when he noted that since it is clear that I think, it is also clear that I think of something, because thought is essentially thus. So, since there can be no thought or knowledge without an object known, I can no more ask what is the reason why I think of something, than why I think, since it is impossible to think without thinking of something. (OA 38:184)

For Arnauld, though, the principle that to think is to think of something requires only that our thought have a certain “objective reality” by virtue of which it is the thought of one object rather than of another. Given this view, Desgabets cannot simply appeal to the intentionality principle in arguing for the conclusion that the simple idea of extension presupposes the existence of an extra-mental object. Rather, he must provide some reason for rejecting an interpretation of that principle on which the object of our perception of extension is determined solely by internal features of that perception. At the Commercy conferences, Desgabets did, in fact, confront a version of the intentionality principle very similar to Arnauld’s. There, his critics objected that the axiom that to think is to think of something requires not that “the thing really exists in itself,” but only that “the soul has in it the idea of what it represents, [and] it suffices that [what is represented] exists objectively, because it has a being, a nature, a truth that renders it knowable” (R 264). The Cardinal de Retz developed this objection by noting that God can communicate to us “the idea that He has of [an object], that is to say, His intelligence terminating in the natures to which He has given at least objective being by His decree.”26 Retz’s conclusion is that “objective being alone is capable of making men know the nature of the things that God has resolved to produce” (255). Desgabets countered that this “pretended objective being” completely undermines “the certainty of all our sciences and cognitions” (R 256). He noted that such being can be “nothing other than what one commonly calls in the Schools, what has being only objectively in the intellect, which is properly defined as a chimerical being of reason” (261). Desgabets had in mind 25

26

Arnauld explained that “a thing is objectively in my mind when I conceive it” (OA 38:198). The notion of objective presence is connected in particular to Descartes’s discussion in the “Third Meditation” of the cause of the “objective reality” of our idea of God (AT 7:40f ). For more on Arnauld’s argument against intelligible extension, see Schmaltz 2000a. Here Retz agreed with Desgabets that God is the free cause of natures, and even cited himself one of Desgabets’s favorite claims in Augustine that “the nature of each thing is the will of God” (R 254). See Chapter 2, at note 36.

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here the scholastic account of entia rationis, “beings of reason” that have no actual being apart from the intellect. The scholastics themselves commonly distinguished between entia rationis cum fundamento in re, rational beings such as negations and privations that have a “foundation in reality,” and entia rationis sine fundamento in re, merely imaginary beings that have no such foundation.27 Desgabets’s main point against his critics is that if the entia we are dealing with have only an objective existence in the intellect, with no grounding in a res that exists external to mind, then none of these beings has a foundation in reality, and thus all count as merely imaginary beings. For the claim that the objective being of certain thoughts has a foundation in reality to have any bite at all, there must be an external reality from which such being derives.28 It is instructive to compare Desgabets’s position here to Descartes’s own response to what he called “the objection of objections” to his account of extension.29 This objection is drawn from one of the “instances” that Descartes’s critic, Pierre Gassendi, offered in response to Descartes’s own replies to his set of objections to the Meditations.30 In a letter to Clerselier included in the 1647 French edition of the Meditations,31 Descartes took the crucial Gassendist objection to be that “mathematical extension, which I offer as the fundamental principle of my physics, is nothing other than my thought, and that it neither has nor can have any subsistence outside my mind, it being only an abstraction that I make from the bodies of physics.” He ridiculed the implication here that extension is a mere figment of the imagination by noting that those who accept such a view of extension must hold that “nothing that we can understand or conceive or imagine can be admitted as true,” and thereby “close the door to reason and content themselves with being monkeys or parrots and not men” (AT 9-1:212). The point here is that if the mere fact that we conceive something reveals that it cannot exist external to our thought, then it is impossible even to have coherent thoughts concerning extra-mental reality. 27 28

29

30 31

On this scholastic distinction, see Menn 1994, 184f, n. 3, 191, n. 14. It is not clear that this point provides an adequate response to Retz, who allowed that the truth of our thoughts is grounded in a conformity to God’s own freely created ideas (see R 253f ). Desgabets himself seems to have attempted to respond to this point by noting that, in the case where we form the objective being rather than God, being would be no different from a chimera (R 261). However, his more complete response would seem to be that even freely created ideas in God must be related to substances external to Him; see §3.5. Thanks to Thomas Lennon for drawing my attention to the relevance of Descartes’s remarks here in a personal communication. I am not sure, however, that he would endorse my claim that Descartes and Desgabets differ in the respect indicated presently. This is Gassendi’s 1644 Disquisitio Metaphysica sive Dubitationes et Instantiæ. Descartes was so incensed by Gassendi’s temerity in publishing a response to his replies that he excised both the “Fifth Objections” and “Fifth Replies” from the 1647 edition and appended the letter to Clerselier to the “Sixth Replies.”

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Descartes’s argument against Gassendi is structurally similar to Desgabets’s argument against “pretended objective reality.” Both objected to the skeptical consequences of holding that the reality of our thought of the external world is something that is tied exclusively to our own mind. Yet there is a crucial difference. Desgabets was rejecting an objective reality that does not correspond to something that actually exists external to mind. In contrast, Descartes was opposed only to a mathematical extension that cannot possibly exist external to mind. As I indicate later, he wanted to allow for the conceivability of the case where an extension that can exist external to us has, in fact, only an objective existence in our thought. Even Regis seems to have been favorably disposed toward the kind of “pretended objective being” that Desgabets rejected. In his 1690 Syst`eme, Regis responded to Malebranche’s claim that our finite minds cannot contain the idea of infinity by noting that even though our idea of infinity is finite “according to its formal being,” that is, as a mode of thought, it nonetheless is infinite in the sense that it represents infinity (Syst`eme 1:194).32 Malebranche countered in a 1693 reply that only something infinite in essendo can be infinite in repræsentando (OCM 17-1:302), but in the following year (the last year of his life), Arnauld defended Regis by insisting on the intelligibility of the position that the infinite object of perception is contained in a finite perception in repræsentando (OA 40:88f).33 Here Arnauld was merely repackaging the view, which he had offered against Malebranche over a decade earlier, that the content of our perceptions is determined entirely by the objective reality contained within them. Indeed, in his 1704 Usage, Regis adopted Arnauld’s language in speaking of the “objective being” of an idea that serves to represent its “exemplary cause” (Usage 80).34 However, the reference here to exemplary causation marks a significant departure from Arnauld. As indicated in §2.7, Regis adopted the principle that the exemplary cause “formally contains” the perfections that its idea represents. In his Syst`eme, he appealed to such a principle in support of the conclusion that it follows simply from the fact that we have an idea or perception of extension that a substance that formally contains the property of extension – that is to say, that is actually extended – exists as the exemplary cause of this idea (Syst`eme 1:98).35 Regis added that this proof of the existence of the material world is “so simple and so natural that I cannot conceive why I have been so long in comprehending it” (1:75). The suggestion here 32 33 34

35

A similar position is repeated in Usage 239f. For Malebranche’s response, which was published in 1699, see OCM 9:954. For more on the exchange here among Regis, Malebranche, and Arnauld, see §5.4.2. Even though Regis did not use this language in the 1690 Syst`eme, he did speak in a 1694 R´eplique to Malebranche of the idea of extension as being “objectively infinite” (Regis 1694, 23). Compare Usage 235–38.

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is that he was drawing on a proof from another source. While this source is not named, the only serious candidate is Desgabets’s object argument.36 To be sure, Regis differed from Desgabets not only in holding that our idea of extension has a particular “objective” or representative being, but also in claiming that this being must have an “exemplary cause.”37 In both respects, Regis is closer to the argument in “Meditation Three” – which provided the basis for Desgabets’s version of the object argument – that God must exist as the cause of the “objective reality” of our idea of God. However, the argument in Descartes concerns the “efficient and total cause” of objective reality. In contrast, Regis distinguished the efficient cause that produces our ideas from the exemplary cause that serves as the model for their production. In the Usage, he noted that God is the “immediate efficient cause” and the operations of the sense organs the “second efficient causes” that produce our ideas, but that the objects of the ideas are the exemplary causes that “make an idea represent one thing rather than another” (Usage 235) (cf. §2.7). For Regis, then, it seems that the object is the cause of an idea simply in the sense that it bears an essential intentional relation to that idea. The causal connection that Regis posited between an idea and its object also differs from the sort of connection between our perceptions and their object that Malebranche later required. In remarks directed against Regis, Malebranche claimed that since divine ideas alone are causally efficacious, only God’s own idea of extension can serve as the external object that “affects” our mind with a perception of body (OCM 17-1:282f ).38 Here Malebranche had in mind full-bodied efficient causation rather than Regis’s weaker exemplary causation. The claim in Malebranche that divine ideas are the efficient causes of our perceptions provides an occasionalist alternative to the conclusion in Regis that the operation of the sense organs serve as the second efficient causes of our ideas.39 But Malebranche also differed from Regis in combining the exemplary and efficient causes of our perceptions of the material world (see Figure 4). Nonetheless, Malebranche did follow Regis, as well as Desgabets, in concluding that our perceptions of the external world presuppose the existence of their objects. Indeed, Malebranche defended this conclusion by 36

37

38 39

It is telling that Regis considered an objection to his proof that appeals to the example idea of a Palais enchant´e (Syst`eme 1:76), the same idea that Desgabets invoked at several points in his unpublished writings (see, e.g., RD 3:77 and 6:236f ). There is a further difference, which I do not discuss here, concerning the application of the intentionality principle to our sensations. As we have seen, Desgabets suggested that this principle applies even to sensations since these states have internal objects. In contrast, Regis held that his principle applies to sensations since they represent relations of being helpful or harmful that hold between the human composite and other bodies external to it (cf. Syst`eme 1:169f, and Usage 80f ). Compare the discussion in §5.4.2. For the argument for this conclusion in Regis, which he borrowed from Desgabets, see §4.4.

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Desgabets Perception or idea of extension

represents/intentionally “of ”

Immutable essence of extension = Indefectible extended substance

Malebranche Immutable and necessary essence of extension = , God s idea of extension efficient cause of

represents intentionally “of ”

Perception of extension

Mutable and contingent extended substance

Regis Objective being of idea of extension

,,

exemplary cause of

Immutable essence of extension = Indefectible extended substance

,,

represents/intentionally “of ”

figure 4. Accounts of the perception of extension

appealing at one point to the principle – which Desgabets had earlier invoked in his Critique – that “to think of nothing, to have the perception of nothing, is not to perceive” (OCM 4:72). Malebranche made this appeal in an addition to the sixth edition (1702) of the Conversations chr´etiennes, as an element of the critique there of the position of the character Aristarque that “I can assert of an object what I clearly perceive to be contained in the idea that represents it,” where this idea is “only a modality of my mind, only my perception” (4:70f). In response, Malebranche’s spokesman, Theodore, claims that Aristarque is committed to saying that his perception of a sphere is true merely in the sense that one can affirm of such a sphere what you clearly conceive to be contained in the idea; that is to say, again according to you, in the modality of your soul, being that it represents a sphere. But this rigmarole, to which your sentiment reduces, can mean only that you can affirm that you perceive what you perceive, and not that what you perceive is in itself such as you perceive it, since you say that your ideas are not distinct from your perceptions. (4:71)

The argument against Aristarque is that if the idea that serves as the immediate object in the case of our perception of a sphere were merely a

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feature of that perception, then that idea could never take us beyond our perceptions. In this respect, the perception would be akin to perceptions of sensible qualities, which do not have as objects anything that could possibly exist external to mind. The perception of a sphere would then be an idea “of nothing” in the sense that it could not reveal even the ways in which external objects can possibly exist “in themselves.” Admittedly, the principle that Malebranche cited in this text differs in one significant respect from the intentionality principle in Desgabets and Regis. Whereas the latter Cartesians required that an extra-mental object contain what is present in our idea of it, Malebranche insisted that an idea external to our mind contains what is present in our perception of the object that idea represents. Nevertheless, Desgabets and Regis agreed with Malebranche that the immediate object of our perception of extension must exist external to us. Both also held, with Malebranche, that the reduction of that object to some internal feature of our mind eviscerates the Cartesian rule that clear and distinct perceptions are true. For all these Cartesians, then, our true perceptions can tell us something about the nature of the material world only if the perceptions are intentionally related to something that is external to our thought (see Figure 4). This agreement illustrates that early modern discussions of intentionality are not exhausted by the debate between Arnauld and Malebranche over whether ideas are “representative beings” distinct from our perceptions. This debate is, of course, both historically and philosophically important, and it is clear that both Desgabets and Regis sided with Arnauld on the basic point at issue. Nonetheless, an exclusive attention to this point can blind us to the fact that Desgabets and Regis both agreed with Malebranche that the truth of our perceptions of bodies presupposes the reality of some external object. This fact is significant because it reveals that all three Cartesians were opposed to Descartes’s claim in “Meditation Three” that his mind provides an adequate basis for the creation of the objective reality of his ideas of corporeal things. Descartes urged that even though properties of corporeal things cannot formally exist in him insofar as he is considered merely as a thinking thing, still the mere fact that he is a substance reveals the possibility that these modes can have an “eminent” existence in him (AT 7:44f ), where eminent existence is understood (somewhat obscurely) as existence in some “higher form.”40 Since Descartes took the rule that clear and distinct ideas are true to require that distinctly perceived properties exist in their cause “formally or eminently,” he concluded that there is no need for an external cause of the objective reality of his ideas of corporeal things.41 40 41

See the official definition of eminent containment in the “Second Replies,” at AT 7:161. For this point, see Vinci 1998, 43–48, 69–78, which emphasizes Descartes’s remarks on the truth rule in a 1642 letter to Mersenne, at AT 3:544f.

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Of course, Descartes did argue later, in “Meditation Six,” that there must be an active faculty in bodies that produces the objective reality of our ideas of corporeal things (AT 7:89f). However, this argument does not appeal to his truth rule.42 Desgabets, Regis, and Malebranche all insisted that it is precisely this rule that reveals that our distinct perceptions of extension derive from an object external to us. Thus, none of them could have allowed for the eminent containment of the object of this perception in our own mind.43 Their disagreement concerned rather the nature of the external object. For Malebranche, as we have seen, the object is an intelligible extension in God that does not require the actual existence of extended substance. In contrast, Desgabets and Regis argued, as we will see, that the object of our true idea of extension must be extended substance itself given that such a substance cannot have a “purely possible” existence either in our mind or in God’s. This argument against purely possible extension sets them on the road to the refutation of a “problematic idealism” in Descartes that dictates that our experience can reveal immediately only the existence of our own mind and its thoughts.

3.4 pure possibilities and the essence argument In his “Suppl´ement,” Desgabets confronted directly the objection to his intentionality principle, which he took to derive from Descartes himself, that we can have ideas of “purely possible” creatures that in no way exist in the actual world. His response is that the very notion of a creature that has absolutely no foothold in created reality is contradictory. If the creatures have no such foothold, then “they are neither conceivable, nor even nominable, to use the scholastic terms” (RD 6:234). In the “Trait´e,” Desgabets explained this point in terms of his distinction between substances and their modes. He noted that it is an implication of his intentionality principle that “the clear and distinct knowledge that one has of substance necessarily supposes its actual existence” (RD 3:76). The case of the distinct conception of a substance differs in this respect from the case of the distinct conception of the modes of that substance, however, since in the latter case the modes themselves need only be “contained in a pure power” of the substance that can possess them (3:76f ). According to Desgabets, the fact that our conceptions of modes can be true even though the modes themselves exist merely in a “pure power” tempts us into thinking that our conception of the substance that has the 42

43

But compare the later version of the argument in AT 8-1:40f, which does appeal to our clear and distinct perception of matter. For more on this argument and its distinction from the argument in “Meditation Six,” see Vinci 1998, 103–107. Malebranche argued explicitly against the possibility of the eminent containment of external objects in our finite minds; see OCM 1:434.

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modes also can be true in the case where the substance is “purely possible” and does not actually exist (RD 3:77f ). But he argued that, in the case where a substance does not exist, neither that substance nor its modes can be conceived to be possible. Substance serves as the ground for the possibility of its modes, since those modes are merely ways in which that substance can exist. If the substance doesn’t exist, there are no ways in which it can exist, since it is nothing. Moreover, since substance is by definition something that “subsists without dependence on any other creature” (3:76),44 we cannot conceive of the possibility of a substance – as we can conceive the possibility of nonexistent modes of existing substances – in terms of another part of created reality. The result is that, in the case of purely possible substances and their modes, we are conceiving of nothing, that is to say, not conceiving. In the Usage, Regis provided the material for a reformulation of this argument in terms of the distinction, also found in Desgabets (see §2.5), between “being of essence” and “being of existence.”45 There, he argued that modes that do not actually exist can have an actual essence, and thus have a being of essence, only if they are linked to something else that actually exists and so has a being of existence. In the case where the substance on which the modes depend has only a being of essence, there would be no grounding being of existence since the substance itself depends on no other created thing. The substance must actually exist for either it or its nonexistent modes to have any being of essence (Usage 257f ). And since something must have a being of essence to be conceivable,46 substances and their modes can be conceived only if those substances actually exist. This is what I have called the essence argument. Regis’s own conclusion is that even though modes have essences that are distinct from their existence, “in the substance (which is a very simple being in relation to modal beings) essence and existence are the same thing” (Usage 260). What is striking about this claim about substance is that Descartes made a similar claim about God when he emphasized in “Meditation Five,” in the course of presenting his version of the ontological argument, that “existence can no more be separated from the essence of God than the fact that its three angles equal two right angles can be separated from the essence of a triangle” (AT 7:66). Prior to Regis, Desgabets had, in fact, urged that one of the principal faults of Descartes’s discussion of the ontological argument is that he did not extend this argument to substances in general (RD 7:263). He noted, in particular, that given Descartes’s own conclusion in “Meditation Five” that modes of extension, such as triangularity, have some sort of being independent of our mind,

44 45 46

This definition is borrowed from Descartes; see AT 8-1:24. Compare Syst`eme, 1:102–105. In the unpaginated “Dictionaire,” at the end of the first volume of the Syst`eme, essence is defined as “that without which a thing cannot be conceived.”

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there must be an essence of extension identical to an existing extended substance (7:261).47 To be sure, Desgabets and Regis both emphasized that the case of God differs from the case of created substance given that God exists “absolutely” while created substance exists only on the supposition that God has freely created it.48 Their insistence on this difference is connected to their understanding of Descartes’s created truths doctrine in terms of the distinction between God’s essence and created essences (cf. §§2.2 and 2.5). Nonetheless, what should give some pause to those who characterize Desgabets and Regis as fundamentally “empiricist” in orientation49 is their argument – which surely is a match for anything found in the rationalists – that it follows from the mere fact that we can conceive a substance that such a substance has an existence that is identical to its essence. The object argument in Desgabets and Regis typically issues in the rather vague conclusion that the “objects” of ideas of the external world exist external to mind. Desgabets did often add that this object must be “such as the idea represents it,” while Regis explained that the objects “formally contain” the perfections represented in the ideas. But these further claims suggest that all the external objects we perceive actually exist external to us with the very qualities we perceive them to possess. When read in light of the essence argument, however, the object argument clearly requires the existence only of the substances on which our conception of external objects depend. Whereas the object argument makes only the point that all ideas must be of something, the essence argument indicates that an object is required precisely because the essences of the external objects we conceive reveal real possibilities only by virtue of their connection to actually existing substances. The most plausible form of the object argument thus depends not only on the intentionality principle but also on the essence argument. Even given the essence argument, one could always suspect that in conceiving of modes of mental substances distinct from us, we are actually confusedly conceiving possible modes of our own mind. No substance external to us would be required for this sort of confused conception. Yet for the Cartesian, there could be no such confusion in the primary cases of our conceptions of God and of extension. In the case of God, the mere fact that we are limited shows that we cannot conceive our own mind in conceiving an infinitely perfect being.50 Moreover, the Cartesian conclusion that thought 47

48 49 50

As indicated in §2.1.2, Descartes himself suggested that the modal essences have their being in the human mind. However, I also urged in this section that such a suggestion does not appear to be fully compatible with his own view that such essences are not subject to change because they are eternal. Compare RD 7:263 and Usage 264. Lennon and Easton 1992, 23. Compare Lennon 1998, 353, and Easton 1992. The argument here is from “Meditation Three,” where Descartes argued that we cannot contain divine perfections potentially since these perfections must be actual (AT 7:47).

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is irreducible to extension reveals that our conception of extended substance cannot be a disguised conception of our own mind. Thus, Desgabets and Regis would claim that the skeptic who admits the mere conceivability of extended substance, and thereby grants that there is an essence of extension distinct from the essence of his own mind, must also grant that this substance has an extra-mental existence. We have seen that Malebranche agreed with Desgabets and Regis that the essence of extension must be distinct from our mind. However, he also allowed for a sense in which actual extension can have what Desgabets would have considered a purely possible existence. Malebranche held that the essence that serves as the object of our perception of extension is contained in the necessary and immutable divine idea that serves as the archetype for the creation of extended substance.51 As noted earlier, he also came to conclude – perhaps in part due to Foucher’s skeptical remarks – that it is possible that there is no material world. But even in the case where no material world exists, it would remain true that the essence of extension is contained God’s idea of extension.52 Thus, in this case, there would be an essence of extension even though there is no existing extended substance; that is to say, in Desgabets’s terms, extension would have a purely possible existence. Desgabets and Regis both often spoke as if their versions of the intentionality principle follow directly from the self-evident truth that one cannot think of nothing. One complication is that they need to rebut a conceptualist reading of this principle suggested in Arnauld, though Desgabets and Regis could counter such a reading by appealing to the essence argument.53 Even if this move is successful, however, they still need to confront the alternative account of essences in Malebranche. It turns out, not too surprisingly, that their deepest reason for rejecting this alternative derives from their version of Descartes’s created truths doctrine. What is surprising, however, is the quasi-Spinozistic way in which they appealed to this doctrine in support of the intentionality principle. Spinoza was a confirmed opponent of Cartesian voluntarism; nevertheless, he offered an account of divine power that is similar in important respects to the one that serves in Desgabets and Regis to link their intentionality and creation doctrines.

3.5 quasi-spinozistic connections to the creation doctrine In his Critique, Desgabets noted, in response to the view that “creatures are contained in the power of God even before one conceives that He has willed 51 52 53

For Malebranche’s identification of divine ideas with archetypes for creation, see OCM 12:11f. Compare OCM 1:434–36, and the defense of the position there in OCM 3:64 and 141f. As I indicate in §3.7, Arnauld has reasons to accept this argument.

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to produce them,” that since God “can see only what He wills to see,” it must be the case that creatures “are conceivable in God only in the instant that He produces them actually” (CdC 69f ). Regis developed this line of response in his discussion in the Usage of the claim that substances that have no actual existence are nonetheless “contained in the power of God.” To such a claim, he objected that these substances cannot be contained in God’s “active power,” since such a power actually produces its effects. He further insisted that they cannot have any sort of “passive or formal possibility” in Him since “God being eternal and immutable, one cannot suppose in Him any power that is separated from act” (Usage 259). For Regis, then, substances cannot exist in the power of God without also existing in reality. Malebranche no doubt would concede the principle that God’s power cannot be separated from His action. Yet he would also insist that the essence of extension could be present in the intellectual act by which God contemplates His idea of extension and not in the volitional act by which He produces extended substance. In line with Desgabets’s remarks, however, Regis urged that even though we can know objects that are in our power but that we do not produce, this cannot be so in God given that power, knowledge, and will “are really the same in God.” Thus, God’s knowledge of the essences of creatures cannot be distinguished from the volitional act by which He produces those essences external to Himself (Usage 185). Regis went on to note that the conclusion that God must produce all essences that He knows is connected to the thesis that “the possibility and impossibility of things depends uniquely on the will of God as on their immediate cause” (Usage 189). On this point, there is an obvious connection to Descartes’s claim, in his 1630 correspondence with Mersenne, that since in God “willing and knowing are a single thing,” it must be the case that “by the very fact of willing something He knows it and it is only for this reason that such a thing is true” (AT 1:149).54 Yet Regis’s position is also linked, though in a less obvious manner, to Spinoza’s views in the Ethics. Relevant here is Spinoza’s attempt to defend the conclusion that God acts from the necessity of His nature by addressing the objection that divine omnipotence requires that He does not “bring about the existence of everything that in actuality He understands.” The response is that since “God’s omnipotence has from eternity been actual and will remain for eternity in the same actuality,” everything that can exist follows “from God’s supreme power or infinite nature” (G 2:62).55 What is 54 55

As I indicated in Chapter 2, however, Regis restricted the scope of this claim more clearly than Descartes did to God’s knowledge of created essences. Spinoza cited the conclusion in Ethics that “from the necessity of the divine nature there must follow infinitely many things in infinitely many modes (i.e., everything that can fall under an infinite intellect)” (G 2:60). As Wilson has argued, the conclusion here is that all possible essences follow directly from the divine nature (Wilson 1999).

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most reminiscent of Regis is the denial here of any potentiality in God’s power.56 Of course, Spinoza’s main conclusion that everything follows from the necessity of God’s nature conflicts with the claim in Regis that possibilities depend on God’s indifferent will (see §2.7). Nonetheless, Spinoza noted that his conclusion bears a certain resemblance to the opinion that “subjects all things to a certain indifferent will of God, and makes all things depend on His good pleasure.” In particular, both are opposed to the claim that there is “something outside of God, which does not depend on God, to which God attends, as a model, in what He does, and at which He aims, as at a certain goal.” Spinoza and his voluntarist counterpart reject such a claim on the grounds that it “subjects God to fate” (Deum fato subjectere) and thus denies that God is “the first and only free cause of the essence of all things as well as of their existence.” As in the case of Regis, so here there is a connection to the 1630 correspondence with Mersenne, in this case to Descartes’s claim there that to say that eternal truths are independent of God is to talk about God “as if He were Jupiter or Saturn and to subject Him to the Styx and the Fates [l’assuiettir au Stix et aus destinees]” (AT 1:145).57 This line of thought admittedly does not provide a direct response to Malebranche, since Malebranche never claimed that the essences that God knows through His ideas are “something outside of God.” However, in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670), Spinoza did anticipate to some extent the response to Malebranche that I have drawn from Regis. There Spinoza emphasized, as Regis did in his later work, that “in themselves God’s will and God’s intellect are really one and the same; they are distinguished only in respect of the thoughts that we form concerning God.” His conclusion, again in line with Regis’s views, is that “in relation to God we affirm one and the same thing when we say that from eternity God willed and decreed that the three angles of a triangle are equal to two right angles, or that God understood this very thing” (G 3:62f). It is true that Spinoza was not so much endorsing the identification of intellect and will in God as arguing that a conception of God in terms of a prince who decrees laws for certain ends derives from “a certain defect in the thinking” of the multitude (3:65).58 Even so, his remarks indicate that he would have joined Regis in rejecting 56

57

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For a similar account of the relation between the views of Regis and Spinoza, see Scribano 1996, 296f. One difference is that Scribano is concerned to make the point, which I find to be questionable, that Regis’s position leads naturally to a kind of Spinozistic necessitarianism. I regret that I discovered this article too late to include evaluation of it here. Spinoza’s remark is in G 2:76. On the connection here between Spinoza and Descartes, see Marion 1985, 145. In another passage, however, Descartes compared the essences and eternal truths created by God to Fates that were established by Jupiter but that subsequently bound him (AT 7:380). Indeed, in the Ethics Spinoza argued that neither intellect nor will can pertain to God considered as substance (G 2:71f ).

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as overly anthropomorphic the view in Malebranche that God’s effects can have a merely potential existence in His intellect. At Commercy, Desgabets employed a different strategy in responding to the view that essences of creatures are found only in God. He objected that “there is nothing that would appear to be less well-founded than what is said, that the nature of a thing and God’s idea are the same thing,” since just as “one must say that all our ideas have a real object, [so] one must say the same about those of God.” In both cases, “to portray [peindre] nothing and not to portray, is the same thing; to be a portrait and to have no real and existing object contains a contradiction” (R 259f ). What is emphasized here is not the difference between the divine intellect and our own, but rather the similarity between the two that is revealed by the fact that the intentionality principle applies to both. As with Regis, there is a connection here to Spinoza, though in Desgabets’s case the connection is less direct insofar as it is mediated by the remarks of Malebranche’s correspondent, Mairan (mentioned in §2.8).59 Recall that in his correspondence, Mairan pressed Malebranche to distinguish his own intelligible extension from Spinoza’s extended substance. One of the points that Malebranche made in response is that Spinoza (referred to in the correspondence only as “the author”) had fallaciously inferred that “the extension of the world is eternal, necessary, etc., because intelligible extension is so.” He told Mairan that this fallacy derives from a misuse of the principle that you cite (badly understood by the author) that one can affirm of a thing what one conceives to be included in it. . . . This principle is true in relation to the properties of beings, but it is not true in relation to their existence. I can infer that matter is divisible, because the idea I have of it represents it to me as such; but I cannot guarantee that it exists, although I cannot doubt the existence of the idea of it. For the idea of it is the immediate object of my mind, and not the matter itself, and I cannot know if it exists except by natural or supernatural revelation. (OCM 19:883)

In his final letter to Malebranche, Mairan objected that in the case where there is no ideatum corresponding to the idea of extension, this idea “has no objective reality outside [thought].” The problem is that the idea is supposed to represent an essence that is distinct from the divine essence. If there is no such essence external to God, however, the idea represents as real an object that, in fact, has no actual reality. But then, “what happens to the great principle without which we must no longer reason, that we ought to affirm of a thing whatever is clearly contained in the idea that represents it to us” (19:905f ). 59

Compare the discussion of the conceptual relation between the views of Desgabets and Spinoza in Scribano 1996, which focuses however on Desgabets’s version of the eternal truths doctrine and does not mention the connection to Spinoza through his critique of “pretended objective reality” that I emphasize here.

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This argument is analogous to the rejection in Desgabets of the possibility of a “pretended objective reality” in us. Recall Desgabets’s claim that an objective being that has no grounding in a res external to our mind can represent only a purely imaginary being. But for him, the same holds for God; His idea of extension represents something that is not merely imaginary only if that idea has a foundation in external reality. One problem for the application of this principle to the case of God is indicated by Desgabets’s admission at the Commercy conferences that this case is distinctive since God’s idea can be regarded as efficacious, and thus as “the cause of the things it knows” (R 259).60 Such an admission is, of course, connected to his acceptance of the created truths doctrine. But we have seen that Regis took this doctrine to reveal the fundamental difference between our act of understanding external objects, which is distinct from our act of will, and God’s act of understanding such objects, which is identical to His act of will. Desgabets’s commitment to this doctrine may, therefore, appear to be in some tension with his view that the intentionality principle applies equally to God’s ideas and to our own.61 If successful, however, Regis’s quasi-Spinozistic response to Malebranche serves to rule out the possibility that God has an idea of an unactualized essence. Such a response, therefore, reinforces Desgabets’s claim that the intentionality principle must apply to God as well as to us. Indeed, Regis himself insisted in the Usage that something that has no extra-mental essence “would not differ from pure nothing, and by consequence could be the object neither of any science nor of any idea of God” (Usage 209). I have urged that Desgabets’s object argument depends not only on the intentionality principle but also on the essence argument. The further suggestion here is that the essence argument depends, in turn, on the creation doctrine. Just as in the case of the dependence of the object argument on the essence argument, so this further dependence on the creation doctrine reveals the need to qualify Desgabets’s own characterization of the intentionality principle as “the most simple, the best known and the most necessary of all principles” (RD 6:223). He did allow in the Critique that Descartes’s conclusion that necessary truths depend on the divine will “admirably confirms all that I have said about the real existence of the things of which we think and speak” (CdC 76). However, even this relation is too weak insofar as it indicates that the creation doctrine merely “confirms” a view of

60 61

As I indicate in §4.7, though, Desgabets allowed that our own ideas can in certain cases create their objects. Indeed, at the Commercy conferences, Desgabets admitted that this view “runs the risk of saying that the terms of knowledge and idea are applied to God and to us without equivocation [´equivoques]” (R 259). Compare Regis’s own view, considered in §2.7, that it is a consequence of the created truths doctrine that divine perfections can be predicated of creatures only equivocally.

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intentionality established independently of it. Desgabets was closer to the mark when he noted in the “Trait´e” that once one accepts his creation doctrine, nothing is easier after that than to derive this fundamental consequence, which can also take the place of a great principle: That just as soon as one thinks of a substance, it is absolutely necessary that God has given to it by creation what one perceives there, and that it suffices to know it to be assured of its actual existence. (RD 3:80)

This passage does not go so far as to say that his account of intentionality requires the creation doctrine. However, it does allow that this doctrine can be understood to provide the basis for such an account. As far as I can determine, Regis never directly addressed the issue of the relation between his views on creation and intentionality. Even so, there is a noteworthy shift in his treatment of these two issues. In the 1690 Syst`eme, his argument for the existence of extension precedes his defense of the claim that God is the cause of the nature and existence of body.62 In contrast, the 1704 Usage asserts the correspondence of ideas to their “exemplary causes” only after disposing of the position that we know external objects by means of ideas in God.63 As we have seen, moreover, this text disposes of such a position by stressing not only the anti-Spinozistic point that God is a “supersubstantial” being radically distinct from us (see §2.8), but also the quasi-Spinozistic point that substantial beings cannot have a merely potential existence in the divine mind. From the argument against potential existence in God, Desgabets and Regis drew the conclusion that the substances we conceive exist external to mind. However, Desgabets also indicated – as did Regis, though less consistently – that it is a corollary of such a conclusion that our knowledge of the existence of mental and material substance have equal epistemic status. This corollary conflicts directly with Descartes’s own thesis in “Meditation Two” that the existence of mental substance is more immediately evident to us than the existence of material substance. Indeed, I noted at the outset Desgabets’s claim in the “Suppl´ement” that this thesis is so defective that one must “reverse the entire machine of the first two Meditations” (RD 6:225). He emphasized there that reversal is required because Descartes’s epistemic machinery is hampered by two principal “faults.” The first of these involves the tendency “to bring into doubt the reality of the things on which we think and of which we speak” (RD 5:171), while the second involves the inclination “to reject all commerce with the senses,” and 62 63

The argument is presented in Syst`eme 1:74–76, while the defense is presented in ibid., 1:98–100. Compare Usage 229–33, which counters the “Platonic” view that we know external objects “by ideas in God,” and ibid., 235–45, which defends the thesis that “all human certitude is founded on the fact that ideas depend on their objects as on their exemplary causes.” For more on Regis’s response to the Platonic view, see §§5.4 and 5.5.

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thus to overlook the fact that all our thoughts depend on the union with the body (5:174f ). In the next chapter, we will consider Desgabets’s response to the second fault in Descartes of ignoring the union and the commerce with the senses. We will see there that this response is bound up with a critique of the corollary of Descartes’s cogito argument that mind is better known than body. But the cogito is involved as well in Desgabets’s response to the first fault of Descartes, which involves the failure to recognize that the extension of which we think and speak must be something “real in itself external to thought.”

3.6 ‘‘the first fault of descartes’’ Desgabets’s “Suppl´ement” begins with a long chapter devoted to “the hyperbolic doubt of Monsieur Descartes” (RD 5:167–80). He noted that Descartes doubted the existence of the material world not because he himself genuinely questioned its existence, but only because he wanted to eliminate prejudices deriving from “the errors of the senses” (5:170f ). However, Desgabets urged, particularly in the second part of his text, that Descartes’s methodical doubt itself reinforces some dangerous prejudices. In particular, he noted in this section that a doubt that emphasizes “the infinity of deceptions of the senses that often make objects appear to us totally other than they are in themselves” leads us to the skeptical conclusion that “things are not such outside of the understanding as we conceive of them by thought” (RD 6:226). Such a conclusion is dangerous, according to Desgabets, since it undermines even the famous proposition that Descartes took to provide foundations for science, namely, I think therefore I am. For if one allows that things need not be such in reality as we conceive of them in thought, then even the perception that one exists as a thinking thing could no longer reveal with certainty that one exists as such (6:224f). This view of the dangers of methodical doubt seems to be connected to Descartes’s suggestion in “Meditation Three” that “some God” could perhaps have given him a nature “such that I am deceived about that which seems most evident” (AT 7:36). The suggestion, in particular, is that the possibility that such a being exists reveals a “metaphysical” reason for questioning the rule that our clear and distinct perceptions are true. As Desgabets indicated, this doubt does indeed appear to undermine even the cogito argument. After all, Descartes himself indicated at the start of “Meditation Three” that his certainty that his distinct perception of his existence is true depends on his confidence in his truth rule (7:35).64 Moreover, when the authors of a set of objections to the Meditations broached the famous problem 64

Descartes stipulated that all distinct perceptions (ideas) are also clear (see AT 8-1:21f ). In line with this stipulation, I use “disinct” perception (idea) as a shorthand for “clear and distinct” perception (idea).

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of the “Cartesian circle,” they mentioned explicitly the threat to the cogito argument (7:124f ). Descartes responded that although we can doubt the truth of distinct perceptions that we merely remember, there nonetheless is no room for doubting our occurrent distinct perception that we exist since we are thinking (7:140f, 144–46). Notoriously, it is not clear that one can admit this sort of distinction and still allow the full force of the metaphysical reason for doubt. Yet Desgabets indicated in the “Suppl´ement” that he was concerned not only with a metaphysical doubt that brings the truth of distinct perceptions into question but also, and even principally, with a hyperbolic doubt that brings into question the existence of corporeal substance. Here the threat is connected not to “some God” of “Meditation Three,” but rather to the “evil genius” of “Meditation One.” On the evil genius hypothesis, it is possible that we have an idea of the material world even though no such world exists external to mind. As I have indicated, Desgabets’s response is that if this possibility is accepted, then even the cogito is lost. In particular, he claimed in the “Suppl´ement” that the cogito argument “would fall to earth if it could happen that an idea has no object external to the understanding, because the existence of the soul, as a thing that thinks, would not be more assured than that of other things if all thought did not necessarily have its object that is real and distinguished from thought.” He insisted, however, that if one accepts the principle that simple conceptions conform to their objects, then “this notion or idea of corporeal substance would suppose the existence of matter no less than that of the soul supposes that of a thing that thinks, and by consequence it would be possible neither to suppose a difference nor to make this difference the foundation of a particular philosophy” (RD 6:224f ). The upshot is that the inference to the existence of corporeal substance is as immune to hyperbolic doubt as the inference to the existence of the self as thinking substance. Desgabets’s emphasis on this equality seems to conflict with the discussion of the cogito in Regis’s Syst`eme. In this text, Regis began the section on metaphysics by arguing that the mere fact that I know objects by perceiving them reveals that I exist, since “the natural light teaches me that if I were nothing, I could have neither perceptions nor knowledge: it is necessary that I am something, and by consequence that I exist” (Syst`eme 1:68). This argument is related to Descartes’s own conclusion – drawn from the discussion in “Meditation Two” of his knowledge of the piece of wax – that the perception of the wax that leads him to judge that the wax exists “entails much more evidently that I myself also exist” (AT 7:33). To be sure, Regis’s further claim that he cannot doubt the existence of the external objects he perceives is not in line with Descartes’s insistence in “Meditation Two” that he cannot be immediately certain that there is any material object external to him. This difference derives from Regis’s acceptance in his text, noted earlier, of a version of Desgabets’s proof of the existence of the material world.

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Even so, Regis did say that he knows his own existence by means of “a simple and internal knowledge that precedes all acquired knowledge and that I call Conscience” (Syst`eme 1:68). Moreover, he argued in a later chapter that “there is a certain difference between mind and body” given that mind is “intelligible by itself” but that body is “not knowable by itself but by mind.” The conclusion here, which seems to be more in line with Descartes’s views than with those of Desgabets, is that “mind knows itself before it knows body” (1:192).65 This conclusion is reflected not only in Regis’s polemical responses in the early 1690s to critics of Cartesian doubt and the cogito (see §5.2), but also in certain parts of the 1704 Usage.66 In that later text, however, Regis also was concerned with emphasizing that our knowledge of the existence of the self has the same sort of certainty as our knowledge of the existence of body. He claimed there that just as we cannot perceive that a certain shape exists without perceiving that there is an extended substance that serves as the subject of that mode, so we “know that the soul exists in perceiving in us some spiritual mode, as, for example, desire, fear, or hope: because we can conceive nothing of these modes, without conceiving that it resides in a subject that exists and that we call Soul [Ame].” The conclusion is not that our knowledge of the soul “precedes all acquired knowledge,” as it is in the Syst`eme. Rather, it is that “we know the soul by the same view that we know body” (Usage 247f ).67 Regis’s argument that we know soul and body by the very same view depends on the “general axiom of metaphysics” that “one can assert of a thing all that one clearly conceives to be contained in the idea that represents it” (Usage 238). This point may seem to be devastating for Descartes; after all, we have noted his suggestion in “Meditation Three” that his certainty the he exists as a thinking thing depends on the rule that all clear and distinct perceptions are true. If this truth rule is, in fact, equivalent to Regis’s general axiom, and if that axiom does indeed imply that our knowledge of the existence of mind and body have the same epistemic status, then Descartes is simply not entitled to the conclusion that his knowledge that he exists as a thinking thing is more certain than his knowledge that body exists as an extended thing. 65

66 67

Compare the claim in the title to an earlier chapter that “the soul knows itself better than it knows body” (Syst`eme 1:164). In this chapter, Regis was concerned with responding to Malebranchean objections to this conclusion. Compare note 6. See, for instance, Usage 43. In this chapter of the Usage, Regis made the additional point – directed primarily against Malebranche – that what we know par conscience ou par sentiment interieur about the nature of the soul is as clear as what our idea of body tells us about the nature of body. See Schmaltz 1996 for an extended treatment of the thesis in Malebranche that what we know about the soul through conscience or sentiment interieur is more obscure than what we know about the body through the idea of extension.

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However, Descartes’s version of the truth rule is most assuredly not equivalent to Regis’s general axiom. Regis claimed that it follows from his axiom that ideas derive from exemplary causes that formally contain the perfections those ideas represent. Yet I have noted that Descartes not only restricted his truth rule to efficient causes but also took such a rule to allow for the possibility that the perfections represented by ideas exist in such causes only eminently. In the case of our own perceptions, there can be no question that they exist formally in thinking substance. But in the case of the bodily qualities that we perceive, Descartes’s truth rule does not preclude the option that they exist eminently in thinking substance rather than formally in extended substance.68 Such a rule, therefore, yields a response to Regis’s claim that we see the existence of mind and body by the same view. By the same token, this rule provides the basis for an answer to Desgabets’s charge that Descartes’s cogito argument is undermined by the supposition that our idea of body has no object external to our understanding. One strategy open to Desgabets and Regis is to stress Descartes’s position in “Meditation Five” that mathematical ideas presuppose the existence of “immutable and eternal natures” that are “neither made by me nor dependent on my mind” (AT 7:64f). Of course, there is a conceptualist reading of this position on which mathematical natures are reducible to features of our own mind (see §2.1.2). According to the essence argument, however, these natures can represent possible objects only if there is a real extended substance that such objects can possibly modify. There is still the Malebranchean position that the possibilities are founded in God’s idea rather than in extended substance itself. But as we have seen, Desgabets rejected this position on the grounds that the essence of extension represented by God’s idea must be something distinct from His own essence. Since he also rejected the possibility that this essence exists as a Platonic form, and since he agreed with Descartes that all created beings pertain to thinking or extended substance,69 Desgabets concluded, as Regis did later, that the extra-mental essence of extension is to be identified with extended substance itself. In constructing these responses to Descartes and Malebranche, I rely on the essence argument in Desgabets and Regis. However, a different line of response is connected to the distinction in Regis’s Syst`eme between “simple and natural ideas” and “complex and artificial ideas.” In a section of this text

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One possible complication concerns the eminent containment in finite mental substance of an extension that is “indefinite” rather than finite. For a discussion of this complication, see Wilson 1986. However, this does not affect the basic point that extension as such need not be formally contained in the cause of the objective reality of its idea. Compare the discussion of Descartes’s view in §2.1.2 and Desgabets’s insistence against Foucher (and Malebranche) that we can know with certainty that “all Beings are Minds or Bodies” (CdC 175).

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on “La Logique ou l’art de penser,” he proposed that simple ideas provide “as it were the matter” for the mental construction of complex ideas. He then noted that since the mind is free in the act of construction to deviate from reality, there is no guarantee that complex ideas correspond to any external object. Since simple ideas involve no such construction, Regis concluded that there is no reason to doubt that they “are real, that is to say, that they are always conformed to their original” (Syst`eme 1:59–62). As Regis himself observed, the simple/complex distinction is itself complicated by the discussion in a later section of the Syst`eme of the difference between “simple” ideas in which one “perceives nothing other than uniformity” and “composed” ideas that involve “some diversity.”70 This basic distinction is, of course, familiar from Locke, who developed it independently of Regis in his 1690 Essay concerning Human Understanding.71 Moreover, Locke’s division of complex ideas into those “which the mind either finds in things existing or is able to make within itself, without the help of any extrinsical Object”72 is reflected in Regis’s claim that composed ideas can be distinguished into “natural” ideas that “depend immediately on the action of external objects on the organs of bodies,” and “artificial” ideas that are constructed by an act of will (Syst`eme 1:171f). Along with simple ideas, natural composed ideas are said to be such that “one cannot doubt that they are conformed to their objects.” Only artificial composed ideas can fail to so conform (1:173f ).73 Regis cited the idea of a triangle as an example of an artificial idea (Syst`eme 1:174f) and thereby placed himself at odds with Desgabets, who offered mathematical ideas as the primary example of a first mental operation that must conform to its object.74 Yet Regis insisted that even artificial ideas must be related to objects since “although these ideas do not have an object with respect to the forms and shapes that one wants them to represent, they have at least a relation to the things to which the soul attributes these forms and shapes.” Even though the idea of a triangle is artificial, and thus 70 71

72

73 74

See Regis’s warning at the end of the section on logic that his more precise taxonomy of ideas occurs in the second book of the section on metaphysics (Syst`eme 1:62). See Locke 1975, 118–21, 163–66. We know that, in the course of his travels in France in 1677–78, Locke met with Regis. See the references to Regis (identified as “Regius”) in the entries from Locke’s travel journal in Lough 1984, 60, 101, and 107. Unfortunately, these entries provide very little information concerning the content of their discussions. Locke 1975, 166f. Locke was discussing here complex ideas of simple modes. He contrasted these ideas with complex ideas of mixed modes, all of which are “put together by the Mind” (ibid., 288). Compare Usage 103–10. See, for instance, CdC 17f, 24f. One reason for this difference is that Desgabets most often distinguished the first mental operation only from the act of will involved in judgment (see §3.2). Thus, he did not stress the scholastic point – reflected in Regis’s account of simple/natural ideas – that this sort of operation involves no discursive combination or division of concepts.

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does not necessarily conform to an existing triangle, still this idea must have a “true object with regard to the extension to which the soul attributes three straight lines.” Regis concluded that one must reject the thesis of the “common philosophers” that “there are ideas that have no object, and that such are the ideas of things that we imagine under forms and shapes that they do not have” (1:174f).75 Nonetheless, the case of artificial ideas does seem to provide a counterexample to the Regis’s axiom that our ideas of bodies have an exemplary cause that formally contains what these ideas represent. After all, Regis admitted in the Syst`eme that there can, in fact, be no exemplary cause of a triangle given that “there is never found in nature three straight lines such as one supposes in a geometrical triangle” (Syst`eme 1:175). Yet, he also indicated that this axiom covers even artificial ideas since it applies to the material from which such ideas are constructed. In his view, the will produces artificial ideas either by performing various mental operations on natural ideas76 or by superadding to those ideas various judgments or suppositions. Regis concluded from this view that “if one were to subtract from the ideas of the understanding all that depends on the abstractions, suppositions, and judgments that the soul makes, one would find that what remains in it is a true natural idea, that is to say, an idea that necessarily supposes an object that contains formally all the properties that it represents” (1:174).77 One might wonder whether the assumption that natural ideas conform to existing objects could itself be one of the superadded judgments that can render an idea false. The Cartesian skeptic could insist that there are indeed grounds for suspecting that it is such a judgment given the possibility that an evil genius is the source of our natural ideas of external objects. Since it is precisely his causal axiom that is in question, it would not do for Regis to respond at this point by invoking it. What he requires is some independent reason for rejecting the possibility that he have natural ideas even though there be no material world. His best option seems to be to revert to the essence argument. On that argument, which is missing from the Syst`eme but is prominent in the Usage, the very conceivability of bodily modes presupposes that the modes themselves have essences that derive from an existing extended substance. Thus, not even the evil genius could bring it about that there is no extended substance to which our distinct conception of bodily modes is related.

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77

Compare Usage 107. See also Locke’s claim in his Essay that the essences of mixed modes are made “without Patterns, or reference to any real Existence” (Locke 1975, 429). The operations he mentions are composition, amplification, diminution, and accommodation (Syst`eme 1:172). These operations are defined in the unpaginated “Dictionaire” of the Syst`eme, and the definitions are repeated in the dictionary in the Usage, at 951, 949, 953, and 948, respectively. Compare Usage 103–10.

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Notice that the essence argument does not depend on Regis’s distinction between simple and artificial ideas. What is crucial to that argument is rather the distinction between ideas of substances and ideas of modes. Moreover, it is the fact that the existence of substance is required for the conceivability of that substance and its modes, and not the fact that the idea of the substance derives immediately from experience, that shows that substance must exist as the object of our idea of it. One advantage for this sort of argument is that it does not depend on the complex details of psychology behind Regis’s appeal to simple natural ideas. The essence argument is instead a kind of transcendental argument for the very conceivability of an external world. As we will discover, however, such conceivability does not require that external objects formally contain in Descartes’s sense – that is to say, actually possess – the particular qualities that we perceive in them. While the essence argument takes us to an external world, ultimately it cannot take us the entire way to Regis’s axiom that exemplary causes formally contain the perfections their ideas represent.

3.7 cartesian realism: the first step In the “Suppl´ement,” Desgabets held that philosophical investigation should commence not with hyperbolic doubt but rather with an exposition and development of “this great principle,” that all simple conception conforms to its object, “against which even the Pyrrhonists would have nothing to say if they have extricated themselves from the prejudices that obscure it” (RD 5:178). I noted at the outset that this position is particularly striking in light of the popular conception of Cartesianism as preoccupied with skepticism. Even so, there is something recognizably Cartesian in Desgabets’s claim, in the second part of the “Suppl´ement,” that our own thoughts are known “so well by a continual and intuitive knowledge, that there is a contradiction to say that anything else can be better known” (RD 6:225). Just as Descartes attempted in the Meditations to construct firm foundations for knowledge by focusing on his ideas, so Desgabets proposed to respond to the Pyrrhonists by starting with his thoughts. There is a sense, then, in which both conceived of the mind as a “mirror of nature” that is supposed to reflect external reality.78 The fundamental difference, however, is that while Descartes held that what is reflected in the mind cannot reveal immediately the existence of the material world, Desgabets insisted that the existence of this world follows directly from what we find in our thoughts.79 78 79

I borrow the terminology from Rorty 1979. But see note 79. Thus, Desgabets could not have accepted the view, which Rorty attributes to Descartes (in Rorty 1979, 54–60), that indubitability is the mark of the mental and that only our inner mental life is beyond doubt.

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We have seen that Desgabets’s argument for the existence of extended substance is not quite as simple as he suggested. Even though he spoke at times as if the existence of this object follows directly from his intentionality principle, it is clear that this inference requires in addition the essence argument. Moreover, even the more complex defense of extra-mental existence does not address every kind of skeptic. As I have presented it, this defense draws attention to the necessary conditions for conceiving the possibility of external objects. So construed, however, such a defense merely takes for granted that such objects are possible. There would be no answer here to a hard-core skeptic who doubts our ability to know whether there could even be an external world. In this way, Desgabets does not so much “reverse” radical Pyrrhonism as sidestep it. This point does not seem to apply to Descartes’s meditator, who questions at the start not the possibility but only the actuality of the material world. However, there is reason to doubt that this meditator could be persuaded to accept immediately Desgabets’s argument for the existence of material substance. After all, we have seen that the full argument requires not only the essence argument but also the consequence of the creation doctrine that God produces external to Himself all the essences that He conceives. Surely someone who wonders whether there is anything external to his mind would not be in a good position to embrace that consequence. Thus, Desgabets’s argument for the existence of extended substance is perhaps too complex to be compelling to someone starting from scratch. Still, it is more direct than the main argument that Descartes provided in “Meditation Six.” In the case of Descartes’s argument, we have a rather circuitous route to the material world that involves ruling out all possible causes of our ideas of bodies other than the bodies themselves (AT 7:79f ). In contrast, Desgabets’s route to the material world goes through a doctrine of the creation of eternal truths that Descartes himself took to provide metaphysical foundations for physics. If this doctrine requires that not even God can conceive of extended substance without creating it, then the Cartesian does indeed have reason to assert the existence of this substance prior to an investigation of various possible causes of our ideas of bodies. In §3.3, I noted that the account of objective reality that Arnauld defended against Malebranche seems to allow for the possibility that extension is present only objectively in our idea of it, and not external to mind. At other times, however, Arnauld offered something very similar to the essence argument that Desgabets used to derive the extra-mental existence of extended substance. He offered this not in his controversy with Malebranche but rather in his discussion of the summary of the Discourse on Metaphysics that Leibniz had sent to him for comment. What is most relevant here is Arnauld’s reaction to Leibniz’s suggestion that God chooses to create a

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particular Adam from among several “possible Adams.”80 In a 1686 letter, Arnauld urged that such “purely possible substances” are merely “figments of the imagination that we create.” His main argument begins with the claim that such substances “cannot be anything other than God’s omnipotence.” Arnauld then noted that since this omnipotence is “pure act,” it “does not permit the existence in it of any possibility.” One can conceive of possibility only in natures that God has actually created, “which allows me to conceive of them as possible, as I can also do with an infinite number of modifications that are in the power of these created natures, such as the thoughts of intelligent natures and the forms of extended substance.”81 Arnauld’s views here contrast with the position in Leibniz that possible substances can exist as ideas in God. Alan Nelson usefully characterizes the differences here in terms of a distinction between an “actualism” in Arnauld that analyzes possibilities concerning creation in terms of facts about created objects that actually exist and a “possibilism” in Leibniz that allows for such possibilities that are founded in nothing external to the divine intellect.82 Even though Nelson calls Arnauld’s view “Cartesian actualism,” he notes, quite correctly, that it “outstrips anything found in Descartes’s writings.”83 Indeed, Descartes seems to have denied the consequence of Arnauld’s actualism that possibilities concerning the “forms of extended substance” require that God has actually created this substance. However, this sort of actualism most assuredly does not outstrip what is found in Desgabets’s writings. After all, Desgabets emphasized that his essence argument has a consequence that is quite similar to the one that Arnauld noted in his remarks to Leibniz. Even more, the quasi-Spinozistic defense of this argument that I have attributed to Desgabets (and also to Regis) depends on just the point that Arnauld offered in response to Leibniz, namely, that there cannot be any “pure possibility” in God’s power. Thus, Arnauld’s actualism effectively corresponds to a realism in Desgabets (and Regis) that takes our ideas of the material world to presuppose the extra-mental existence of their object. Such a realism is to be contrasted with the “idealistic” suggestion in Descartes that bodies can have merely an “objective” presence in our ideas. However, the essence argument cannot eliminate all skepticism concerning 80

81 82

83

As will become clear later, my remarks concerning this reaction are indebted to the discussion of it in Nelson 1993, which does not consider its relation to the views of Desgabets. There is a consideration of this relation, however, in Scribano 1996 (see note 82). Leibniz 1965, 2:32. My characterization of actualism is a bit more specific than Nelson’s own characterization of it as holding that “all philosophically interesting uses of possibles [are] analyzable into facts about actually existing things” (Nelson 1993, 676). Compare the view in Scribano 1996 that there is a rejection in Arnauld, as well as in Desgabets and Regis, of purely possible substances and essences. Nelson 1993, 685.

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the existence of bodies. Desgabets himself indicated as much when he noted in his “Suppl´ement” that Descartes went astray in doubting the existence of the material world “taken purely and simply,” since all that he is really entitled to doubt is the existence of particular bodies secundum quid (RD 5:179). This point draws, of course, on Desgabets’s own distinction between the atemporal existence simpliciter of the essences of modes and the temporal existence secundum quid of the modes themselves (see §2.4.2). In suggesting that Descartes is entitled to doubt the existence of bodies secundum quid, the remark in the “Suppl´ement” in effect grants that the essence argument can establish only the existence simpliciter of an atemporal material substance. As far as this argument goes, systematic deception with respect to the existence secundum quid of particular bodies is a real possibility. With the essence argument, therefore, we have only a first step toward the refutation of doubt concerning the existence of the material world. This restriction in the essence argument undermines Desgabets’s frequent claim that his inference from our idea of material substance to the existence of that substance has the same form as the inference in Descartes from our idea of the self to the existence of mental substance. Applied to the case of the self, Desgabets’s essence argument entails only the existence of an immutable essence of mind that is identical to an atemporal substantial being. However, Descartes’s cogito argument is concerned primarily not with the existence simpliciter of such a being, but rather with the existence secundum quid of a temporal self. In this way, that argument seems to go beyond any conclusions that the essence argument allows in the case of body. Thus, we are lacking a complete answer to Descartes’s claim in “Meditation Two” that the cases of mind and body differ since “if I judge that the wax exists from the fact that I see it, clearly this same fact entails much more evidently that I myself also exist” (AT 7:33). This same point cuts against Regis’s conclusion in the Usage that we know soul and body “by the same view.” The main argument there for this conclusion is that just as we cannot conceive of a spiritual mode “without conceiving that it resides in a subject that exists, and that we call a soul,” so “we cannot conceive [a] shape as actually existing without conceiving at the same time that it resides in a subject that exists actually and that we call body” (Usage 247f ). Yet Regis accepted the quasi-Spinozistic view in Desgabets that particular bodies are modes of one substance, rather than substances themselves. All that the essence argument allows him to say, then, is that these particular bodies have a “real possibility” grounded in the existence of the one extended substance. Moreover, Regis inherited from Desgabets the position that substances exist outside of time. Once again, however, the cogito concerns not the existence of this sort of substance but rather the existence of a self with temporal thoughts. Although the fact that we have direct access to our temporal self creates problems for Regis’s conclusion that we know soul and body by the same

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view, it also provides a basis for a new argument in Desgabets’s writings for the existence secundum quid of bodies in motion. As we will discover, this argument is like Kant’s famous “refutation” of Descartes’s “problematic idealism” in emphasizing that temporal experience of the self presupposes the existence of spatial objects. Unlike Kant, however, Desgabets did not emphasize that such objects are needed for the determination of objective features of our temporal inner experience.84 Rather, he appealed to a traditional Aristotelian account of time in support of the conclusion that subjective experience of temporal duration is not possible apart from motion. His conclusion, in effect, is that the mere fact that reflection on the self involves an awareness of a temporal sequence of thoughts suffices to refute a hyperbolic doubt of the existence of bodies secundum quid that informs Descartes’s discussion of the cogito. Characteristically, Regis was not as directly critical as Desgabets was of Descartes’s views on the cogito. Nonetheless, he did accept Desgabets’s claim that our temporal thoughts bear an essential connection to bodily motion. Both thinkers insisted that this connection serves to undermine the more orthodox Cartesian claim, defended most notably by Malebranche, that we have a “pure intellect” that operates apart from the body. Some have recently urged that this rejection of pure intellect is tied to an empiricism in Desgabets and Regis that does not allow for a priori knowledge.85 We will discover in the following chapter, however, that it is the commitment in Desgabets and Regis to the view that continuous temporal duration is essentially linked to motion, more than any predilection on their part toward an empiricist account of knowledge, that is behind their radical doctrine that all human thought derives from the union of the soul with a particular body. 84 85

See CPR B 275f. For more on Kant’s argument, see §4.6. See the works cited in note 49.

4 The Union Doctrine Temporal Human Thought and Motion

In the previous chapter, I noted the charge in Desgabets’s “Suppl´ement” that two principal faults are linked to Descartes’s methodical doubt, the first of which concerns the failure to recognize that our idea of extension presupposes the existence of an extra-mental object, and the second of which concerns the neglect of “the commerce with the senses” and the dependence of human thought on the union of the soul with body. As we have seen, Desgabets took his corrective to the first fault to address as well a Pyrrhonian skepticism deriving Foucher’s response to Malebranche. However, Desgabets’s response to the second fault indicates an agreement with Foucher’s critique of Malebranche’s supposition that we have a “pure intellect” that operates independently of the body. This supposition is connected to an argument for the real distinction between mind and body in Descartes that takes our “essence” as thinking things to consist in the ability to have purely intellectual thought. Descartes also admitted that certain features of our experience reveal that our soul is united to a particular body. However, Desgabets went beyond Descartes, and Malebranche as well, in holding that the union permeates all of our thought. On this point, Regis was profoundly influenced by Desgabets, though Desgabets was even more radical than Regis in using his views on the union to mount an attack on Descartes’s thesis that it follows from his cogito argument that mind is better known than body. In attacking Descartes’s views on pure intellect and the cogito, Desgabets is similar to Descartes’s critic, Gassendi. Indeed, some who have discussed Desgabets’s views on the mind have characterized it as more Gassendist than Cartesian.1 However, Desgabets is distinguished from Gassendi insofar as he sought to offer an internal critique of Descartes’s theory of mind that embraces not only his claim that all perceptions are states of an immaterial 1

See, for instance, Kirwan 1903, 388, and Armogathe 1977, 87.

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mind but also his view that humans are distinguished from other animals by the fact that they possess such a mind. Desgabets insisted that these features of Descartes’s system are consistent with his own conclusion that the union with body is essential to human thought. In §4.1, I begin my discussion of Desgabets’s distinctive form of Cartesian psychology by considering his endorsement of Foucher’s rejection of Malebranche’s views on pure intellect. In his Critique, Desgabets accepted in particular the argument in Foucher that the mere fact that we can remember our intellectual thoughts reveals that even they are linked to traces in the brain. In comments on Malebranche elsewhere, however, he supplemented this argument from human memory with the more general point that purely intellectual thought can belong only to a disembodied intellect such as that of an angel, which differs fundamentally from the human soul. This point is central to Desgabets’s response to the second fault in Descartes, which stresses that human thought requires a union with body. In §4.2, I consider this response in relation not only to Descartes’s comments on the union, but also to Regis’s later development of the ontology that he inherited from Desgabets. Desgabets and Regis suggested at times that human thought involves the union because it derives from a “commerce with the senses.” Such a suggestion is connected to their acceptance of the scholastic maxim that “there is nothing in the intellect not first in the senses.” Section 4.3 takes up their defense of this maxim, which seems to indicate a “sensualism” in their thought that serves to reinforce the characterization of them as “Cartesian empiricists.” However, their main argument against pure intellect focuses not on the sensory nature of human thought but rather on the fact that all such thought has a continuous temporal duration. They claimed, in particular, that this duration requires a union with motion. In §4.4, I consider an account in Descartes and Regis of continuous temporal human thought that draws on a “cartesianized” version of the traditional Aristotelian definition of time as the measure of motion. In their view, there can be no temporal duration apart from changes that derive from motion. In support of this result, Desgabets and Regis appealed to the claim in Thomas that angelic substances have a “pure thought” that is governed not by continuous time but rather by the “aevum.” In §4.5, I explore complexities in this Thomistic position that create difficulties for the conclusion in Desgabets and Regis that all temporal succession is tied to motion. However, I also argue there that certain aspects of Thomistic angelology reinforce the claim in these Cartesians that the fact that our thoughts have a continuous temporal duration reveals their dependence on body. In §4.6, I turn to Desgabets’s attempt to use his account of temporal thought to mount a pre-Kantian refutation of an idealism in Descartes that holds, as Kant later put it, that “there is only one empirical assertion that is indubitably certain, namely, that ‘I am’” (CPR B274–79). Kant’s refutation

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emphasized that the existence of outer objects is required for empirical knowledge of temporal relations among our inner states. In contrast, Desgabets’s refutation is supported by an account of the nature of the self that he took to derive from Descartes’s own cogito argument. As I indicate in §4.7, this Cartesian refutation involves a step toward realism that holds that we have a knowledge of the existence of particular bodies that is as secure as our knowledge of the existence of our own soul. Though Regis was somewhat reluctant to take this further step, it is in line with his deepest views on human thought. My thesis that there is this second step to realism in the work of Desgabets and Regis contrasts with the recent claim in Thomas Lennon that they are committed to the idealistic position that particular objects are mind-dependent phenomena. Lennon’s defense of this claim draws attention to important complications introduced by Desgabets and Regis pertaining to the individuation of bodies and souls. On balance, however, the evidence indicates that these Cartesians endorsed the decidedly nonidealistic position that these particular objects have a reality that is independent of, and that conditions, our temporal experience of that reality.

4.1 desgabets’s critique : pure intellect and memory We have considered the critique in Simon Foucher of “suppositions” in Malebranche concerning the immutability of necessary truths (in §2.2.2) and the representative of ideas and the existence of extension (in §3.1). Foucher singled out for attack the further supposition in Malebranche that we have “thoughts of pure intellection that leave no traces in the brain” (Crit. 38).2 He was thinking of Malebranche’s discussion in the third book of the Recherche, which is devoted to “pure mind” (esprit pur), or “the mind examined in itself and without any relation to body” (OCM 1:379). The claim there is that the mind has a faculty of “pure understanding” (entendement pur) by virtue of which it is capable of “knowing external objects without forming corporeal images of them in the brain to represent them” (1:381). Foucher countered that Malebranche’s claim yields the absurd result that “one cannot speak at all of what he regards as the objects of intellection alone.” Foucher’s argument is that since memory operates by means of “traces, shapes, and motions in the organs of the brain,” Malebranche is committed to saying that “we could not have any memory of all these subjects” that pertain to pure understanding (Crit. 37–44). In his Critique of Foucher, Desgabets was concerned, for the most part, with defending against Foucher’s skeptical attack a Cartesian dualism in Malebranche that distinguishes mind as thinking substance from body as 2

This is the fourth of the seven suppositions attributed to Malebranche; see Chapter 3, note 3.

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extended substance. On the particular issue of pure intellect, however, he expressed a rare point of agreement with Foucher’s critique of Malebranche. Desgabets noted in particular that pure intellection being taken in the sense of the Recherche for an operation independent of body, you are correct in all that you say to combat his opinion, and I agree with you that it is impossible to be assured by experience that there are no traces formed in the brain when one exercises the operations that one takes here for pure intellections. I find it also quite true what you say concerning the experience that teaches us that our organs are no less fatigued by simple intellections than they can be by the imagination, and that memory conserving the species of the most metaphysical of thoughts, it is an infallible mark that they are joined to traces in the brain as much as other modes of thought. (CdC 92f )

The assumption here, as in Foucher’s response to Malebranche, is that there can be no memory of thoughts that bear no connection to traces in the brain.3 Given this assumption, the fact that we can remember even “the most metaphysical thoughts” does indeed serve as an “infallible mark” that such thoughts are joined to brain states. Such an assumption would seem to be one that Malebranche accepted. He claimed in the Recherche, after all, that a proper explanation of memory must draw on the principle that “all our different perceptions are attached to the changes occurring in the fibers in the principal part of the brain in which the soul resides most particularly” (OCM 1:224). However, in the “pr´eface” containing his response to Foucher, Malebranche emphasized the distinctive nature of the traces involved in memory pertaining to pure intellect. He noted there that there are two sorts of traces [in the brain]: the ones that the mind forms to represent things, as the trace that accompanies the idea of a square; the others that accompany abstract ideas and that do not represent them, as the traces that the sound of words and the shape of characters produced in the brain, which do not naturally have the force to represent or to recall ideas. (OCM 2:496)

The view here is that the brain traces involved in memory of abstract ideas trigger the perception not of the ideas themselves but rather of the words associated with those ideas. Since the connection between those words and the accompanying ideas are themselves conventional, the traces cannot be said to “naturally” bring about the recollection of the ideas. This point does not address the underlying objection in Foucher and Desgabets that we can have memory of purely intellectual thoughts only if there is some connection, whether natural or conventional, between those thoughts and brain traces. Even so, there is the more radical suggestion in Malebranche that no such connections are required. In a later clarification 3

A similar assumption informs Desgabets’s discussion of memory at RD 5:186f.

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of his remarks on memory in the Recherche, for instance, Malebranche allowed that the thoughts of the soul leave “certain changes” in its own substance that allow it to have a “spiritual memory” of certain objects (OCM 3:67–69).4 The implication is that these changes suffice for such memory; thus, there is no need for a memory of words made possible by brain traces. This implication is related to Descartes’s own distinction in a 1644 letter between “the memory of material things [that] depends on the traces that remain in the brain after an image has been imprinted on it; and . . . the memory of intellectual things [that] depends on some other traces that remain in the mind itself ” (AT 4:114).5 For Descartes and Malebranche alike, the independence of pure intellect is revealed by the fact that the mind does not depend on changes in the brain for spiritual or intellectual memory. The differences over intellectual memory in the Foucher–Desgabets– Malebranche exchange are broached as well in an earlier exchange between Gassendi and Descartes. In his comments on the Meditations, Gassendi protested that in order to prove that you are a diverse (that is, as you contend, an incorporeal) nature, you must put forth some operation in a way different than the brutes do, if not outside of the brain, at least independent of the brain: but this you will not do. For you yourself are perturbed when it is perturbed and oppressed when it is oppressed, and if something removes the species of things from it, you yourself do not retain any trace. (AT 7:269)

The claim here that the mind is “perturbed and oppressed” when the brain is so affected recalls Desgabets’s endorsement of the objection in Foucher that the organs are fatigued in purely intellectual thought as well as in imagination. In claiming that no one retains a trace of thought “if the something removes the species of things from it,” Gassendi also anticipates the main argument in Desgabets and Foucher against pure intellect, namely, that memory of any thought requires brain traces. Desgabets could not have accepted in its entirety the objection that Gassendi offered against Descartes. The most obvious difference concerns the case of the “brutes.” While Gassendi was concerned about casting doubt on the claim in Descartes that we have operations that differ in kind from the operations of nonhuman animals,6 Desgabets enthusiastically endorsed such a claim. Thus, a chapter of Desgabets’s “Suppl´ement” is devoted to his defense of Descartes’s thesis that the brutes are mere machines that have no 4

5 6

Malebranche excused his failure to mention such changes in the Recherche by noting that one cannot know what these changes consist in given that we have no clear idea of the soul. For a discussion of this point, see Schmaltz 1996, 197–201. Compare his later remark in a 1642 letter to Constantijn Huygens that we have an “intellectual memory” that “is certainly independent of the body” (AT 3:598). See, for instance, his discussion in the Discourse on the Method, at AT 6:56–59.

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sensory thoughts or feelings. Indeed, Desgabets appealed to this thesis in support of the conclusion that the human soul is immaterial (RD 5:199f ), the very conclusion that Gassendi was concerned to dispute in his exchange with Descartes. Although Desgabets rejected the suggestion in Gassendi that our operations involve nothing immaterial, he allowed that all such operations depend on states of the brain.7 In so allowing, Desgabets, in effect, rejected the position that Descartes offered in the following response to Gassendi’s remarks. I have often distinctly shown that the mind can operate independently of the brain; for the brain can be of no use for pure intellect, but only for imagining and sensing. And although, when something strongly strikes the imagination or the senses (as when the brain is perturbed), the mind does not easily empty itself to understand other things, we nevertheless experience that when the imagination is less strong, we often understand something completely different from it: as when while sleeping we notice that we dream, it is the work of the imagination that we sleep, but when we notice that we dream, it is a work of the intellect alone. (AT 7:358f )

In commenting on this passage, Margaret Wilson claims that the position that Descartes defended here differs from a contemporary “Cartesian dualism” that holds only that mental events differ from bodily events. In particular, the contemporary dualist differs from Descartes in failing to conclude that “the search for a neurobiological account of ‘pure thought’ is in any sense more chimerical than the search for a neurobiological account of sensation.”8 In this respect, such a dualist would differ from Malebranche as well. In contrast, Desgabets offered a dualistic position that not merely allows that our intellectual thought has a neurological basis, but requires that it does. Even if one grants the assumption in Desgabets and Foucher that remembered intellectual thoughts depend on brain traces, we still do not have Desgabets’s strong conclusion that all our mental operations depend on the brain. There is, for instance, Descartes’s claim in response to Gassendi that even though a dream is the work of the imagination, the “noticing” of it can pertain to the intellect alone. Given this claim, one could object to Desgabets that even if remembered thoughts must depend on brain traces, the noticing of those thoughts could be an intellectual act that is independent of the body. 7

8

See also the view of the apostate Cartesian Henricus Regius, in a 1647 broadsheet directed against Descartes, that the actions of mind are “organic” given that it is the case that “as the dispositions of the body differ, so the mind has different thoughts” (AT 8-2:344). Descartes responded that Regius made this claim only because he wanted to indicate, contrary to his official pronouncement of mind–body distinctness, that mind is, in fact, only a mode of body (AT 8-2:355f). For more on the Descartes–Regius relation, see the remarks in §I.2, at note 33. Wilson 1978, 180.

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Desgabets’s best rejoinder to this line of argument would draw on his view that any such intellectual act must belong to a mind that differs in kind from the human soul. Such a response is indicated in a 1674 letter concerning the Recherche, in which Desgabets told Malebranche that “the thing which appears to me in your book the most contrary to my reasonings concerning the demonstration of the immortality of the soul is that it seems that you consider [the soul] as a substance too detached from the relations that it has to body.” In particular, Desgabets objected to the suggestion in Malebranche that the union of the soul to a body is “only the effect of the arbitrary will of God that unites them without having been determined by the essence or nature of the thing; which gives an idea of the soul strongly related to the one we have of an angel” (OCM 18:84). To say that our mind can possess intellectual thoughts that are independent of the body is to confuse our mind with a disembodied angelic intellect. Desgabets’s main objection to an understanding of our soul in terms of angelic minds is that an angel has “a nature more contrary to that of the soul than simply distinguished.” In the letter to Malebranche, he emphasized theological reasons for drawing this distinction connected to the differences between human beings and embodied demons in hell. The embodiment of the demons is itself a punishment since this is a “violent” state contrary to the natural state of the angelic mind, which is to exist in separation from body.9 By contrast, the separation from body is the violent state of the human soul, since it is by its nature united to a body (OCM 18:85f ).10 Desgabets did allow that the human soul “is very distinct from the body” (OCM 18:86). This position reflects his acceptance of the basic Cartesian claim that the soul as thinking substance is distinct from body as extended substance (cf. §4.2). However, even though he held that the human soul is through its essence distinct from body, he rejected the claim that it is through its essence above body. This is clear from his insistence to Malebranche that this soul is “a thinking substance, but thinking in a certain manner, which is that the thoughts are modes naturally required to be united with corporeal motions” (18:84f ). Elsewhere, Desgabets echoed his criticism of Malebranche’s appeal to God’s “arbitrary will” when he noted that “we experience that the soul and the organic body are one for another, not by an arbitrary end [destination] of God, . . . but because their essence and their own nature is to be one for another” (RD 7:294f ). On his view, our ordinary experience confirms the theological belief that the embodied soul differs in nature from a pure mind, 9

10

This view deviates from that of Thomas, who held that the suffering of demons involves not sensations of pain deriving from union with a body, but rather from the experience of the frustration of the will; see S.Th. Ia, 64, 3. Here the position is in line with Thomas’s claim that it is only due to sin that the soul exists in a disembodied state after death; see S.Th. Ia–IIæ, 85, 5–6.

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even when, as in the case of the demons, that mind is embodied. To mark this distinction, he generally reserved the term esprit for pure minds that are naturally separated from body, such as those found in angels, and used the term aˆ me for souls that are by nature united to body, such as those found in human beings. This distinction is reflected in the complaint in his letter to Malebranche that the title of the Recherche refers to an examination of la nature de l’esprit de l’homme rather than of la nature de l’ˆame (OCM 18:89).11 The complaint here applies not only to Malebranche, but also – and even, for Desgabets, primarily – to Descartes.

4.2 ‘‘the second fault of descartes’’ As I have indicated, Desgabets’s “Suppl´ement” is divided into two main parts. The first focuses on Descartes’s account of what we know concerning the relation between mind and body, while the second concerns aspects of Descartes’s theory of ideas that bear on his account of our knowledge of the existence of God and of the material world. The remarks in the second part provide the details of the response to the “first fault” in Descartes of failing to see that our ideas presuppose the existence of their objects. In contrast, the first part of the “Suppl´ement” concerns primarily Descartes’s “second fault” of failing to see that all human thought depends on body. While the second part begins with an investigation of the nature of ideas that is guided by Desgabets’s intentionality principle, the first begins with a consideration of the account of the mind that emerges from the discovery in Descartes concerning the nature of sensory qualities. In particular, the first part highlights the discovery that sensory qualities such as colors, sounds, and temperatures cannot exist in matter, given that all states of matter are reducible to modes of extension, and given that these qualities are not so reducible. The consequence here is that “the sun is not luminous, the snow is not white, the fire is not hot.” These qualities are instead “effectively only our sensations, our perceptions, they are thoughts, passions of the soul of which it is the subject and immediate object.”12 Thus, such qualities are not present in the material world but rather are something “wholly spiritual” (RD 5:164–66). Here we have an analogue of a contemporary “qualia” argument against a reduction of perceptual states to states of the body.13 In proposing this sort of argument, Desgabets further distinguished himself from Gassendi, who offered against Descartes the more Aristotelian view 11 12 13

The full title of Malebranche’s text is, De la Recherche de la v´erit´e, ou l’on traite de la nature de l’esprit de l’homme, et de l’usage qu’il en doit faire pour e´viter l’erreur dans les sciences. The point that the soul is the “object” of our perception of color is connected to the view that Desgabets is committed to “colored” souls; see §3.2, at note 21. For a helpful summary of the contemporary debate over qualia and phenomenal consciousness, see Guzeldere ¨ 1997, esp. 36–44.

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that our sensations, like the sensations of the brutes, are just states of the bodily sense organs.14 Moreover, Desgabets was closer to Descartes than to contemporary critics of materialist reductionism in claiming not only that perceptual states are irreducible to bodily states, but also that the soul that is the subject of these states is something that is “really distinct” from body.15 However, the main argument that Descartes offered for the real distinction in “Meditation Six” does not focus on the nature of sensory qualities. Instead, he claimed there that since “nothing else pertains to my nature or essence beyond the fact that I am a thinking thing,” he can conclude that he has “a distinct idea of myself as a thinking thing, not extended.” This idea, together with the “distinct idea of body insofar as it is an extended thing, not thinking,” yields the result that “I am really distinct from my body, and can exist without it” (AT 7:78). It is not immediately evident how the fact that nothing pertains to his essence but thought shows that he can exist apart from his body. However, we can understand the connection here in terms of the suggestion in Descartes that it is purely intellectual thought that pertains to his essence. I discern such a suggestion in his observation, immediately following the presentation of the real distinction argument, that I find in me certain faculties for certain special modes of thinking, namely the faculties of imagining and sensing, without which I can clearly and distinctly understand myself, but not vice versa them without me, that is without an intellectual substance in which they inhere: for intellection is in some way included in their formal concept, whence I perceive that they are distinguished from me as modes from a thing. (AT 7:78)

Thus, pure intellection, as opposed to sensing and imagining, pertains to my essence, that is to say, is that without which I cannot understand myself. The further claim that intellection is “included in the formal concept” of the additional faculties of sensation and imagination is admittedly difficult to parse. However, the point here seems to be that these faculties, or rather the states pertaining to them, are modes of a thing that cannot lack at least the potential for purely intellectual states. But given the assumption, which Descartes emphasized in his remarks to Gassendi, that such states depend in no way on the body or brain, it just follows that my intellectual substance can exist apart from my body, just as the real distinction argument requires.16 14 15

16

For Gassendi’s endorsement of this Aristotelian view, see AT 7:269f. Thus, contemporary philosophers such as Thomas Nagel and Joseph Levine who have posed the problem of consciousness have shown no sympathy for substance dualism (for references, see Guzeldere ¨ 1997). For the view that the real distinction argument depends on the conception of the self in terms of pure intellect, see Wilson 1978, 200f, and Rozemond 1998, 48–60. Descartes did offer an argument for the immateriality of the mind that stresses not the independence of intellectual thought, but rather the fact that no perceptual states, including sensation and

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Descartes’s argument thus depends on an assumption that Desgabets explicitly rejected, namely, that we have intellectual operations that do not depend on body. In common with recent discussions in the philosophy of mind, moreover, the emphasis in Desgabets is on our sensory perceptions rather than our nonsensory intellectual thoughts. One reason for this emphasis is that Desgabets wanted to draw attention to those states that clearly derive from the union of the soul with the body. In the “Suppl´ement,” he held that this sort of attention will help us to see that, contrary to what Descartes suggested, our thoughts occur “in a man and not in an angel” (RD 5:176). As in the case of Malebranche, then, so Desgabets took Descartes to go wrong in confusing the human soul with an angelic intellect.17 Arnauld had earlier offered a version of this charge against Descartes. He objected that the argument in “Meditation Six” for the distinction of mind from body “comes close to proving too much, and takes us back to the Platonic view (which however the author rejects) that nothing corporeal pertains to our essence, so that man is merely a rational soul and the body merely a vehicle for the soul; whence man is defined as a soul using a body” (AT 7:203). Descartes responded to the charge of having “proved too much,” however, by emphasizing his conclusion in “Meditation Six” that we can infer from the fact that we have sensory thoughts that our mind is “substantially united to” body. The particular argument for this conclusion draws on the observation that nature teaches me by these sensations of pain, hunger, thirst, etc., that I am not merely present in my body as a sailor is in a ship, but am most tightly conjoined and as it were intermixed with it, so that I compose a unity with it. For otherwise, when the body is damaged, I, who am nothing other than a thinking thing, would not sense pain on that account, but would perceive that damage by pure intellect, as the sailor perceives by sight whether anything in the ship is broken; and when the body needed food or drink, I would understand this expressly, not having confused sensations of hunger and thirst. For certainly these same sensations of hunger, thirst, pain, etc., are nothing other than confused modes of thinking arising from the union and as if intermingling of the mind with the body. (7:81)

Contemporary discussion of Descartes’s views on the soul–body union tend to emphasize the problem of the interaction of distinct substances. However, the main concern in this passage is to highlight certain phenomenological features of our experience that do not pertain to the mind simply as a thinking thing, that is to say, to pure intellect. Descartes’s view here is that

17

imagination, have anything in common with corporeal states; see, for instance, AT 7:175f. However, the stress on pure intellect is understandable given Descartes’s concern, expressed in his letter dedicating the Meditations to the Sorbonne, that he support the religious doctrine of the immortality of the soul (AT 7:3). It is interesting, however, that Malebranche’s own discussions of our knowledge of mind tend to emphasize sensory as opposed to intellectual states; for more on this point, see Schmaltz 1996, chs. 2–3.

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any such features must be attributed to the union rather than to the mind alone. He expressed this same point later, in the Principles, when he claimed that “the mind is conscious [conscia] that [pain and other sensations] do not proceed from itself alone, and cannot pertain to it from the fact alone that it is a thinking thing, but only from the fact that it is joined to something other than itself that is extended and mobile, which thing is called a human body” (AT 8-1:41). In Descartes’s view, then, the fact that we are aware of certain perceptions that do not proceed from pure intellect suffices to refute the unqualified Platonist claim, which Arnauld found objectionable, that “nothing corporeal pertains to our essence.” Even so, Descartes never clearly indicated the ontological import of the claim that body belongs to the essence of the human being. He spoke to Arnauld of the “substantial union” of our mind with body and noted further that both of these components are “incomplete substances when they are referred to a human being” that is itself “something that is a unity in its own right” (AT 7:222).18 In a famous passage from his 1643 correspondence with Princess Elisabeth, Descartes also claimed that the union has its own “primitive notion” on a par with the primitive notions of mind and body.19 Although the indication here is that the human composite is a special sort of unified entity that is set apart from mind and body considered in themselves, Descartes stopped just short of saying that this composite is a substance in its own right.20 At one point, Desgabets took this further step in claiming that “we find three kinds of simple substances that are created, that is to say, matter or body, the angel or rational soul, and one which is composed of body and soul, which is man” (RD 1:3). Given his ontology, however, such a position would force him to posit an atemporal substantial being distinct from material and mental substance. He pointedly refrained from positing this odd entity in the “Trait´e,” where he provided only “matter and spiritual substances” as examples of created substantial beings (RD 2:21). In his Usage, Regis emphasized, in line with the remarks in the “Trait´e,” that since substance is “subject neither to time nor to place,” it is only “mind

18 19 20

See also Descartes’s claim in a 1641 letter to Regius that the fact that the soul and body are incomplete substances reveals that they compose an ens per se (AT 3:460). See AT 3:664–68 and 690–95. Desgabets cited the view in this correspondence of the three primitive notions in RD 5:194. Earlier, in Schmaltz 1992, I took Descartes’s remarks in the 1643 correspondence with Elisabeth to indicate that the composite forms a substance. For a critique of the claim that there is any such indication there, see Rozemond 1998, ch. 6. I am now inclined to agree that Descartes never embraced the position that the human being constitutes a special sort of substance. However, I continue to think that he wanted to hold at times that this being is more than a mere composite since it has its own special and unified nature. My suspicion is that Descartes never did figure out how to provide room in his ontology for a being that is distinctive in this way but that is not itself a substance.

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considered in itself” and “body considered in itself,” and not human souls united to human bodies, that are substances (Usage 42).21 He went beyond Desgabets, however, in offering there an explicit account of the ontological status of the union. Regis noted that this union “is a true mode,” and thus that one must say not “that the man taken formally is a substantial being, but a modal being, understanding by a modal being, a being the formal being of which consists in modes” (46). The indication here is not only that the soul–body composite is a modal being, but also that the human soul and its body that are the constituent parts of such a being are themselves modes. The anti-Platonist implications of this position are indicated by Regis’s own insistence in the Usage that the “person [personne] in a man can consist neither in the soul nor in the body alone, but in the soul and in the body united together.” This is so because neither the soul alone nor the body alone is “a complete Being,” but only a part of a human composite that is itself “wholly complete” (Usage 69f ). The need for this third (nonsubstantial) being is revealed by the fact that “sensations pertain in part neither to the soul nor to the body, [but] they pertain totally to the man.” Not to the soul alone, since although the soul is the “subject” (sujet) of the sensations, it is not their efficient cause; and not to the body alone, since although the body is the efficient cause of sensations, it is not their material cause. The conclusion in the Usage is that only the human composite can be both the material and the efficient cause of the sensory states (72).22 The argument here is distinguished from the proof of the union that Descartes offered in “Meditation Six” insofar as it emphasizes not the confused nature of our sensations but rather the fact that they depend causally on the body. However, Regis’s argument is in line with the emphasis in Desgabets on the fact that all our thoughts derive from a “commerce with the senses.” As in the case of Desgabets, Regis took the fact that all our thoughts have a sensory origin to support the traditional scholastic maxim that “nothing is in the intellect except what was previously in the senses” (nihil est in intellectu quin prius fuerit in sensu). Nevertheless, we will see that Desgabets and Regis ultimately held that it is the temporality of human thought, and not its sensory origin, that reveals most clearly its dependence on the union.

21 22

Compare the claim in the Syst`eme that the human being cannot itself be a substance since “body and mind are the only substances I know” (1:114). It is clear that Regis could not endorse “Cartesian dualism” in the sense of Shoemaker, since such a dualism requires that “the immaterial substance associated with the person is the person” and that “the states of the immaterial substance are the mental states of the person” (Shoemaker 1984, 141; emphasis in original). Shoemaker himself brackets the issue of the relation of Cartesian dualism to the historical views of Descartes and his followers.

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4.3 nihil est in intellectu In the first part of the “Suppl´ement,” Desgabets devoted a chapter to a discussion of the “common maxim,” Nihil est in intellectu quin prius fuerit in sensu (RD 5:180–83). He offered there his own view on this maxim as a “middle way” between two extreme positions. The one extreme is represented by the view of the “libertines” that our ideas not only come from the senses but also “are in effect material and they are only motions of very subtle parts of our brain.” The other extreme is represented by the view in Descartes that pure intellections “have no dependence on internal or external sense” (5:180f ). As we have seen, Desgabets’s main argument against the libertine position draws on Descartes’s discovery that the sensory qualities we perceive, and thus our perceptions of these qualities, cannot be reduced to modes of extension. His argument against Descartes is that even “in the most abstract speculations, where the soul above all deploys its freedom, it always has commerce with the senses, at least the interior [senses], which are nothing other than imprinted species [esp`eces trac´ees] in the brain.” Desgabets’s compromise position is that “in all thought without exception body plays some role” but that “the soul that thinks depending on body is not at all a body” (5:181). Desgabets did note one respect in which the scholastic maxim must be modified. In particular, he insisted that everything in the intellect is first not in the senses (in sensu) but from the senses (a sensu). This change is required due to the fact that our thoughts are not similar to what is found in the bodily sense organs (RD 5:183). It may seem that Desgabets had in mind here merely the fact that these thoughts are spiritual rather than material. However, in a later section, he contrasted “pure intellections” that reveal their objects directly with an act of imagination that involves a “turning” to an image in the brain. Of course, there is a resemblance here to Descartes’s proposal toward the start of “Meditation Six” that the mind “turns toward” and “looks at” something in the body in the case of imagination, but “turns toward itself” and “inspects its own ideas” in the case of pure intellection (AT 7:73). However, even though Descartes’s pure intellect is distinct from anything sensory, Desgabets indicated that his pure intellection includes even sensations of pleasure and pain, and in general anything that does not involve an act of imagination.23 Desgabets’s insistence that all our thoughts involve a “commerce with the senses” may seem to suggest that he did not recognize any nonsensory pure intellections. Yet he did speak in the “Suppl´ement” of our having ideas that “represent God, the angels, [and] universals.” His claim is not that these ideas are sensory, but rather that we can possess them only when our body is in a particular state. Thus, he noted that we can have a distinct conception of 23

See RD 5:192; cf. CdC 96f.

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universals when the action of the “animal spirits” in the brain is strong and enduring, but that we can have only a confused conception of them when this action is only weak and passing (RD 5:191). The point here is connected to the passage from the Critique in which Desgabets endorsed Foucher’s observation that “our organs are no less fatigued by simple intellections than they can be by the imagination.” Moreover, the indication elsewhere in this passage is that pure intellections include not only perceptions of sensory qualities but also “our most metaphysical thoughts.” Desgabets’s concern, therefore, was not to deny that we have nonsensory thoughts, but merely to claim that even such thoughts depend on the states of the body to which our soul is united. Some comments in Regis seem to preclude even this relatively weak claim. At the start of the Usage, he distinguished between “the mind insofar as it is united to a human body,” which “can know only what is under sensible species,” and “mind considered in itself,” which “knows itself by itself, that is to say by its own substance” (Usage 40). The point that we know not only the mind “itself” but also “by itself” suggests not simply that we can know the mind as it is apart from its union with body, but also that this very knowledge is independent of the union. Here we have a remnant of Regis’s claim in the Syst`eme that knowledge of mind “precedes all acquired knowledge.”24 However, such a claim conflicts with the conclusion in the Usage that we know soul and body “by the same view.” Moreover, the assertion that we know the mind by itself is in tension with the views in this text concerning the maxim that “all that is in the understanding has passed through the senses” (tout ce qui est dans l’entendement a pass´e par les sens) (Usage 223). Regis noted there that the “Ancients, following Aristotle,” accepted this maxim “as absolutely true,” but that the “Moderns” believe that it is true “only in some respect.” In particular, the latter allow that the maxim holds for the faculty of imagination, but insist that it does not hold for the faculty of pure understanding. One might expect that Regis, the defender of Cartesianism, would have taken up the cause of the moderns. Yet, even though he did criticize the “highly abstract” and “highly obscure” manner in which the ancients framed their position, he came down firmly on their side and against the moderns. In particular, he opposed the modern hypothesis that we have “an understanding that acts independently of the body” (225). But since Regis held that all thoughts that depend on the body derive from the union, he would seem to be committed to the conclusion that even the thoughts involved in our knowledge of the “mind considered in itself” derive from this relation. At one point in the Usage, Regis emphasized the limitations imposed by the union when he cited the position in Aquinas that “we cannot know

24

See §3.6 at note 67.

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spiritual substances in the state of this present life if it is not by some comparison to corporeal things” (Usage 224).25 He also allowed, both here and earlier in the Syst`eme, that the faculty of conception by which we “know all particular minds” is distinct from the faculties of sensation and imagination.26 Yet, he recognized at times that even this faculty is dependent on the senses insofar as its activity is triggered by sense experience.27 In places where he insisted that all human thought depends on sense experience, Regis went beyond Desgabets, who tended to stress only that our thoughts depend on brain traces. However, Regis did not endorse the further empiricist position, which Thomas Lennon has recently attributed to him, that “before the fact of creation there can be no rational guarantee of what God creates; this can be determined only after the fact through experience.”28 In the Usage, Regis did indeed claim that “the fact” of the existence of modes “can be known only by experience of the senses, and by consequence in a manner constantly changing” (Usage 265). In this passage, however, he explicitly contrasted this sort of knowledge with unchanging knowledge of the “necessary and immutable” objects of the sciences, that is, of substances and modal essences. Moreover, the argument he borrowed from Desgabets for the indefectibility of these objects clearly is supposed to be a priori rather than inductive. If empiricism is supposed to rule out this sort of argument, and indeed any sort of indubitable knowledge of necessary and immutable objects, then neither Desgabets nor Regis can be characterized as empiricists. This is not, of course, to deny any sense in which they are empiricists. If empiricism is defined in terms of the denial that we have a pure intellect that operates apart from body, then both can be placed in this camp. In some ways, Regis is even more radical than Desgabets on this point since he emphasized more than Desgabets did the dependence of all human thought on sense perception of material objects. Yet the point about the sensory basis of human experience is conspicuously absent from Regis’s main argument in the Usage for the principle of the ancients that everything in the understanding was first in the senses. The argument there is that pure intellect cannot be a mental faculty since “all faculties suppose succession in their operation, and all succession supposes motion; but the mind, as such, is not subject to motion” (Usage 225). Since the operations of our faculties are successive, they bear an essential relation to motion, and so differ in 25

26 27 28

For the corresponding position in Thomas, see S.Th. Ia, 88, 1. Interestingly, Malebranche also emphasized that we must conceive the faculties of the soul in terms of bodily faculties. For discussion of his position, see Schmaltz 1996, 179f, 193–96. Compare Syst`eme 1:160–62 and Usage 55f. See, for instance, his claim in the Usage that the idea of the soul comes only “mediately” from the senses because it involves reflection on sensory ideas (75). Lennon 1998, 1:355.

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kind from a “mind as such,” which thinks in complete independence from body and its motions. There is an anticipation in Desgabets of this line of argument. In the “Suppl´ement,” he insisted that the mere fact that our thoughts “have their beginning, continuation, and their end” reveals that it is motion that excites them and gives them their manner of being, and also their removal, it is it that makes them continue for a longer or shorter time with a dependence so great and especially so sensible that the most speculative people can do anything only in time. (RD 5:189)

In his 1674 letter to Malebranche, Desgabets concluded that the fact that our successive thoughts depend essentially on motion reveals that our souls differ from angelic minds, which since they are wholly independent of body have “no thoughts one after another and no union with local motion” (OCM 18:84–86). Obviously, the crucial premise in Desgabets and Regis that all temporal succession presupposes motion is controversial. Yet both provided a defense of this premise that appeals to a cartesianized version of Aristotle’s account of time. Moreover, the reference to angelic minds in Desgabets’s letter to Malebranche is connected to his strategy of reinforcing the distinction between human souls and purely intellectual minds by appealing to the broadly Thomistic position that the existence of angels separated from matter is to be measured not by time but rather by a nontemporal aevum. We will discover that certain aspects of the Thomistic account of angelic thought create difficulties for the conclusion in Desgabets and Regis that all successive duration is tied to motion. Nonetheless, the scholastic position ultimately reinforces the conclusion in Desgabets and Regis that the experience of the human soul differs fundamentally from the experience of disembodied minds.

4.4 continuous time and the union with motion From the beginning, in the “Trait´e,” Desgabets held that substance has an indivisible existence that is outside of time but also can possess an “extrinsic” temporal duration by virtue of its having modes that are produced successively by motion. This view seems to be most intelligible in the case of material substance, where motion serves to distinguish various parts of matter. However, Desgabets made clear that the connection between temporal duration and motion is not restricted to this case. Indeed, he asserted as a general principle that “time and motion are two things that cannot be distinguished really” (RD 2:41). Drawing on the Cartesian principle that two things can be really distinct only if each can exist without the other, Desgabets concluded

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that time and motion “are inseparable” (2:43).29 Even in the case of spiritual substances, then, there can be no time without motion. The comment in the “Trait´e” that time and motion are not really distinct includes the rider: “as Aristotle has taught.” The reference here is to the fourth book of the Physics, where Aristotle concluded that time is “the number of motion in respect of before and after” (A 1:373). Aristotle did emphasize in this text that time itself cannot be a motion since it does not have a particular location in space, as motion does, and also cannot be faster or slower, as motion can be (1:370f). However, he also held that even though time differs from motion “in definition,” it has “the same substratum” as motion in the sense that it is a measure essentially tied to motion (1:371). Aristotle added to his definition of time the clause that time is “continuous since it is an attribute of what is continuous.” He took motion to be continuous in the sense of being divisible into further parts ad infinitum. He then argued that if motion is continuous then so must time be, “for the time that has passed is always thought to be in proportion to the motion” (A 1:371). The view here of the intimate connection between the continuous nature of time and motion is reflected in Desgabets’s appeal in the “Trait´e” to what “philosophy aided by mathematics teaches concerning the composition of the continuum” and, in particular, to the result that “motion and time flow by parts divisible to infinity” and that “motion and time establish an extension, or a successive and continuous quantity” (RD 2:40f ). For Desgabets, as for Aristotle, time is continuous since it is bound to something that is by its nature continuous. In the Usage, Regis also endorsed “the famous definition of Aristotle: time is the measure of motion” (Usage 351). With Desgabets, moreover, he emphasized that temporal duration is “composed of parts flowing to infinity.” Regis claimed that the temporal Nunc is itself an “instant” that is “extended and divisible to infinity, and that flows by means of parts that succeed one another” (311). Temporal duration is said to be “a kind of motion” that “can be measured only by a motion,” and in particular by “the motion of the sun, which is of all motions that we know the most regular and the most periodic” (310).30 Descartes himself noted, in a strikingly Aristotelian passage from his Principles, that when time is considered as “the measure of motion,” it is determined by means of a comparison of the duration of an object with “the duration of the greatest and most regular motions that give rise to days and years.” One point in this passage is that when it is abstracted from the 29 30

In Descartes, see AT 8-1:28f. Compare the account of time in Syst`eme 1:107f. Desgabets also held in the “Trait´e” that we measure temporal duration by the motion of the sun since it is “the best known and the most uniform [motion] that we know” (RD 2:40).

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motion it measures, time is merely a “mode of thinking” that does not correspond to any extra-mental reality. This passage is related to Aristotle’s own admission that time is a measure that cannot exist apart from the soul that measures (A 1:377).31 However, Descartes departed from Aristotle when he emphasized that the duration measured by the regular motions need not itself be a motion, since “the duration that we understand to be involved in motion is certainly no different from the duration involved in things that do not move” (AT 8-1:27). Although the context of this remark seems to indicate a concern with the duration of bodies at rest,32 we will see that he took the point to apply primarily to the duration of minds that are subject neither to motion nor to rest. In this way, then, Descartes attempted to extend temporal measure beyond the motion to which Aristotle had restricted it. In contrast, Desgabets and Regis attempted to restrict the set of phenomena to which the Aristotelian definition applies. They agreed with Aristotle that time is a mind-dependent measure of motion. Indeed, in the Usage, Regis criticized the view that time is something really distinct from motion on the grounds that it “regards abstract things as if they can exist outside of us in a state of abstraction” (Usage 317).33 However, even though Aristotle had understood measured motion to include any sort of qualitative or quantitative change, Desgabets followed Descartes in thinking that the only true motion is local motion, that is, separation of parts of matter from other parts contiguous to them.34 The position in Regis is a bit more complicated, since in the section containing his discussion of motion, he explicitly denied that all motion reduces to local motion. However, he referred in this passage to an earlier discussion that seems merely to distinguish four different ways in which local motion can be considered.35 In any case, it is clear that Regis took motion to be present only in parts of matter.36 He 31

32

33 34 35

36

Descartes’s view that there is only a “distinction of reason” between abstracted time and the duration it measures is more closely related to a similar view in Su´arez, to whom Descartes was indebted for his theory of distinctions. For the Su´arez–Descartes connection on these points, see Sol`ere 1997. Thus, he defended the claim about the duration of objects that do not move by noting that two bodies that move at unequal speeds have the same duration. One obvious problem with this example, which Desgabets noted (see L 322f ), is that it involves moving bodies. Compare Desgabets’s critique in the “Trait´e” of those who hold that “motion and duration [are] two things really distinct” (RD 2:41f). Compare RD 2:39f and AT 8-1:33f. The reference is to the section in the Usage where Regis distinguished between (1) motus ad locum, or motion involving change of place; (2) motus ad quantitem, or motion that augments or diminishes the mass of a body; (3) motus ad qualitatem, or motion that changes the state of a body without changing its nature; and (4) motus ad formum or generationem, or motion that brings about a new body by means of essential change (306). Type (1) seems to pertain to the nature of motion, while types (2)–(4) seem to pertain to the various effects of motion. Thus, in the “Dictionnaire” appended to the Usage defines mouvement as “the successive application of bodies one to another” (960).

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followed Desgabets, moreover, in claiming that the temporal duration of things “does not differ from their motion” (315). For both Desgabets and Regis, then, the Aristotelian definition of time as the measure of motion entails that only that which has bodily motion can have a temporal duration.37 One difficulty that Desgabets and Regis had to confront is broached by Descartes’s suggestion in the Principles that time measures equally the durations of bodies in motion and at rest. The response in Desgabets is that the bodies that have a temporal duration measured by the motion of the sun must move at least with respect to the sun (L 328).38 In Regis, the response is that rest is merely “the least motion” that itself depends on motion (Usage 343). However, a more serious problem is that the restriction of time to motion appears to undermine Cartesian dualism. For if bodily motions alone can have such a duration, then it would seem that our temporal thoughts must be reducible to such motions. This line of objection is reflected in the charge on the part of the “disciples of Descartes” at the Commercy conferences that it is a “primary inconvenience” of Desgabets’s position that is implies that “the soul knows very clearly by an intuitive notion that it is a body” (R 243). Desgabets attempted to distance himself from this sort of materialism when he asserted in his “Descartes a` l’alambic,” which he submitted for discussion at the conferences, that there is a connection that “all thought has to motion, although it is not motion” (L 321). But this assertion raises the question of how a temporal duration that is restricted to local motion can measure our thoughts as well. Desgabets’s answer to this question is most explicit in the “Suppl´ement,” where he claimed that even though our soul has “neither time nor duration by identity of nature,” still it has these “by union with motion, in which sense one says quite properly that the soul has a body and the body has a soul” (RD 5:190). The claim that our soul does not have temporal duration “by identity of nature” indicates that we do not have such a duration simply by virtue of being a thinking thing. In fact, Desgabets held that something can have such a duration only by virtue of being in motion. However, he also believed that the soul can be subject to time due to the fact that it “has” a particular body, and, more specifically, due to the fact that its thoughts are united to the motions of that body.

37

38

At Commercy, Desgabets argued against the claim in the Principles that bodies at rest also have a temporal duration by noting, first, that bodies at rest with respect to certain bodies are in motion with respect to others and, second, that the temporal duration of these bodies is tied to their motion rather than to their rest (R 321). Desgabets was drawing here on the principle in Descartes of the reciprocity of transference, according to which a body A cannot be transferred from the vicinity of body B without B also being transferred from the vicinity of A. For Descartes’s principle, see AT 8-1:55f.

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Desgabets’s emphasis on the fact that the union is with motion is explained by his remark at the Commercy conferences that “the body does not act on the soul by rest, shapes, sizes or arrangements of its parts, but by their motion” (R 293). There is a clear Cartesian basis for the point that the union occurs through motion, as indicated by Descartes’s claim in the Passions of the Soul that our soul has a nature that “is such that it receives as many different impressions, that is, it has as many different perceptions as there are different motions in the [pineal] gland” (AT 11:355). What is new in Desgabets, however, is that view that motion not only produces certain thoughts that reveal the union with body but also gives those thoughts a temporal duration that does not derive from their own nature. Though Desgabets’s distinction between duration by nature and duration by union does not reappear in Regis, his Usage endorses essentially the position that Desgabets has outlined. This text indicates that “spiritual modes,” that is, “the soul with its thoughts,” have the temporal duration that they do by virtue of the fact that they “depend on some manner of bodily motion [mani`ere du mouvement du corps],39 to which they are united.” This union brings it about that our thoughts “are no less passing than the manner of motion on which they depend” (Usage 307). Regis did insist that only motion can be “intrinsic and essential” to duration, since motion alone can be divided into parts that are measurable by other motions, and in particular by the regular motion of the sun (315). However, he also allowed that the duration of our thoughts can be so measured due to their dependence on bodily motion. In Regis, as well as in Desgabets, this dependence on motion distinguishes our thought from the purely intellectual thought of disembodied angelic minds.

4.5 angelic intellect and human thought Desgabets stressed in his 1674 letter to Malebranche that those thoughts that depend on motion differ fundamentally from the thoughts of “pure minds” of angels that are wholly independent of body. In support of this position, he claimed in his “Suppl´ement” that angelic minds “think indivisibly and irrevocably, [and] see effects in their causes, consequences in their principles, without discourse, without succession, without composition, without division” (RD 5:176). The source of this conception of pure thought is not Aristotle, of course, but Thomas Aquinas, who had claimed that the angelic mind, or more generally any created intellect separated from body, immediately knows all the consequences of the principles it considers by means of 39

Regis held that generation depends immediately on mani`eres du mouvement and not on mouvement itself, on the grounds that motion must be modified in a particular manner in order to cause anything at all. Thus, for instance, the motion of a river doesn’t create wheat directly, but only as modified or directed by the mill wheel (Usage 305).

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a nondiscursive “intelligence.”40 Indeed, at Commercy, Desgabets declared that the position that the duration of a pure mind “is not successive, but all at once and without any parts” is “followed by nearly everyone and for which St. Thomas himself has declared.” He contrasted this common position with the view of “Saint Bonaventure and very few others” that “all created substances have in their existence a true successive duration with a succession of parts flowing one after another, the same as that of motion and of time” (R 286). But Desgabets took this minority view to be reflected principally in “the sentiment of Descartes,” according to which “all created substances have in their existence a true successive duration with a train of parts flowing one after another, which is the same as that of motion and time” (285f). Desgabets had in mind here the remarks on the duration of our thought in Descartes’s 1648 correspondence with Arnauld.41 The remarks were prompted by Arnauld’s critique of Descartes’s claim in “Meditation Three” that his duration is divisible into distinct parts. Arnauld’s objection to this claim appeals to the view of the Philosophi ac Theologi that “a permanent and maximally spiritual thing, such as the mind. . . has a duration that is permanent and tota simul (which the duration of God certainly is), and consequently not possessing those parts, the earlier of which do not depend on the later.” This simultaneous and indivisible duration of pure spirits differs in nature from the divisible duration of motion, “which alone is time in a proper sense.” Arnauld noted that, given the assumption in “Meditation Three” that there is no material world, and hence no real motion, the only duration that could be at issue in that text would be the permanent duration of pure spirits. But then, he observed, those who accept the common view must say that this duration is in no way divisible into distinct parts (AT 5:188f ). Descartes responded that this line of objection “rests on the scholastic opinion. . . with which I greatly differ.” He cited in particular his claim in the Principles that the duration of objects in motion is the same as the duration of objects that do not move. But he also added that “even if no bodies existed, it still could not be said that the duration of the human mind was tota simul like the duration of God” since “our thoughts display a successiveness that in no way can be admitted in divine thoughts” (AT 5:193). Thus, he took the remarks in the Principles to indicate that minds, as well as bodies at rest, have a duration measurable by time. When Arnauld questioned in a followup letter “whence the before and after, which must be found in all succession, is to be selected in the successive duration of things not in motion” (5:215), 40 41

S.Th. Ia, 58, 3. For a general discussion of Thomas’s angelology and its historical context, see Collins 1947. As indicated at R 288. Compare the discussion of the relation of the 1648 Arnauld correspondence to the Commercy discussions in Rodis-Lewis 1990.

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Descartes insisted that “the before and after of any duration is known to me in no way other than by the before and after of the successive duration that I detect in my own thought, with which other things coexist” (5:223). At Commercy, Retz objected to Desgabets’s comparison of Descartes’s position here to the views of Bonaventure. He noted, for instance, that although Bonaventure “distinguishes three sorts of duration, Descartes says that there is only one” (R 312).42 According to the view in Bonaventure that Retz had in mind, the three sorts of duration are the nonsuccessive eternity of God, the successive but unchanging aevum of the angels, and the successive and changing duration of beings measured by time.43 In contrast, according to Retz, Descartes attributed the same sort of successive duration to all beings, including God. Descartes’s claim in the 1648 letter to Arnauld that God’s existence tota simul differs entirely from our own successive duration casts some doubt on Retz’s interpretation of his position; I return to this point later. Even so, it must be conceded to Retz that Bonaventure’s own stress on the difference between the angelic aevum and temporal duration has no counterpart in Descartes. Nevertheless, Desgabets’s main concern was to show not that Descartes followed Bonaventure, but rather that one must follow Thomas in thinking that the pure minds of angels do not have a successive duration. As I indicate presently, Regis did not consistently deny such a duration in angelic minds. Yet he did appeal to Thomas in the Usage in support of the position that the angels have an “aeviternal” existence that “is all at once, that does not flow successively, as that of modal beings” (Usage 716). Moreover, Regis declared earlier in this text that Thomas’s view that the angelic aevum stands midway between a temporal duration tied to motion and God’s eternal existence “does not differ in any way from our own” (352).44 Interestingly, Regis did not share Desgabets’s judgment that this Thomistic view is common, but held instead that “most philosophers” claim, contrary to Thomas, that “permanent beings” have their own “intrinsic duration and succession of existence.” In the course of discussing such a claim, Regis singled out, in particular, Descartes’s view in “Meditation Three” that “his mind can be divided into several instants” (321f). However, even though they disagreed over whether this view is exotic or common, Desgabets and Regis agreed that it improperly attributes to pure minds a successive duration that is divisible into parts.

42

43 44

Retz also noted that Bonaventure held that duration is really or modally distinct from the things that endure, while Descartes held that duration, when distinguished from the thing that endures, is a “mode of thinking” only rationally distinct from that thing (R 312; cf. AT 8-1:30). For a discussion that defends Retz’s judgment against Desgabets that the similarities between Bonaventure and Descartes are relatively superficial, see Sol`ere 1997, 342f. For a discussion of the relevant position in Bonventure, see Gilson 1953, 209f. Compare the distinction among time, aeviternity and eternity in S.Th. Ia, 10, 5.

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Bonaventure was concerned with affirming that even the angels have a successive duration to allow for the view that God can annihilate such substances.45 Though Thomas rejected Bonaventure’s claim that the aevum involves succession, he also wanted to allow for the possibility of the annihilation of angelic substances, as Desgabets himself recognized (R 285f).46 To the best of my knowledge, Desgabets refrained from any direct criticism of Aquinas on this point. In the Usage, however, Regis later took on the assertion in Bonaventure and Thomas of “the pretended defectibility of substances.” Regis agreed with Thomas that “substances cannot have the succession of parts that Saint Bonaventure attributes to them,” but he sided with Bonaventure in thinking that there can be defectibility, or annihilation, only in the case of beings with successive duration (Usage 337–39). His reason for siding here with Bonaventure rather than with Thomas, which he borrowed from Desgabets, is that God could annihilate substances that lack a successive duration only by destroying them at the very instant that He creates them, a contradictory act that not even He can perform (see §2.3 and 2.6). This disagreement with Aquinas notwithstanding, Regis took the Thomistic account of the angelic aevum to provide a framework for understanding his own view of the relation between substances and their modes. In particular, he emphasized the position in Thomas that the aevum is distinct not only from a continuously changing temporal duration but also from God’s existence insofar as the unchanging existence of angels “can be conjoined with” changes in their states.47 Drawing on this position, Regis claimed that all substances have an aeviternal existence that “is independent of motion” and that “can change not according to their nature, but only according to their modes”(Usage 349f). Though Thomas himself tended to restrict aeviternal existence to angelic substances, there is a scholastic precedent for Regis’s extension of it to all created substances. I have in mind here the claim in Su´arez’s Disputationes Metaphysicæ that not only angels but also rational souls and even prime matter considered in themselves have an aeviternal existence.48 The view in Su´arez, which is congenial to Regis, is that all of these beings are ex se totam simul with respect to their substance even though their modes involve a successive duration. Regis’s admission that aeviternal substances “can change according to their modes” is connected to his position that such substances can possess particular modes that derive from continuous motion and thus are measurable by continuous time (Usage 350f). In Regis’s view, then, there are three 45 46

47 48

On this point, see Gilson 1953, 209f. For Thomas’s rejection of Bonaventure’s claim, see S.Th. Ia, 10, 5. For his view that all creatures would be annihilated if God ceased to preserve them in existence, see Aquinas 1975, 3-1:219. S.Th. Ia, 10, 5. Opera 26:946. Compare the discussion of Su´arez’s position here in Sol`ere 1997, 337.

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Three Radical Doctrines table 1. Accounts of Time Continuous Time

Aquinas Su´arez

Desgabets

Regis

Beings subject to celestial motion States subject to celestial motion Modal beings (i.e., particular bodies and souls and their states) Modal beings (i.e., particular bodies and souls and their states) and angelic states (?)

Discrete Time

Aevum

Eternity

Angelic states (?) Angelic substances

God

Angelic states

God

Angelic substances, rational souls, and prime matter Created material and mental substances and modal essences Created material and mental substances and modal essences

God

God

measures of existence: continuous time for modal beings (i.e., for particular souls and bodies and their states); the aevum for the material and spiritual substances capable of modes as well as for modal essences; and eternity for God, who can possess no modes (see Table 1). In the main, I think, Desgabets could accept the quasi-Thomistic distinction of measures in Regis. One possible difficulty concerns Regis’s suggestion that spiritual substances distinct from God can receive modes. If the view here is simply that any spiritual substance can receive modes through a union with motion, there is no problem. But if the suggestion is rather that spiritual substances can receive modes apart from the union, it conflicts with Desgabets’s own position, which he claimed to find in Thomas, that angels that are separate from body have a “perfect simplicity” that precludes any sort of succession of modes (RD 3:73f).49 This undifferentiated and atemporal thought would seem to be the purest expression of the essence of mind. In the parallel case where matter lacked motion, the essence of matter would seem to be so expressed by an undifferentiated and atemporal extension.50 In the case of our own souls and the material world as it actually is, however, there is only an “impure” expression of the relevant essences that involves a succession of different modes. Desgabets had good reason to deny that spiritual substances can have modes apart from the union with motion given his own principle that there can be no modes apart from those produced by motion. But Regis himself 49 50

Desgabets made a similar appeal to Thomas in the “Entretiens sur la nature des anges,” in MS Epinal 143, 381–96. As Desgabets suggested in RD 2:43f and R 320f.

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endorsed such a principle when he claimed in the Usage that motion “is the cause not only of modifications that take place in corporeal substance, but also of those that take place in spiritual substance.” The main “argument from reason” that he provided for the view here of spiritual substance is that “the modifications of the soul being successive, they can proceed only from a cause that is also successive, such as is the manner of bodily motion” (Usage 268f). Thus, there can be no succession of particular thoughts in a spiritual substance that is separate from body and its motions. Unfortunately for Regis, this argument runs up against his own claim in the Usage that, given the decrees of the fourth Lateran Council in 1215, all good Catholics must accept as a dogma of faith that angels not only are “intelligent substances separated from all matter” but also “experience [a] succession of thoughts that begin, that continue, that end with a duration entirely similar to that of our thoughts” (Usage 715). Regis stressed that this dogma is consistent with reason since reason requires only that angels have thoughts that do not depend on body, not that they have thoughts that lack succession (727).51 However, the claim that angelic thoughts have a succession “entirely similar to our own” does seem to undermine his own argument from reason for the conclusion that there can be no succession in thoughts apart from motion. In the end, this problem is not too serious since Regis’s concession to faith is unnecessary. The relevant decrees of the Lateran Council are confined to the claim that God created both angels and demons with good natures and are completely silent on the sort of succession involved in angelic thought.52 Thus, what this council requires is, in fact, consistent with reason’s conclusion that any succession in thought must derive from motion. However, complications for this conclusion derive from the claim in Thomas, which Regis himself cited with approval in the Usage, that angels “combine immutable existence with . . . mutable thoughts and affections.”53 Thomas made clear that these changes cannot be linked to motion when he noted that angels cannot be “subject to celestial motion, by which primarily continuous time is measured.”54 It is true that Thomas said little about the precise nature of the succession of angelic states. However, Su´arez later developed Thomas’s suggestion that this succession is unique when he urged that angelic thought is composed of a series of indivisible “angelic instants” 51 52

53 54

See the discussion in §5.3 of the general tenet in the Usage that faith is consistent with reason though also “above” it. Indeed, some have claimed that the Lateran Council constitution Firmiter does not even assert the existence of angels and demons. For a discussion that is (properly) critical of this claim, but nonetheless indicates the relative thinness of the Lateran constitution, see Quay 1981. Why Regis would have thought that Lateran determined so much about the nature of angels is a good question, and one I cannot answer. S.Th. Ia, 10, 5, paraphrased in Usage 352. S.Th. Ia, 63, 7.

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(instantia angelica) that can be measured by a sort of “discrete time.”55 Thus, where Desgabets and Regis held that, in the case of creatures, there is only the aeviternality of substances and the continuous temporality of modes, Su´arez allowed for a distinct sort of temporality that measures a succession in intellectual states that is not connected to motion (see, again, Table 1). The admission of this distinct sort of time provides a challenge to the view in Desgabets and Regis that all succession is tied to continuous motion. Desgabets’s comments in the “Trait´e” on “the composition of the continuum” suggest the response that time can no more be composed of indivisible parts than space can (RD 2:40f ). The response is explicit in the Usage, where Regis objected that the position that time is composed of indivisible instants reduces to the absurd view that it is “composed of a number of nullities” (Usage 313). Here Regis was drawing on a common Cartesian argument against the position that bodies are composed of spatial atoms. In the 1662 Art de penser of Arnauld and Nicole, for instance, there is the claim that if the parts of extension are indivisible, “they therefore have zero extension, and hence it is impossible for them to form an extension.”56 Likewise, according to Regis, a time composed of indivisible instants cannot form temporal extension. Although Descartes was occasionally read as an atomist during his own day, it is now widely acknowledged that he rejected the very intelligibility of the notion of spatial atoms.57 As we will discover presently, there is less consensus about his attitude toward temporal atoms. Yet there are reasons to question Regis’s own assumption that the traditional argument against spatial atoms carries over to temporal atoms. To see that this is so, recall the view in Thomas – which Desgabets highlighted – that angelic thought involves a nondiscursive “intelligence.” Such thought is indivisible simply in the sense that it does not itself involve a succession of distinct parts. Thus, the choice here is not between being extended and being a “nullity,” as in the case of spatial atoms, but between being successive and occurring “all at once.” The fact that atoms lack spatial extent may entail that they cannot compose something that has spatial extent. Yet, the fact that each angelic thought occurs tota simul, or without successive parts, does not seem to entail that it cannot be a member of a series of such thoughts. Notice that the argument here is not that time in general is composed of indivisible instants. After all, though he was the main proponent of discrete time, Su´arez did allow for continuous time. What is required is only that it is possible that there be a succession of thoughts that do not themselves involve any internal succession. Thus, certain aspects of the theory of angelic thought in Thomas and Su´arez cast doubt on Regis’s argument against temporal atomism. However, 55 56 57

Opera 26:947v–48v. For discussion, see Armogathe 1983. Arnauld and Nicole 1981, 297. The consensus is understandable given that Descartes argued explicitly against atomism. See Introduction, note 29.

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other features of it support the fundamental distinction in Desgabets between human souls and angelic minds. Thomas himself suggested that angelic thoughts cannot be measured by continuous time since they “are not subject to celestial motion.” Following this suggestion, Su´arez urged that the operations of our soul are subject to a “material time” measured by continuous celestial motion only insofar as the operations themselves are “concomitant with and dependent on something from phantasmata.” In contrast, “separate souls” such as those of angels cannot be subject to this time since their thoughts are independent of bodily phantasmata.58 This distinction between human and separated souls supports the point in Desgabets and Regis that our own temporal experience reveals that we are not simply disembodied minds. We will discover that in Desgabets, more clearly than in Regis, this point informs, in turn, a critique of Descartes’s claim that inner experience can immediately reveal only the existence of the self as a thinking thing. Desgabets was not the only one to challenge such a claim. Most notably, Kant later held that this claim yields a “problematic idealism” that is itself problematic. In his “Refutation of Idealism,” which he added to the second edition (1787) of his Critique of Pure Reason, Kant defined such an idealism in terms of the thesis that “there is only one empirical assertion that is indubitably certain, namely, that I am.” (CPR B274). He argued in response to this position that although the certainty of the I think reveals immediately the existence of some subject of thought, it does not yield any determinate knowledge of that subject. In particular, it does not yield determinate knowledge of the temporal inner experience of the self. The main claim against the Cartesian idealist is that we need objects external to the self in order to know the nonsubjective temporal relations among our internal states.59 The argument that we need such objects draws, in turn, on the result, in the “First Analogy of Experience” in the Critique, that there must be a “permanent in perception” to represent the unchanging time that is required for a proper temporal ordering of events. Kant’s conclusion in the “Refutation of Idealism” is that since there is no permanent aspect of our inner experience, we can find the permanent only in what we perceive to be outside of us, in space. In this way, “even our inner experience, which for Descartes is indubitable, is possible only on the assumption of outer experience” (CPR B275).60 58 59

60

Opera 950r–51r. For the suggestion in Thomas, see S.Th. Ia, 63, 7. CPR B274–79. Kant distinguished the problematic idealism of Descartes from “the dogmatic idealism of Berkeley,” which claims that the existence of outer objects is not merely doubtful but rather impossible. He indicated that dogmatic idealism is refuted by the derivation in the “Transcendental Aesthetic” of a concept of space that allows for synthetic a priori knowledge (CPR B274). For discussion of the relevant details, see Allison 1983, ch. 14; Guyer 1987, pt. IV; and Vogel 1993.

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As is clear even from this rough sketch, Kant’s refutation is bound up with the details of his own critical system. I do not propose to examine these details here. What I do propose to consider is the basic objection, which is not idiosyncratic to Kant, that problematic idealism fails since knowledge of the temporal self that the idealist grants requires the existence of external spatial objects. In particular, I focus on the form of this objection in Desgabets. As will become evident, Desgabets gave his “refutation of idealism” a decidedly Cartesian spin. While Kant focused on a particular sort of knowledge of temporality that Descartes never considered, Desgabets was concerned with the knowledge of the self revealed by Descartes’s own cogito argument. What he attempted to show is that the nature of this self cannot be conceived in terms of thought alone insofar as the experience of the cogito has a specific kind of temporal dimension. It is in this sense, then, that Desgabets can be said to have offered a Cartesian refutation of idealism. In offering such a refutation, Desgabets differed not only from Kant, but also from Gassendi, another prominent critic of Descartes’s discussion of the cogito. We will first consider the distinguishing features of Desgabets’s critique of the cogito and then take up some complications that this critique broaches concerning Descartes’s views on the temporality of thought.

4.6 a cartesian refutation of idealism 61 4.6.1 The Cogito and the Union with Motion In his comments on “Meditation Two,” Gassendi objected that Descartes’s remarks on the famous wax example “establish your perception of the existence of your mind and not its nature” (AT 7:275). Descartes responded indignantly that “one thing cannot be demonstrated apart from the other” (7:359). In “Meditation Two” itself, he insisted that the mere fact that his thought provides the only basis for his certainty that he exists reveals that he himself is “strictly only a thing that thinks” (7:27). The argument is that his existence can be certain on this basis only if his nature is defined in terms of thought alone. For if the definition of his nature involved something more than thought, then he could not be certain that something with that nature exists whenever he thinks. In contrast to Gassendi, Desgabets did not question that knowledge of the existence of the self is bound up with a particular account of its nature. What he challenged rather was Descartes’s view of which account is supported by the cogito argument. In “Descartes a` l’alambic,” Desgabets urged, in particular, that “actual thought being only a mode of the soul, one cannot use it to enter into the nature of the soul, which is much better defined 61

In this section, I draw on the discussion in Schmaltz 2002.

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in saying that the soul is an intellectual substance depending on body.” He added that this mistaken conclusion regarding the nature of the soul “is the source of the faults that one encounters in the metaphysical meditations of M. Descartes” (L 322). This particular response to Descartes is admittedly problematic. Desgabets’s stated reason for rejecting Descartes’s definition of the self is that since the thought involved in reflection on the cogito is “only a mode of the soul,” it cannot constitute the nature of the soul. But Descartes had indicated earlier, in a 1648 letter to Arnauld, that the thought “in which I take the essence of the mind to consist is very much other than this or that act of thinking.” He noted that this difference is revealed by the fact that “the mind elicits from itself this or that act of thinking, not however that it is a thinking thing” (AT 5:221). In the terminology of the Principles, thought as nature is the “principal attribute” on which all other properties of mind depend, while particular acts of thought are simply “modifications of thinking” (AT 8-1:26). From Descartes’s perspective, then, the objection in Desgabets that actual thought is a mode that does not enter into the nature of the soul fails to distinguish thought as principal attribute from modifications of that attribute. However, the deeper point of Desgabets’s remarks is that our soul cannot be defined simply in terms of thought given that we depend essentially on body. This point is connected to Desgabets’s claim, again in “Descartes a` l’alambic,” that Descartes does not understand human thought since “he has taken it for that of an angel, detached from all commerce with the senses” (L 321). We have encountered this charge of “angelism” before, not only in Desgabets’s 1674 letter to Malebranche but also in Arnauld’s comments on “Meditation Six.” We have also seen that Descartes responded to Arnauld’s charge that his real distinction argument “proves too much” by emphasizing his conclusion that our confused sensory thoughts reveal that our soul is united to a particular body. However, Descartes further stressed to Arnauld that his argument that the soul is united to body does not “prove too little” since it “does not prevent our having a clear and distinct conception of our mind alone as a complete thing” (AT 7:228). As Descartes indicated, the conception of our mind as a “complete thing” is simply the conception of it as a substance that requires thought alone for its existence.62 He conceded that some of our thoughts require a union with body; however, he insisted that the union is not essential to thought as such. The mere fact that we possess thought, therefore, cannot reveal that we depend on body. In answer to Desgabets, then, Descartes could admit that our mind has a “commerce with the senses” by virtue of its substantial union with a body and 62

See AT 7:220–23. Here Descartes was responding to Arnauld’s objection that his remarks in “Meditation Two” do not establish that his conception that his essence excludes body is “complete and adequate” (AT 7:198f).

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so is distinct from an angelic mind. Yet he also could claim that the union is not revealed by the mere fact that I am a thinking thing. Indeed, this fact shows that I am a substance that requires nothing more than thought in order to exist. The argument here, as summarized by Desgabets, is that “this manner of reasoning: I think therefore I am, is the best for knowing the nature of the soul, and that it is a substance distinct from body, because we know thus that to be, we do not need extension, shape, etc.” (L 320). To counter this argument, Desgabets needs to claim that all our thoughts require a union with body. Anything short of this claim would allow for the possibility of a conception of the self as existing with thoughts that do not depend on the union, a conception that would, in turn, suffice for the conception of the self as a complete thing that does not require body. But Desgabets did respond in just this manner when he asserted that “one can have no thought other than that depending on body and its motions” (L 320). In his view, all our thoughts derive from the union, and thus none of them can yield the conception of the self as a complete thing that does not require body. It should be clear by now that Desgabets took the dependence on bodily motion to be required since all our thoughts have a temporal duration. The point about temporality is, in fact, prominent in a discussion of Desgabets’s views at the 1677 Paris meeting that served as a follow-up to the discussions at Commercy. At that meeting, Desgabets’s representative63 summarized his position as follows. The soul cannot say I think and not see in this idea at the same instant [the idea] of succession or continuation and end. But all that can pertain only to extension or to body; thus one cannot have the idea of the I think of Descartes with a perfect abstraction from all properties of extension or body. (OCM 18:123)

Desgabets himself sometimes claimed that it is the whole I think therefore I am, and not just the I think, that involves the idea of temporal succession.64 But this difference is not ultimately crucial given his view that all our thoughts occur in a continuous time. Whether the I think is a separate thought or part of a larger thought, it must have a continuous temporal duration. But time can measure the duration only of something that has local motion either by its nature or through a union with motion. Moreover, motion itself is a mode that we cannot distinctly conceive apart from extension. The conclusion here, as reported at the Paris meeting, is that we cannot conceive 63 64

As indicated in §I.1, Desgabets’s position seems to have been presented by Retz’s confidant, Corbinelli. See, for instance, his claim at Commercy that one cannot know that I think thus I am purely and simply a thing that thinks without also recognizing that the knowledge is “commencing, continuing, and ending” (R 293).

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of the I think “with a perfect abstraction from all properties of extension or body.”65 The point that there is an idea of temporal succession in addition to the I think has an analogue in Kant’s response, in a preface to the second edition of his Critique, to the claim that he is immediately conscious only of his own representations. There Kant countered that he has in addition an inner experience of my existence in time (and consequently also of its determinability in time), and this is more than to be conscious merely of my representation. It [i.e., inner experience] is identical with the empirical consciousness of my existence, which is determinable only through relation to something which, while bound up with my existence, is outside of me. (CPR Bxln; emphasis in original)

What is in line with Desgabets’s views is the basic point here that inner experience has a temporal dimension that goes beyond the mere presence of representations. To be sure, there is a fundamental difference between the manner in which Desgabets and Kant appealed to the temporality of thought in order to respond to Descartes’s problematic idealism. As I have indicated, Kant’s basic argument in the “Refutation of Idealism” is that the permanent in space is required for the determination of inner experience in time (thus the emphasis in the preceding passage on determinability). In contrast, Desgabets’s argument against Descartes’s hyperbolic doubt emphasizes that local motion is required for temporal inner experience. The difference can be expressed by saying that Kant held that the permanent in space is required for the determination of objective temporal relations among our inner states, whereas Desgabets held that local motion is required for the very existence of the subjective experience of temporality. The lack of focus on the permanent may seem to be an advantage for Desgabets since it allows him to sidestep the common objection to Kant that the self can stand in as the “permanent in perception” required for time determination.66 Certainly there is no question of the self standing in for the local motion that Desgabets took to be necessary for subjective temporality. Yet Kant’s emphasis on our determination of objective time seems to give him the upper hand. This emphasis allows him to answer the idealist objection that all inferences to outer objects as contingent causes 65

66

At this meeting, Malebranche objected to this line of argument that one can in fact conceive of the self in abstraction from succession (OCM 18:1237). In §4.6.2, I consider the related objection in Retz that our conception of “substantial thought” is independent of particular features of our experience. For different readings of Kant’s own response to this objection, see Allison 1983, 298f, and Guyer 1987, 307–10. For a critical discussion of these readings, see Vogel 1993.

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of inner states are problematic. Kant’s response is that outer objects are required not merely as contingent causes but also as necessary conditions for our knowledge of particular temporal features of our inner states. But Desgabets seems to be concerned only with the causes of our subjectively temporal thoughts and so appears to be vulnerable to the objection of the problematic idealist. Indeed, at the Commercy conferences, Desgabets’s critics offered just this objection to his own position. They insisted, in particular, that Descartes had shown that “he can clearly know his thought without being certain that there is a body” (R 228). We can be certain that we have some thought when we reflect on it, but we cannot be certain that that thought “comes from body if it can come from elsewhere.” The critics charged that since he has not established that our thought could have no source other than body, Desgabets is not entitled to the conclusion that body is, in fact, the cause of our thought (232). Desgabets is reported to have responded that since “the perception representing thought to him [represents it as] having motion, he rests content with this” (R 232). The remark is cryptic, to say the least, but we can understand it to say that our conception of our own thought must represent it, and represent it truly, as bearing an essential relation to motion. More precisely, any adequate conception of thought as temporal must represent that thought as united to motion. In stressing the need for a conception of subjective temporality, Desgabets was drawing attention to a feature of our experience broached by Descartes’s claim in “Meditation Two” that “I am, I exist necessarily is true whenever [quoties] it is put forward by me or conceived in my mind” (AT 7:25). The quoties indicates that the certainty of the truth of I exist is indexed to a particular time, namely, the moment at which the I conceives the proposition.67 But then the cogito argument involves, in addition to the I think, the recognition that thought takes place at a particular moment. What is most crucial here is not, as in Kant, the determination of that moment but rather, as in Desgabets, the very experience of temporality. As we have seen, though, Desgabets emphasized not only that our thought is subjectively temporal, but also that this sort of temporality is continuous in the sense that it is divisible into parts without end. In his view, this continuity reveals most clearly that time is inseparable from a motion that is by its very nature continuous. But given that the I think occurs in a subjective continuous time, and given that this sort of time presupposes the reality of motion, the I think itself presupposes this reality. This pre-Kantian refutation of idealism can be seen as building on the basic structure of Descartes’s own cogito argument. On a natural reading, 67

This point is relevant to Descartes’s claim that we cannot doubt our clear and distinct perceptions as long as we are attending to them (see AT 7:145f).

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Descartes I exist

derived from

I think

yields

complete conception of I as only a thinking thing

Desgabets I exist

derived from

I think occurring in continuous time

yields

complete conception of I as thing with thoughts united with motion figure 5. Accounts of the cogito

the argument involves the derivation of the I exist from the I think (see Figure 5). There is the objection that this derivation is merely a tautology insofar as one is already affirming I exist in affirming I think.68 However, Desgabets’s criticism is not that the I think contains too much, but rather that it contains too little. His concern here was with the additional move in Descartes from the I think to a conception of the I as a thinking thing that is complete in the sense that nothing else is required for it to be recognized as a substance. This last step is, in fact, crucial with respect to the issue of idealism, since Descartes insisted that our conception of the self requires no commitment to the existence of body. Desgabets’s objection was that the self that we confront in experience includes not only thought but also the continuous time in which thought occurs. But if, as Desgabets insisted, thought can have a continuous temporal duration only if it is united with motion, then the cogito argument requires that a conception of the self can be complete only if it represents that self as a thing with thoughts united with motion. Desgabets’s refutation of idealism turns on the claim that the conception of the self that arises out of reflection on the I think requires an appeal to the union with motion, and thus presupposes the reality of that motion (see, again, Figure 5).

4.6.2 The Cogito and Continuous Time Desgabets’s refutation simply assumes that the experience of this self is governed by a continuous time. However, there is some question whether such an assumption is acceptable to Descartes. Indeed, there is the argument in Jean Wahl that Descartes’s account of the cogito requires that time is not continuous but rather composed of discrete, atemporal instants. Wahl urges, in particular, that recognition of the truth of the cogito argument is for Descartes “an instantaneous certitude, a judgment, a reasoning gathered

68

As indicated in §5.2.1, there is an anticipation of this line of objection in Huet.

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[ramass´e ] in an instant,” one which “contains no succession in time.”69 On Wahl’s reading, then, Descartes has reasons drawn from the experience of the cogito to reject the assumption that one must see a continuous temporal duration in the I think. There is, however, a direct counterexample to this reading that is provided by the report of an interview of Descartes conducted in 1648 by the young theological student, Frans Burman. According to that report, Descartes expressly denied that thought occurs in an instant (in instanti) on the grounds that “all my acts occur in time [in tempore], and I can be said to continue and persevere in the same thought through some time [per aliquod tempus]” (AT 5:148).70 Drawing on this text, Jean-Marie Beyssade argues against Wahl that when Descartes said that he knows that I exist is true whenever he conceives it, he was referring to the temporally extended moment during which he considers this proposition.71 If this is correct, then Descartes must concede the point in Desgabets that the I think involves a continuous temporal succession. One difficulty with the use of this report is that it derives not from Descartes himself, but rather from a transcription of Burman’s recollections of the interview.72 Moreover, the particular passage concerning the temporality of thought is problematic because Descartes is reported to have denied that God has an eternal existence that is “all at once and once for all” (simul et semel). He is said to have argued that since “we can distinguish parts in [God’s eternity] now after the creation of the world, why should we not be able to do so before creation, since it is the same duration” (AT 5:148f ). But the suggestion here that there could be a duration that predates the creation of the world seems to conflict with Descartes’s own assertion, in a 1649 letter to Henry More, that “it involves a contradiction to conceive of any duration intervening between the destruction of an earlier world and the creation of a new one” (5:343).73 Furthermore, Descartes seemed to have precluded any sort of divisibility in divine action when he noted in the 1644 Principles that God “understands, wills and operates everything simultaneously [simul] through one and the same and most simple action” (AT 8-1:14). Here we have the affirmation of an eternity tota simul in divine thought that, as Descartes emphasized in his 1648 letter to Arnauld, has no analogue to our successive thoughts. 69 70

71 72

73

Wahl 1994, 54, 55. Here he was responding to Burman’s claim that the consideration of the proof of the existence of God in “Meditation Three” requires several thoughts, each of which occurs in instanti (AT 5:148). Beyssade 1979, 131–43, 346–54. A few days after the interview, Burman dictated his impressions to the young Dutch Cartesian, Johannes Clauberg. The record we now possess is, in fact, based on an anonymous copy of Clauberg’s manuscript. For More’s suggestion that there could be such an interval, see AT 5:302.

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Evidence from Descartes’s own hand that is roughly contemporaneous with the interview with Burman thus casts doubt on Burman’s report of Descartes’s assertion that God has a divisible duration.74 However, the insistence in the letter to Arnauld that our own thought is successive seems to reinforce the claim recorded by Burman that our thoughts are not instantaneous but “persevere through some time.” It is true that Descartes emphasized in his 1648 correspondence with Arnauld that the fact that his thought is successive is revealed by the fact that “it is possible that I exist at this moment, while I think of something, and nevertheless not exist at the very next moment, which if I do exist, I may think of something different” (AT 5:193). The suggestion here that it is possible that he has several distinct thoughts may appear to fall short of the point that each of his thoughts has a divisible duration. Yet it is significant that Descartes said only that he may think of something different a moment later. It thus appears that the moments could be distinct even though the thought remains the same. Moreover, his correspondence with Arnauld focused on the claim in “Meditation Three” that “the nature of time” reveals that our life is divisible into “innumerable parts,” each of which are independent of the others. This context indicates that Descartes was concerned with holding that we differ from God not only because our mental life involves a succession of distinct thoughts, but also because each of our thoughts involves a succession of distinct parts. I would not insist that Descartes consistently rejected the view that our thoughts can be instantaneous. There is, for instance, his remark in the early and unfinished Rules for the Direction of the Mind that we can have an “intuition” of a proposition whereby we grasp it tota simul et non successive (AT 11:407).75 Even so, it seems to me that the denial in the letter to Arnauld that our mental life involves anything like the tota simul of divine thought is introspectively quite plausible. As evidence, one could even emphasize the unfamiliarity of the “angelic instants” that Su´arez posited. Our own experience appears to involve a perseverance through time rather than a series of contiguous atemporal thoughts. Nonetheless, Martial Gueroult claims that Descartes is committed to the discontinuity of time even given his admission of the experience of psychological continuity. Gueroult’s argument is that even though Descartes allowed that there is an “abstract view of created existence” on which “duration is proposed as something infinitely divisible and continuous,” he nonetheless held that such a view is “imperfect” since there is a “concrete and real point of view” that reveals time to be “a repetition of indivisible 74 75

For a discussion of further reasons to question the accuracy of Burman’s record, see Ariew 1987. But see the claim in Beyssade 1979, 144, that this passage is consistent with the view that our thought occurs in a continuous time.

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and discontinuous creative instants.”76 His main evidence that Descartes privileged the concrete point of view is drawn – ironically, given Desgabets’s position – from “the whole Cartesian conception of motion.”77 In particular, Gueroult claims that Descartes embraced a “static” conception of motion that is reflected most clearly in his insistence that light is transmitted in an atemporal “instant.”78 Thus, even though time appears to us to be continuous, the case of motion is supposed to show that it is really discontinuous. Gueroult’s brief is not convincing. For one thing, Descartes himself emphasized in the Principles that “the power of light consists not in some duration of motion, but rather in the pressure or primary preparation for motion [praeparatione ad motum]” (AT 8-1:115), which pressure or preparation derives from the tendency of bodies in a vortex to move in a straight line.79 Thus, the transmission of light can be instantaneous since it is not itself a motion but only an instantaneous result of motion. In this same passage, moreover, Descartes noted that bodies in perpetual motion have a particular configuration that “can endure only through the minimum point of time, which they call an instant, and therefore the continuation [continuitatem] of their motion is not interrupted” (8–1:115). Here instantaneous states, far from precluding continuous motion, are said to be required for it.80 Descartes, therefore, seems to have allowed, pace Gueroult, that the continuity of motion is real rather than an illusion tied to an imperfect view. Indeed, there is a good Cartesian argument that motion must be continuous. The argument I have in mind occurs not in Descartes, but rather in Spinoza’s summary of Descartes’s Principles. In this text, Spinoza constructed on Descartes’s behalf a response to the Zeno-type paradox involving the hypothetical case of circular motion with the greatest speed. The proposal is that at this speed the time it takes for the rotation would be reduced to a single indivisible moment. But then at every moment each point of the circle would begin and end its motion in the same place. Since to be at rest is just to remain 76 77 78

79

80

Gueroult 1984, 194. Ibid., 194f. Ibid., 193, 196f. Gueroult is criticizing here the defense of a continuist reading of Descartes in Laporte 1950. For Descartes’s insistence that the transmission of light is instantaneous, see his comment to one correspondent that if it could be shown that light moves through a time interval and not instantaneously, then “I would be prepared to admit that I knew absolutely nothing in philosophy” (AT 1:308). See AT 8-1:108–12. The fact that this tendency itself derives from Descartes’s second law of motion (AT 8-1:63f ) explains his assertion quoted in note 78 that the doctrine of the instantaneous transmission of light is central to his philosophical system. Compare Arthur’s conclusion that Descartes needed to appeal to instantaneous states of a moving body “to give a consistent analysis of continuous motion and duration without the concepts of the calculus” (Arthur 1988, 373).

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in the same place, we get the contradictory result that each point is continuously in motion, by hypothesis, and also continuously at rest (G 1:192f).81 Spinoza responded that the paradox reveals the impossibility not of motion but of a greatest speed. He noted that the notion of such a speed requires the notion of an indivisible moment at which a point begins and ends its motion, and he argued that the latter notion is ruled out by the antiatomistic tenet in Descartes that every extension can be divided, at least in thought (G 1:84). Spinoza’s argument is that since the space through which a body moves is always divisible, the time by which that motion is measured is also so divisible. But just as there can be no indivisible point in space, given that space is infinitely divisible, so the temporal duration of motion through space “will be divisible, and this to infinity” (1:194). Thus, it is impossible for motion to begin and end without a change involving a temporal interval. Spinoza’s discussion provides a Cartesian basis for the conclusion that time is continuous insofar as it measures motion. However, Desgabets’s refutation of idealism requires, in addition, the claim that time is continuous only if it measures motion. For only if the connection to motion is necessary can one infer the reality of motion from the fact that the I think occurs in continuous time. Desgabets would perhaps have emphasized that in contrast to the case of motion, continuous temporality is not essential to thought as such. In his view, after all, “pure” thought does not take place in continuous time, but occurs “indivisibly and irrevocably.” Nor can Descartes completely gainsay the possibility of such thought given his own claim to Arnauld that divine thought is present tota simul and without any succession. Yet it is perhaps significant that Descartes allowed for nonsuccessive thought only in the case of God. Indeed, it appears from his 1648 remarks to Arnauld that he understood his claim in “Meditation Three” that his existence as a thinking thing has a duration that is divisible into distinct parts to be generalizable to any created thinking thing. If it followed simply from the nature of created thought that such thought has a divisible temporal duration, it would be possible, as Descartes insisted to Arnauld, that we have temporal thoughts “even if no bodies existed.” There is some question, however, whether the remarks on the nature of time in “Meditation Three” entail that the thought of created beings has a continuous temporal duration. Even though I criticized the claim in Wahl and Gueroult that Descartes was committed to temporal discontinuity, I think it must be conceded that the argument in “Meditation Three” for the conclusion that we need a cause that conserves us in existence “at each moment” does not itself preclude the position that these moments themselves are indivisible. What the argument strictly requires is only that the moments are 81

Spinoza attributed the paradox to Zeno, but the argument is not to be found in any of the ancient sources on this thinker.

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independent in the sense that one can exist without the others. But then the doctrine that our conservation is not distinct from our creation at each moment does not itself entail that our thoughts have a continuous temporal duration. The upshot here is that Descartes required something beyond his theory of conservation that explains the fact that our thoughts occur in continuous time. One point in Desgabets’s favor is that Descartes himself provided nothing in the way of an argument for the conclusion that any succession in created thought must occur in continuous time. Moreover, it is difficult to see how one could construct an argument for this conclusion that is analogous to the argument in Spinoza for the continuity of the time governing motion. It is true that Desgabets cannot claim to have refuted Descartes’s account of the cogito until he proves that continuous succession is not essential to created thought as such. But all he needs to establish this point is the relatively weak claim that it is possible that created thought occur outside of continuous time. By the same token, those who reject this possibility are committed to the relatively strong claim that such thought requires not just succession, but also a succession that happens to match the continuous succession of motion. As we have seen, though, Desgabets went further in arguing that thought that does not derive from motion must have an indivisible and immutable existence. He took the result here to be that any sort of change in thought must derive from a change in something external to thought.82 By contrast, Thomas and Su´arez each allowed for a source of change in angelic states that is internal to spiritual substance. Later, the Paris professor Jean Du Hamel drew attention to this point in objecting to the axiom in Regis that “each thing persists in itself to remain in the state it is in.” Du Hamel noted in particular that “this axiom is false in [the case of] the angels, who following what theology teaches us turn themselves, some toward the good, others toward evil” (R´ef. 56). Regis responded by appealing to his claim in the Syst`eme that changes in our will derive from alterations in our intellect, and that these alterations derive from changes in the body to which our soul is united (R´ep. R´ef. 28f).83 One problem with this response is that it focuses exclusively on human thought and, thus, does not directly address the scholastic point that changes in angelic thought are distinctive in having an internal source. Even so, the mere possibility of the claim in Su´arez that this sort of change involves a succession of indivisible instants suffices to establish 82

83

Compare the argument in Kant’s precritical work, the 1755 Nova Delucidatio, that since internal changes in the mind cannot “arise from its own nature and apart from a connection with other things, those other things must be present outside the mind, and the mind must be connected with them in a mutual relation” (quoted in Guyer 1987, 11f). This passage cites the remarks in Syst`eme 1:213. For more on the Du Hamel–Regis exchange, see §5.2.3.

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the minimal conclusion that Desgabets’s refutation requires, namely, that there can be created thought that does not possess a continuous temporal duration. If it can be shown that such a duration does not derive from the nature of created thought, then there are Cartesian reasons to conclude that such succession must derive from motion. To see that this is so, recall Descartes’s claim in the Principles, mentioned in §4.2, that our sensations pertain to mind not “by virtue of the fact that it is a thinking thing,” but only “by virtue of the fact that it is joined to something other than itself that is extended and mobile.” The sensory features of our experience are extrinsic to pure thought and, thus, cannot pertain to mind only by virtue of the fact that it is a thinking thing. Rather, such features must derive from the union of the mind with an extended and mobile thing. Yet Desgabets could argue in a similar way that since continuous temporality is extrinsic to pure thought, it also cannot pertain to mind only by virtue of the fact that it is a thinking thing. Such temporality must derive from something external to thought, and since Cartesian dualism requires that the only two natures in the created world are thought and extension, it must derive from extension. But Spinoza’s argument indicates that continuous time derives from extension by means of continuous motion. This claim gives us the link between continuous time and motion that Desgabets’s refutation of idealism requires. As I noted earlier, Descartes held that it follows merely from the fact that we can conceive of ourselves as thinking without conceiving of a union with a body that our conception of the self does not depend on any conception of body. This argument depends on the assumption that we have purely intellectual thoughts that are independent of the union. It is this assumption that Desgabets challenged by appealing to the fact that all our thoughts occur in continuous time. However, Retz indicated that there is a way of arguing for the conclusion that we can conceive of ourselves apart from the union without depending on this assumption. At Commercy, he urged that even if it were granted to Desgabets that all our thoughts derive from the union with body, still Descartes could say that the I in the proposition I think “signifies nothing other than substantial thought; the idea of substantial thought contains the idea of no body in its nature; thus this nature can be conceived such as it is without body” (R 226). The claim here is that we can know on the basis of reflection on the cogito that we exist as thinking substance prior to knowing that we are united to a body. Thus, we have an instance of knowledge of the self that does not require any knowledge of its connection to body. There is, to my knowledge, no record of any direct response on Desgabets’s part to this objection. However, one can construct a response on the basis of his response, considered in §2.4.2, to Descartes’s account of time in “Meditation Three.” Recall the protest in “Descartes a` l’alambic” that this

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account confounds “the successive duration of our life with our substantial being.” Desgabets concluded there that even though Descartes was correct in holding that the parts of our temporal life need to be conserved, he went wrong in inferring from this that our “substantial being” also requires continuous conservation. As we know, he took “substantial being” to be “substance considered in itself according to its intrinsic and essential attributes without any relation to time.” In effect, then, our substantial being is simply the atemporal essence of our mind (see §2.3). Successive duration enters in only with respect to the modes that give this essence “a particular and determinate manner of being.” In our case, it is our successive thoughts that give our essence such a manner of being. According to Desgabets, then, we can know the self as something that possesses a particular and determinate temporal existence only when we consider it as determined by particular thoughts. In response to Retz, then, Desgabets could protest that the conception of the I as merely “substantial thought” is simply the conception of it as an atemporal essence. The self revealed in reflection on the cogito is not such an essence, but rather a concrete subject of temporal thoughts. Here again, we can draw an analogy to Kant. In this case, the relevant Kantian point is indicated by the claim in the “Refutation of Idealism” that “a merely intellectual representation” of the I cannot yield determinate empirical knowledge of inner experience. Such knowledge requires, in addition, temporally determined “inner intuitions.” Since we can determine these intuitions in time only by relating them to external spatial objects, empirical knowledge – in contrast to the abstract intellectual knowledge of the I think – presupposes the existence of those objects (CPR B278).84 In Desgabets, the claim is that knowledge of substantial thought cannot yield a complete conception of a self that has a temporal duration. What is required for such a conception is, in addition, a consideration of the temporal thoughts that give the self a particular and determinate existence. The point of Desgabets’s Cartesian refutation is that such a consideration will lead us to the conclusion that the temporal self bears an essential relation to particular parts of matter that are actually in motion.

4.7 cartesian realism: the second step In §3.7, I indicated that Desgabets’s essence argument falls short of establishing the temporal existence secundum quid of particular bodies. His Cartesian refutation of idealism fills this gap insofar as it establishes not only that there is an atemporal substance that allows for the possibility of bodily modes, but also that there are temporal modes of that substance that provide the basis for the temporality of our own thoughts. 84

Compare CPR Bxl n.

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It is striking that there is no similar refutation in Regis. Indeed, Regis seems to have been inclined to the view in Descartes that we can conceive of the self in terms of thought alone. Toward the beginning of the Usage, he claimed that even though our mind is distinct from the mind of an angel, nonetheless we have a conception of our mind “considered in itself” that is distinct from our conception of our mind considered as united to a human body. He countered the objection that one cannot make this distinction because “there is never a moment before the mind is united to a human body” by insisting that “one can nevertheless consider this mind as if it were not united, seeing that its existence precedes its union, if not with a priority of time, at least with a priority of nature” (Usage 42f). Earlier I noted that Regis at times suggested, in tension with his own principles, that our knowledge of mind is independent of the union. In the passage just cited, however, he restricted himself to the weaker claim that we know the mind as it is apart from the union. Yet, even this claim is in tension with Desgabets’s refutation of idealism insofar as it suggests that we can completely conceive of the self in abstraction from the union. The opposition to Desgabets is clear from the fact that Regis’s remarks serve to reinforce Retz’s objection that we can conceive of the self apart from body since we can conceive of it simply in terms of “substantial thought.” As I indicated, Desgabets’s response to this objection is that the conception of the temporal self requires a conception not only of such thought, but also of the union with motion that gives the self a particular and determinate existence. Yet it seems difficult for Regis to demur to this response given that he himself accepted the distinction in Desgabets between atemporal substance and its temporal modes. Insofar as the self revealed in the cogito argument is a temporal being, Regis cannot identify this self with substantial thought. To be sure, neither Desgabets nor Regis say much about the nature of the temporal self. Indeed, Regis may seem to have precluded the existence of any persisting subject of temporal mental states when he claimed in the Usage that our thoughts “are born and perish in the same instant; or if they persevere in being, this is only in passing by continual reproduction, as with corporeal modal beings” (Usage 307).85 However, Regis held, with Desgabets, that corporeal modes include not only transitory states such as shape and motion but also the particular bodies that serve as the enduring subjects of those states. Presumably, then, particular human souls could be conceived, by analogy with particular bodies, as the enduring subjects of various passing thoughts. Such a suggestion is in line with Regis’s comment in the Usage that spiritual modal beings include “the soul with its thoughts,” both of which “depend on certain manners of the motion of body to which it [the soul] is united” (307).86 85 86

Compare Usage 307f. On the reference here to “manners of motion,” see note 39.

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In saying that the human soul depends on a union with motion, Regis was not merely making the point that such a soul depends causally on motion for its existence. Rather, he was claiming in addition that we cannot properly conceive of that soul as a modal being without conceiving of it as united to motion. Such a claim is further reinforced by his position, which he borrowed from Desgabets, that the duration of modal beings cannot be conceived apart from motion. For Regis, then, the human soul that is the temporal subject of particular thoughts depends conceptually as well as causally on motion. But this is just the point that behind Desgabets’s claim we cannot adequately conceive of the self revealed in the cogito argument in abstraction from any relation to body. Though he did not fully recognize the fact, Regis was deeply committed to the essential elements of Desgabets’s refutation of idealism. In Kant, the refutation of Descartes’s idealism is conjoined with a “transcendental idealism” that takes particular objects in space to be minddependent phenomena. Similarly, Thomas Lennon argues that there is an idealistic dimension to the account of the material world in Desgabets and Regis. In the case of Desgabets, Lennon emphasizes a passage from the “Suppl´ement” that defends the thesis that “our thoughts give to their objects an extrinsic being of actual existence.” Here Desgabets attempted to defend his principle that all simple ideas have real objects by noting that our thoughts themselves can create their objects by means of “combination, union, separation, comparison, etc.” What is created here is a particular “form” of an object that is distinct from atemporal modal essences insofar as it comes into being at a particular time. Thus, the architect who designs a house produces a particular arrangement of material parts that did not exist previously. Desgabets extended this point to include any sort of designation that depends on convention. Even the units of a measuring stick or the regiments or companies of an army have merely an “extrinsic denomination” imposed on the world by our temporal thought (RD 6:243f).87 Lennon takes this line of argument to result in the conclusion that “numerical distinctions in the physical world, that is, the individuation of it, depends on our thought.”88 However, the point in Desgabets seems to be restricted to particular conventional designations. What is not said is that all ways of distinguishing individual objects are merely conventional. Indeed, Desgabets insisted at one point that material objects have “intrinsic” forms that exist apart from our conventions, and thus that it is “quite false” to say that “they exist in the understanding” (RD 1:7f). There is good reason for him to affirm the existence of such intrinsic features. For if everything in 87 88

This position recurs at several points in Desgabets’s writings; see RD 1:7, 4:103f, 7:261, 7:271, and 7:299. Lennon 1994, 24. Lennon elsewhere argues that there is a similar position in Descartes; see Lennon 1993, ch. IV.

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bodies that is distinct from the nature of matter as such were merely an extrinsic designation, there would be no mind-independent modal essences. It is clear, however, that Desgabets was committed to the claim that there are such essences and that they are determined atemporally by the nature of material substance. Thus, he was committed to the position that there are, in addition to the forms and categories that we impose at a particular time, features of material objects that are fixed by material substance apart from our thought. It might seem to be the case that Regis’s work provides stronger evidence for Lennon’s idealistic reading. In his Syst`eme, after all, Regis argued that the divisible quantity of matter is only “an exterior mode that consists in a certain manner in which we conceive body in relation to such and such a size [grandeur]” (Syst`eme 1:283).89 Earlier in this text, he stipulated that exterior modes “depend on something that is not in the substances, as being loved, being desired, which are modes taken from the action of another” (1:3). His suggestion, then, is that the quantity that particular bodies possess is something that derives not from the nature of matter but from our conception. Nevertheless, Regis indicated in the Syst`eme that there are certain “interior modes” such as “shape, motion, repose, etc.” that do not derive from the manner in which we conceive particular objects (Syst`eme 1:3). Moreover, in saying that quantity is merely an extrinsic mode, he had in mind not quantity as such, or what he called “indeterminate quantity,” but rather some particular “determined quantity” that depends on “a certain manner in which we conceive of body in relation to such and such a size.”90 On my reading, he was simply following Desgabets in holding that the particular measure of size is something that our thought imposes on the world. There is no additional claim here that the quantity we measure is itself something that depends on our thought. We can explain this point in terms of the case of temporal duration. As we have seen, Desgabets and Regis alike held that continuous temporal duration cannot be conceived apart from motion. Yet both also claimed that time derives from our measurement of duration by means of some “regular” motion. As Regis put the point in the Usage, time considered “formally” consists in “the comparison that the mind makes of some parts of the course of the sun with some parts of the duration of modal beings” (Usage 310). Time is, therefore, merely an “extrinsic denomination” insofar as it depends on our choice of a particular motion as the standard of measurement. For both Desgabets and Regis, however, the motions we measure are themselves “intrinsic” features of the material world that exist apart from our conception. 89 90

Cited in, Lennon 1994, 26. For the distinction between a quantit´e indetermin´ee that is “essential to body” and a quantit´e that is a mode exterieur that “consists in a certain manner in which one conceives body,” see Syst`eme 1:283.

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Lennon considers the views of Desgabets and Regis concerning not only particular physical objects but also individual minds. His central conclusion is that Regis’s discussion of this issue marks an advance insofar as he “is remarkably explicit in treating individual minds as modes of a single thinking substance.”91 Lennon cites, in particular, the claim in the Syst`eme that just as “the extension that is the essential attribute of body is never corrupted, but only the modes that make it such and such a body,” so “the thought that is the essential attribute of mind cannot be corrupted,” but only “the modes that determine it to be such and such a soul, for example, to be the soul of Pierre, of Paul, of Jean, etc.” (Syst`eme 1:266f). Regis followed Desgabets in thinking that particular bodies are all modes of one and the same extended substance. But the analogy here tempts us to think that Regis also took particular souls to be modes of one and the same mental substance.92 In this case, there is a need to resist temptation. One reason for resistance is that Regis held in the Syst`eme – in a passage Lennon notes in passing – that the individual revealed by reflection on the cogito argument is itself a substance.93 The position suggested here that different thinkers constitute different substances is even more explicit in the Usage. In the “R´efutation” appended to that work, Regis responded to the claim in Spinoza that distinct substances cannot share the same attribute by distinguishing among generic, specific, and numerical attributes. For Regis, generic attributes are attributes considered generically, as distinct from modes, while specific attributes are attribute kinds, such as extension and thought, and numerical attributes are the individual concrete attributes (“R´ef.” 906). Regis urged against Spinoza that substances with the same generic and specific attributes can, nonetheless, have distinct numerical attributes. It is telling that he appealed in support of this claim to the fact that “Pierre and Paul have different numerical attributes, and they are not prevented from having the same generic and specific attribute” (918). The indication here is that the souls of Pierre and Paul modify numerically distinct substances.94

91 92

93

94

Lennon 1994, 26. In a review that is otherwise critical of Lennon’s discussion (see note 98), Thiel endorses the position in Lennon that “Regis extends the notion of just one substance to the mental world” (Thiel 1997, 359). See Syst`eme 1:96, cited in Lennon 1994, 25. In a note, Lennon claims that this passage does not explicitly deny that different individual minds are modes of the same substance (Lennon 1994, 37, n. 62). Even though the denial may not be explicit, it is suggested by the fact that Regis was concerned in the passage with the individual thinker. Here Regis applied to the case of attributes the distinction in the Syst`eme (cited in Lennon 1994, 27f) among generic, specific, and numerical real distinctness (see Syst`eme 1:116). However, the earlier text holds that there is a generic real distinction between the man and the rock, which do not have the same generic attribute, and also claims that there is a numerical real distinction between two drops of water, which differ with respect to their “common accidents.”

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Even so, it is clear that Regis took the souls of Pierre and Paul to be modes rather than substances. Lennon claims that he further “suggests” that individual souls “consist of their thoughts” and so “anticipates Hume’s analysis of the mind” as a “bundle of perceptions.”95 As I indicated earlier, some of Regis’s remarks do indeed suggest the view that the soul is merely a collection of transitory thoughts. However, I noted other remarks in which he indicated that particular souls, like particular bodies, are something in addition to their various states. We can understand this distinction in terms of the view in the Syst`eme that particular animals and plants cannot be identified with a particular quantity since they “pass from their birth to their death through an infinity of degrees of quantity, although their essence remains always the same” (Syst`eme 1:283). One could say, in the same way, that particular souls cannot be identified with particular thoughts since they pass through an infinity of different thoughts even while retaining the same modal essence. What has that essence, it seems, is not merely a collection of modes, but something that is itself a single, continuing mode. The view that our soul has a single essence conflicts not only with Lennon’s claim that Regis anticipated a Humean analysis of the mind, but also with his suggestion that Regis took our soul to be something “unreal” insofar as its individuation is something that depends merely on our thought.96 If it has its own modal essence created by God, then our soul, like mental substance itself, has a reality that is independent of our conception. The indication in Regis is that the essence of the human soul consists in being united to an organic body in such a way that all its thoughts depend on motions in that body and that certain motions in the body depend on its thoughts.97 This divinely instituted essence, and not our conception, serves to individuate our soul.98 It must be admitted that Regis provided little in the way of a detailed account of the way in which the soul differs from its various thoughts. One difficulty here is that having adopted Desgabets’s identification of our mental substance with an atemporal substantial essence, Regis could no longer follow Descartes in holding that our soul is related to its thoughts as a substance is to its modes. However, he seemed to want to retain some sort of distinction between the thoughts and the soul that has them. Moreover, the passage in the Syst`eme concerning the modal essences of particular bodies implies that 95 96 97

98

Lennon 1994, 27. Ibid., 30. Compare Syst`eme 1:121–23, and Usage 45–49. The reason for the asymmetry is that the human body has certain motions, such as those involved in reflex action, that do not derive from its nature as a human body. For the related objection to Lennon that our soul is individuated by the union apart from our conception, see Thiel 1997, 359f.

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the human soul also has its own modal essence. Such an implication indicates that Regis took the distinction between the soul and its states to have a foundation in mind-independent reality. There is also a sense in which Regis must hold that extrinsic denominations themselves depend on such a reality. To see that this is so, consider again the insistence in Desgabets on the fact that the extrinsic beings, in contrast to atemporal modal essences, have a temporal history. Since Desgabets also held that temporal duration is inconceivable apart from a motion that is intrinsic to matter, we have the basis here for the argument that we cannot adequately conceive of extrinsic beings apart from an intrinsic, and thus mind-independent, feature of the material world. But we have seen that Regis adopted Desgabets’s account of temporal duration. Moreover, he held not only that extrinsic denominations are linked in an essential way to our conception, but also that all such conceptions are essentially temporal. Thus, Regis must conclude that we cannot adequately conceive of such denominations apart from a motion that he explicitly identified as an intrinsic mode of matter. In effect, this line of argument applies to the case of extrinsic denominations the considerations that Desgabets used to refute the contention in Descartes that we can adequately conceive the temporal self apart from an external material world. It is thus even more ironic that Regis never explicitly endorsed Desgabets’s refutation of Cartesian idealism. I suspect that his failure here is explained, at least in part, by the fact that his attachment to Descartes’s identification of the self with the mind “considered in itself ” blinded him to the implication of his own views that the temporal self depends essentially on motion. As we will see, this attachment is reflected in his published response to the critique of Cartesian doubt and the cogito in the 1689 Censura philosophiæ cartesianæ of Pierre-Daniel Huet. However, Regis’s response also broaches the radical doctrine connected to Desgabets’s refutation of idealism, namely, the doctrine that our thoughts all require a union with motion. In the discussion that follows concerning developments in late seventeenth-century French Cartesianism, it will become clear that this doctrine is linked to Regis’s rejection of a Platonism of the sort endorsed by Malebranche.

part iii PIERRE-SYLVAIN REGIS

5 Huet’s Censura, Malebranche, and Platonism

In Chapter 1, I started with the royal decree to the University of Paris in 1671 that triggered the official French campaign against Cartesianism. As indicated there, this campaign initially emphasized the difficulties of reconciling Descartes’s physics with Church teachings concerning the Eucharist. In this chapter, I begin with the second stage of this campaign, which is marked by another royal decree to the University of Paris, this one in 1691, requiring the philosophy professors to sign an anti-Cartesian formulary. This formulary contains only the most oblique reference to the issue of the Eucharist, highlighting instead a Cartesian epistemology that emphasizes the method of doubt and the need for clear and distinct ideas. In §5.1, I begin with a consideration of the anti-Cartesian formulary at the University of Paris. Though this formulary is presented as a censure imposed from without of views found within the university, it most likely was compiled by a disgruntled member (or members) of the university who drew for the most part on sources from outside of the academy. One of the main issues raised in the formulary concerns the conflict of Descartes’s method of doubt with the requirements of faith. The emphasis both on Cartesian method and on the relation between faith and reason bespeaks the influence of the 1689 Censura philosophiæ cartesianæ of the skeptic PierreDaniel Huet. Huet was not the only early modern critic of Cartesianism to discuss these issues, but he integrated them in a distinctive manner and also related them to his own unique interpretation of Descartes’s doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths. Huet’s Censura is important not only because it provided the backdrop for the 1691 formulary, but also because it triggered one of the most famous debates over Cartesianism in early modern France. This debate is the focus of §5.2. The Cartesian side of the debate was represented by Regis, who offered a response to Huet that emphasizes the mitigated nature of Cartesian doubt and the compatibility of Cartesian philosophy with faith. Regis’s response does not fully engage the issue of Descartes’s creation doctrine that 215

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Huet broached and, in general, tends to play down those aspects of his Radical Cartesianism that we considered in Part II. However, the Paris academician Jean Du Hamel (also Duhamel) published a set of R´eflexions on Regis’s Cartesianism that addresses some of his radical views. After considering the Huet–Regis–Du Hamel exchange, I turn in §5.3 to Regis’s own final discussion in his 1704 Usage of the issue, broached in the 1691 formulary, of the relation between faith and reason. This discussion is particularly noteworthy since it is the only place where Regis directly criticizes the views of Desgabets. The criticisms of Desgabets are problematic in ways that cast doubt on the central thesis in the Usage that reason and faith occupy non-overlapping regions of intellectual space. However, Regis’s remarks do serve to address Huet’s charge that Descartes’s created truths doctrine is merely a device for reconciling faith and reason. In the course of the Censura, Huet criticized Descartes for adopting a Platonic account of the nature of the mind. The issue of Platonism was addressed most directly not in the initial debate over Huet’s text, however, but rather in a subsequent dispute involving Regis that concerns the views of Malebranche. Just as the debate over the Censura marks a shift in discussions of Cartesianism from an earlier focus on the Eucharist to a broader concern with the implications of Cartesian philosophy for faith, so also the dispute over Malebranche indicates a transition of sorts within Cartesianism. The nature of this transition is indicated by the distinction in Francisque Bouillier between two periods in French Cartesianism,“the one which goes from Descartes to Malebranche, and the other which goes from Malebranche to the end of the eighteenth century.” The first period is said to be dominated by “the immediate disciples of Descartes, anterior to Malebranche, or at least not under his influence, [who] reproduce the doctrine of the master without any allegiance to Saint Augustine or to Plato.” In contrast, the second period is “marked by the stamp of the genius and the doctrines of Malebranche,” and thus is dominated by “a sort of Augustinian or Platonic idealism.”1 The distinctions here are admittedly too sharp. Bouillier placed Desgabets and Regis among the immediate disciples of Descartes. Yet I cited earlier the claim in Desgabets that he followed “the noble and Platonic manner in which the Fathers have explicated matters of faith.”2 Moreover, in both the Syst`eme and the Usage, Regis cited Augustine explicitly in support of his conclusion that the soul united with a body is distinct from a “pure mind.”3 Even so, Victor Cousin noted with some reason that Desgabets was 1 2 3

Bouillier 1868, 1:503f. I set aside here, but return in the Conclusion, to the point that “the immediate disciples of Descartes” merely “reproduce the doctrine of the master.” See §1.4.4, at note 126. Compare Syst`eme 1:152 and Usage 46.

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“in reality closer to Aristotle than to Plato.”4 The relation to Aristotle is especially clear in Desgabets’s endorsement of the Aristotelian maxim that there is nothing in the intellect that is not in the senses. As we know, Regis also accepted this maxim (see §4.3). Here there is support for the suggestion in Bouillier that he offered a version of Cartesianism that differs from the Platonic form of Cartesianism marked by the stamp of Malebranche. In §5.4, I examine the debate between Regis and Malebranche, who were ranked in the early modern period among “the most considerable of the Cartesians.” This debate initially focused somewhat narrowly on the issue of the nature of ideas. As in the case of the Huet–Regis–Du Hamel exchange, however, the dispute addressed broader issues in its later stages. In the case of the Malebranche debate, the later stages involved an exchange between Regis and a disciple of Malebranche, Henri de Lelevel. Lelevel offered a version of “Platonic idealism” that contrasts sharply with a realist insistence in Regis on the connection of our mind to the created material world. I conclude in §5.5 with an examination of the response to Regis’s Usage by the Cartesian Charles-Claude Genest. Even though he was not a follower of Malebranche, Genest offered broadly Platonist criticisms of the theory of mind in Regis’s text. These criticisms of Regis draw attention to a realism that was once recognized as an important form of Cartesianism but that now is largely forgotten.

5.1 the 1691 formulary and the censura On 28 October 1691, the same Archbishop Harlay who had presented Louis’s 1671 decree to the University of Paris (see §1.1) now offered for the signature of the members of the Paris philosophy faculty a formulary condemning the following propositions that “His Majesty desires not to be taught in the schools.” 1. One must rid oneself of all kinds of prejudices and doubt everything before being certain of any knowledge. 2. One must doubt whether there is a God until one has a clear and distinct knowledge of it. 3. We do not know whether God did not create us such that we are always deceived in the very things that appear the clearest. 4. As a philosopher, one must not develop fully the unfortunate consequences that an opinion might have for faith, even when the opinion appears incompatible with faith; notwithstanding this, one must stop at that opinion, if it is evident. 4

Cousin 1970, 131f. Cousin added that Desgabets was closer to “Gassendi than Descartes” (cf. the related claim in the works cited in Chapter 4, note 1).

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5. The matter of bodies is nothing other than their extension and one cannot exist without the other. 6. One must reject all the reasons the theologians and the philosophers have used until now (with Saint Thomas) to demonstrate the existence of God. 7. Faith, hope, and charity, and generally all the supernatural habits are nothing spiritual distinct from the soul, as the natural habits are nothing spiritual distinct from mind and will. 8. All the actions of the infidels are sins. 9. The state of pure nature is impossible. 10. The invincible ignorance of natural right does not excuse sin. 11. One is free, providing that one acts with judgment and with full knowledge, even when one acts necessarily.5 We have here not a vague censure of views that introduce confusion into the explanation of some unnamed mysteries, as in 1671, but the condemnation of a specific set of philosophical and theological propositions. The introduction of the new formulary by the archbishop, and the subsequent signature of it by the philosophy professors, marks a break from past inaction on the part of the Paris Faculty of Arts. Louis’s 1671 decree to the University of Paris was followed by declarations against the new Cartesian philosophy by the Paris faculties of theology (in 1671) and medicine (in 1673).6 This decree also provided the basis for the harassment of Cartesian professors at universities in Angers (1675) and Caen (1677). During this period, however, the Paris Faculty of Arts refrained from issuing an antiCartesian declaration. Nor, it must be said, were they ever formally required to issue one. After all, Louis’s 1671 decree merely requested that university officials enforce its statutes as they saw fit. Why, then, the sudden need for new action in 1691? The fact that the archbishop passed along a formulary from the king may seem to indicate that this new campaign against Cartesianism has its source in events outside of the university. However, in an anonymous “M´emoire” of the academic battles over Cartesianism during the 1690s, there is the claim that “some person ill-disposed toward the University,” but no doubt also connected with it, composed a list of eleven propositions “presumably extracted from the writings of professors of philosophy at the University.” The report continues that this individual passed the list along to Archbishop Harlay, who then examined various theses sponsored by these professors. Finding nothing corresponding to the eleven propositions, the archbishop took no further action. Undeterred, however, the author of the formulary discovered a way 5 6

Argentr´e 1963, 3-1:149f. For the 1671 declaration of the Paris Faculty of Theology “contra Doctrinam Carthesi,” see Babin 1679, 5f. See also the discussion in Jourdain, 1862–66, 1:234f.

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to present it to the king. Louis must have had as little interest in the abstract issues addressed in the formulary as he had in the technical details of transubstantiation during the earlier Eucharist Affair. Nevertheless, he was sensitive to any hint of disorder in the universities that were training future members of the secular and religious hierarchies in France. It was undoubtedly due to this sensitivity that Louis ordered his archbishop to conduct a new examination of the Paris philosophy faculty. Harlay subsequently took the simpler route of having the rector of the university require the signature of all philosophy professors on a formulary denouncing the eleven propositions.7 The fifth proposition of the formulary, concerning the identification of matter with extension, is a faint echo of the old debates, connected to the 1671 decree, concerning the nature of Christ’s eucharistic body. However, the formulary itself emphasizes other issues. In particular, its first four propositions draw attention to the impious nature of a philosophy based on methodical doubt and clear and distinct ideas. The radical doubt mentioned in the first three propositions, which throws even the veracity of God into question, is familiar from Descartes. The fourth proposition is more difficult to pin on Descartes, but we will discover presently that even it has connections to Cartesianism. The context for the last four propositions is provided not by Cartesian philosophy but rather the grand theological disputes that pitted the defenders of Jansenius against the Jesuits. While the Jesuits followed a Molinist line that mitigates the effects of the fall on natural reason and the human will, the Jansenists claimed to be faithful to Augustine in insisting on the total depravity of fallen human nature.8 The issues mentioned in the last four propositions concerning infidel sin, the possibility of a nature purified of the effects of sin and grace, the moral consequences of ignorance and especially the nature of free will were all part of the conflict between Jansenists and Jesuits.9 Indeed, the propositions themselves seem to be drawn more or less directly from papal condemnations of the writings of Jansenius and one of his mentors, the Louvain theologian Michael Baius.10 In drawing 7 8 9 10

The “M´emoire” is reproduced in Jourdain 1862–66, 2:127v–28v. See the remarks in §1.2.3 on the French controversies over Jansenism. See also the literature cited in Chapter 1, note 68. For a discussion of these technical issues from a Jesuit perspective, see Lubac 1969. The eighth proposition is nearly identical to one of the theses condemned in a 1567 bull directed against Baius (namely, thesis 25, in Denzinger 1963, 431), while the ninth proposition is connected to the condemnation there of the denial in Baius that God can create humans with a “pure nature” (see thesis 55, in Denzinger 1963, 434). In his Augustinus, Jansenius explicitly affirmed the claim in the tenth proposition of the 1691 formulary that ignorance of natural right does not excuse sin ( Jansenius 1964, 2:col. 305–10). The eleventh proposition is linked to the claim in Baius, condemned in the 1567 bull, that an action can be free “even if necessary” (thesis 39, in Denzinger 1963, 433). Moreover, one of the five

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attention to these condemnations, the formulary reinforces the Jesuit objection that the views of Baius and Jansenius fall outside the boundaries set by Church tradition.11 The fourth proposition indicates most clearly the connection between the initial set of philosophical propositions and the last set of theological propositions. The philosopher featured in this proposition follows reason even when it leads to conclusions that conflict with the dictates of faith. One can see a sort of parallel here to the Jansenist theologian who adheres in an extreme way to the letter of Augustine, even when there is a conflict with the definitive declarations of the Church.12 The suggestion in the formulary, then, is that there is a slippery slope starting from Cartesian doubt and ending in heretical Jansenist theology. Such a suggestion is in line with the charge, which one member of the Sorbonne, the abb´e Edme Pirot, directed in 1706 against the Cartesian professor Petit de Montempuis, that “Cartesianism is scarcely one step distant from Jansenism.”13 To seal the connection between Cartesianism and Jansenism in the formulary, however, we must show that the fourth proposition has a Cartesian basis. The Cartesian basis is not immediately evident from the formulary itself, but the connection to Descartes is indicated in a text that almost certainly was the source for this bridge proposition. This text is the 1689 Censura philosophiæ cartesianæ of a well-connected member of the French establishment, Pierre-Daniel Huet.14 Huet noted that this text

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propositions condemned in the later anti-Jansenist bulls holds that merit or demerit for action requires not freedom from necessity, but merely freedom from constraint (Deniznger 1963, 445). For the source of this proposition in the Augustinus, see Jansenius 1964, 2:col. 657–64. The middle three propositions are by contrast something of a miscellany, but they are more likely than the other eight to have been drawn directly from the work of Cartesian philosophy professors at the University of Paris. Thus, in a set of lecture notes that were first published in 1695 but no doubt include material that dates from before that time, the Paris professor Edme Pourchot addressed all the issues raised in these propositions (see Pourchot 1733). For documentation of this point, see Schmaltz in press. One the other hand, there seems to be in the formulary, malgr´e lui, some tension between the “haughty” rationalism reflected in the first four propositions and the denigration of the natural faculties reflected in the last four propositions. This conflict seems to me to provide some support for the thesis that Ferdinand Brunti`ere offered over a century ago of “the most redoubtable opposition” of Jansenism to the stress in Cartesianism on “the total power of reason” (Brunti`ere 1898, 121, 130). Petit de Montempuis 1707, 148v. The Paris Archbishop Louis-Antoine de Noailles rebuked Pirot for making such an accusation without supporting evidence, but the following year the Sorbonne cited the thesis in Petit de Montempuis that the free will is only “formally” rather than “actively” indifferent and that such a will excludes only necessity deriving from “constraint or natural propensity” and not necessity tout court. Huet served as sous-pr´ecepteur to the Dauphin from 1672 to 1678 and became – apparently with some reluctance but on the insistence of the pr´ecepteur Bossuet – a member of the Acad´emie fran¸caise in 1674. Huet was rewarded for his service with the Abbey of Aunay in 1678 and then was appointed Bishop of Soissons in 1685, though he was not consecrated

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“attracted more attention to me than all that I have ever written,”15 and it was quickly and widely read. Already in 1690 there were published Cartesian responses to the work from Eberhard Schweling, a professor at Bremen, and Andreas Peterman, a professor at Leipzig.16 The portion of the Censura that bears most directly on the fourth proposition is found in its final chapter on “the weighing of the Cartesian philosophy in general.” Although this chapter praises the clarity of Descartes’s writing and his skill as a mathematician, it also draws attention to several basic faults in the Cartesian system. One of these faults derives from the fact that Descartes refused to accept that “it is necessary to submit his mind to all that God has proposed to be believed,” but instead “dared to compare the truth of his opinions with the truth of the dogmas of the faith” (Cpc 172f ). Huet charged that Descartes was so wedded to his philosophy that he accepted it even though he recognized that it conflicts with dogmas of the faith. He then offered the bold hypothesis that Descartes attempted to reconcile faith and reason by appealing to the fact “that God can make things repugnant to reason and to themselves, because they are not repugnant to reason by themselves, but by the will of God” (174).17 This suggestion seems to founder on Descartes’s own insistence that it is “impious to fear that any truths discovered in philosophy could be in conflict with those from faith,” and that “there is nothing pertaining to religion that cannot be explicated equally easily through my principles than through those that are commonly received” (AT 7:581).18 However, I suspect that had he been confronted with this evidence, Huet would have claimed that Descartes was simply dissembling, that in his heart of hearts he recognized – what was obvious to his critics – that the results of his reason conflict with faith. Such a recognition would seem for Huet to provide the only intelligible

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due to political conflict between Paris and Rome. He later switched appointments with the Bishop of Avranches and was consecrated in this post in 1692. He was allowed to abdicate in 1699 and was awarded with the Abbey of Fontenay. At this point, he moved to the Paris house of the Jesuits, where he died in 1721. There is more on Huet in the translator’s preface to Huet forthcoming. In a 16 September 1691 letter from Huet to Huygens, in Huygens 1888–1950, 10:143. See Schweling 1690 and D. A. P. 1690. Compare Schotan 1691 and Volder 1695. Johannes Schotan was a professor at Franeker, and Burchard de Volder was a professor at Leiden. Huet’s source here seems not to be Descartes’s brief remarks on the doctrine of created truths in his published responses to objections to his Meditations, which do not mention the possibility that God makes repugnant propositions to be true. Rather, he appears to have drawn on two letters in which Descartes warned that we should not limit God’s power by denying that He can bring about what we conceive to be contradictory (see AT 4:118f and 5:223f ). Clerselier included these letters in Descartes 1659 and 1666–67. These remarks are from a letter to the head of the French Jesuits, Jacques Dinet, that was first published in the second (1642) edition of the Meditations. In this letter, Descartes complained about the set of objections to the Meditations submitted by Dinet’s subordinate, the Jesuit Pierre Bourdin. I have more to say in §5.2.1 about Bourdin’s objections and Descartes’s responses to them.

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motivation for offering what from his perspective was the philosophically incoherent and theologically suspect view that God can do the impossible. In any event, Huet condemned Descartes’s purported belief that reason conflicts with faith principally on the grounds that the belief itself conflicts with faith and, in particular, with the determination of the Lateran Council that reason and faith are compatible (Cpc 176).19 For Huet, the preferred option to accepting Descartes’s bizarre doctrine of created eternal truths is to adhere to the decree of the Church that faith is compatible with reason and to subordinate reason to faith (173f ). The charge that Cartesian philosophy conflicts with the dictates of faith is not entirely unprecedented. In his 1680 Sentimens, after all, La Ville took Desgabets to task for appealing to the fact that God has the power to do the impossible in order to explain how Christ’s body can be present in the Eucharist (see §1.5). What is new in Huet, however, is the claim that such a position can be applied more generally to the relation between faith and reason, and that it can be attributed directly to Descartes himself, rather than to some of his followers. On both of these points, the Censura provides a better fit than the Sentimens with the fourth proposition of the 1691 formulary. Moreover, the Censura provides a discussion of Descartes’s method of doubt that touches on the points mentioned in the first three propositions of the formulary. Thus, this text emphasizes in its first chapter the radical nature of Descartes’s initial doubt, the fact that this doubt covers even the belief that God exists, and the skeptical suggestion that God could deceive us even in matters that seem most evident (Cpc 11f, 30f ). As in the case of the 1691 formulary, so Huet’s Censura bundles these features of the Cartesian method with the view that one must accept reason even where it conflicts with faith. Admittedly, Huet’s views are not entirely in line with the 1691 formulary since he himself indicated some sympathy for methodical doubt.20 The Censura, in fact, endorses an “Academic skepticism” that emphasizes the need to doubt in order to eliminate dogmatic beliefs concerning the true natures of objects.21 This sort of skepticism is connected to a fideistic side of Huet’s thought that is reflected in the thesis of his aptly titled Trait´e philosophique de la foiblesse de l’esprit humain that the “art of doubting” provides the best means of preparing the mind for faith.22 Certainly, traditionalists in the University of Paris would not have been entirely comfortable with such a thesis. Indeed, the same Pirot who took on 19

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For the relevant teaching from the fifth session of the Council of Lateran, see Denzinger 1963, 354. In the dedicatory letter to the Meditations, Descartes cited the decrees during this session concerning the immortality of the soul; see AT 7:3. For this point, see Malbreil 1991, 319. See Neto 1997. The line that Huet took here is similar to the one that Foucher had taken in his 1675 Critique of Malebranche; see the remarks in §3.1, at note 3. Huet 1723, 209. Though published posthumously, Huet composed the work around the same time as he composed the Censura. On the Trait´e, see Malbreil 1994.

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Petit de Montempuis wrote to Huet in 1692 that although the discussion in Huet’s skeptical Alnetanæ quæstiones de concordia rationis et fidei is on the whole “as solid as the matter it relates,” still it is not certain that “we could challenge reason to the extent of saying that it can produce no certainty without striking at faith.”23 Even so, Huet’s critique of Descartes’s views on the eternal truths made clear his rejection of any sort of doubt that places at risk the truths of faith. Moreover, he was explicitly critical in the Censura of Descartes’s appeal to clarity and distinctness as the criterion of truth. In these central respects, then, his views are right in line with the critique in the 1691 formulary of a philosophy that adheres to methodical doubt and clear and distinct ideas even in cases where these yield results that are contrary to faith. Huet’s Censura brought to the fore the general issue of the relation between faith and reason that appeared later in the 1691 formulary. This was an issue that Regis was particularly concerned about addressing, and he addressed it in a manner that indicated a rare point of disagreement with his mentor, Desgabets. However, Regis was concerned as well about responding to the more specific objections to Descartes in Huet’s Censura. Indeed, both in his response to Huet and in a later related exchange with Du Hamel, Regis served as the main spokesperson for the Cartesian camp. Such was not the case in his subsequent public debates with Malebranche and his disciple, Lelevel. Here we have an internal dispute over the proper way in which to develop basic Cartesian doctrines. Neither in his response to Huet nor in his initial critique of Malebranche did Regis emphasize the distinctive features of his own brand of Cartesianism. In the case of Huet, the focus is on the specific objections in the Censura to methodical doubt and the cogito argument, whereas in the case of Malebranche, the debate featured the question of whether ideas are reducible to our perceptions. However, the later stages of these two debates involved a more direct confrontation with the deep issues broached by the distinctive form of Cartesianism that Regis inherited from Desgabets.

5.2 huet--regis--du hamel: cartesian themes 5.2.1 Huet on Doubt and the Cogito The Censura is dedicated to the duc de Montausier, Charles de Sainte Maure, the royal counselor responsible for bringing Huet to the French court during the 1670s. In the preface, Huet credited Montausier with prompting him to speak out against Descartes by means of the argument that if “the Fathers of the Church formerly opposed the pagan philosophers, whose 23

Quoted in Tolmer 1949, 552f. In a letter to Bossuet dating from that same time, however, Huet indicated that Pirot was one of the people who encouraged him to publish his attack on Descartes in the Nouveaux M´emoires ; see Bossuet 1909–25, 5:109.

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principles had little or no relation to matters pertaining to eternal salvation, much more must one oppose the dogmas of a Christian man that work against the maxims of Christ and in consequence produce the most serious destruction” (Cpc 4). Indeed, the title of Huet’s text implies that he stands as a censor who, like the university censors at Angers in the 1670s, condemns Descartes’s works for the theological threat they pose. Huet presented the role of this work in just this manner when he wrote to Bossuet that he published the Censura because he knew that “the king did not want the doctrine of Descartes to be spreading in his realm.”24 Thus, it is no surprise that Huet followed the Angers censors in pointing out the dangers that Cartesianism poses for Church teachings regarding the Eucharist (143f ). Even so, the Censura begins not with these dangers, but rather with an extended discussion of the method of doubt and the cogito. A second chapter adds to this discussion a critical examination of Descartes’s claim that clear and distinct perception serves as the “criterion of truth.” Together, these first two chapters comprise almost half of the work. The remaining text considers topics not directly tied to Cartesian epistemology. Thus, the third chapter takes issue with Descartes’s account of the mind, while the fourth chapter criticizes Descartes’s argument from the idea of God to God as its cause. A fifth chapter rejects Descartes’s identification of matter and his argument against the void; the issue of the Eucharist is mentioned here. The sixth and seventh chapters offer brief critical discussions of Descartes’s views on the origin of the world and on gravity. As indicated previously, the eighth and final chapter is a general “weighing” of the Cartesian philosophy. Huet clearly took the discussion of the method of doubt and the cogito to the centerpiece of the Censura, as shown by the fact that this is the only section of his text that he substantially revised in its 1694 edition.25 This emphasis on Cartesian epistemology distinguishes this work from the more standard scholastic critiques of Descartes during this time. However, the emphasis is not unprecedented. Indeed, one set of objections that was published with Descartes’s Meditations is devoted almost exclusively to the method of doubt. This is the incomplete set provided the Jesuit Pierre Bourdin, which includes the charge that radical doubt precludes any sort of certainty (AT 7:498, 529f).26 In support of this charge, Bourdin offered the consideration, found in other sets of objections,27 that Descartes’s doubt ensnares him in a circle from which it is impossible to escape. Huet repeated 24 25

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In a 1692 letter, in Bossuet 1909–25, 5:107. The revisions were based on annotations that Huet made to Regis’s R´eponse. For a discussion of some of the elements that Huet introduced into the 1694 edition of the Censura, see [Rodis-]Lewis 1950c, 116–23. Compare the editorial endnotes in Huet forthcoming. The objections as published break off at one point, and include interspersed and extremely critical replies from Descartes. For more on the context of Bourdin’s objections to Descartes, see Ariew 1995. See the objections at AT 7:125 and 214.

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this same point when he noted in the Censura that neither Descartes’s “natural light” nor his clear and distinct perception can serve as an entirely reliable “criterion of truth” (Cpc 52f, 62).28 Even so, his discussion of this point differs in one important respect from Bourdin’s. Bourdin emphasized the difficulties with the doubts raised in “Meditation One” that concern dreaming and the “evil genius.” In contrast, Huet focused from the start on the skeptical difficulties concerning the suggestion at the start of “Meditation Three” that we cannot know “whether God has made us always to be deceived” (12). Huet suggested, as Bourdin had not, that Descartes needed to grant these difficulties given his own admission that “God can make the things that appear to us to be most evidently false to be true” (52f, 61f ).29 Huet’s unique diagnosis, which I mentioned earlier, is that Descartes cannot provide a reliable criterion of truth given that he was forced to posit a God who can do the impossible in order to overcome the conflict between his reason and faith. The first chapter of the Censura illustrates the difficulties with Descartes’s method by highlighting the problematic nature of his cogito argument. Here again, the discussion is somewhat derivative. For instance, the objection in the Censura that the cogito depends on knowledge that is precluded by methodical doubt (Cpc 14f ) is anticipated in objections that critics of Descartes had offered during his own lifetime.30 However, to my knowledge, Huet was the first to articulate the now familiar objection that the cogito argument involves a petitio principii insofar as the I think already includes the I exist (14f ). Further, he defended at some length a novel critique of this argument that focuses on the temporality of our consideration of the cogito. This objection starts with the observation that the act by which the perceiver concludes I think is distinct from the act by which he concludes I exist. Huet assumed that these two different acts cannot occur at the same time and, therefore, inferred that the I think act must temporally precede the I exist act. But then the former cannot serve to establish the truth of the latter. As Huet put the argument, “there is one time when the antecedent is enunciated, I think, and another time when the consequent is enunciated, therefore I am. Accordingly, this would be better put forward as, I think, therefore I will be, or as I thought, therefore I am” (23). Given Descartes’s own principle that we can affirm our existence only at the time we are thinking of it,31 the reformulated arguments could not be acceptable to him. 28 29

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On the Bourdin–Huet connection, see Belgioioso 1999, 66f. Descartes did not explicitly link his “metaphysical reason for doubt” in “Meditation Three” with his eternal truths doctrine, though some commentators have suggested that there is a connection here. See, for instance, Wilson 1978, 120–31. See especially AT 7:413. Compare the objection at AT 7:125 that knowledge that one is a thinking thing depends on knowledge of God. These passages are from the Second and Sixth Objections, respectively, both of which were compiled from various sources by Mersenne. Compare §4.6.1, at note 67.

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Similar problems arise just at the level of the I think. Huet insisted that here again a particular thought must be distinct from and temporally prior to the act of reflecting on it.32 The reflective act can involve only a memory of the thought. Since Descartes himself admitted that doubt covers our memory even of clear and distinct perceptions, he cannot allow for the indubitability of the I think (Cpc 19f ).33 Even if these difficulties can be overcome, there is still the objection – connected to what is for Huet the main weakness with the Cartesian method of doubt – that “the sentiment of Descartes that God can make two contradictory propositions to be true at the same time” entails that “He can bring it about that that which thinks is and is not” (Cpc 16). Another way of putting the difficulty is that a God who can do the impossible can bring about the contradiction that I think without existing. In attempting to save faith by positing such a God, Descartes undermined the very argument that he himself took to be central to his system. Huet’s conclusion is that “this argument, Je pense, donc je suis, which appears so clear to Descartes, is however empty and uncertain [inane et incertain]” (57). In the third chapter of the Censura, Huet took issue with Descartes’s use of the cogito to support certain claims about the nature of the human mind. There he singled out Descartes’s argument that since he can infer to his existence as a thinking thing even while doubting that there is a material world, “his nature consists in thought alone” and thus nothing else pertains to him as thinking, “not body, not place, not motion, not expansiveness, or as the Cartesians call it, extension” (Cpc 76). He opposed this reasoning with the argument of the Epicurean that since he cannot think without a body, the mere fact that he exists as a thinking thing shows that he has a body (76–79). Huet himself wanted to find a middle way between the Epicurean materialist and Descartes, who falls into “an error of Pythagoras that is passed to the school of the Platonists and Stoics,” namely, the error of holding that “the whole nature of man [consists] in the mind alone” (85). This middle way is just the Aristotelian position that human beings are composed of a mind united to a body. Huet further insisted, with the Aristotelians, that the sensations that Descartes attributed to the mind actually belong to the body. He admitted that the mind thinks of the sensation, but held that in that case the mind has a second-order thought that has the bodily sensation as its object (87–90). Huet also opposed Descartes’s Platonism of innate ideas on the Aristotelian grounds that all ideas derive ultimately from sensory traces in the body (90–96). 32

33

In Cpc 24–26, Huet anticipated the Cartesian objection in Regis that reflection on a perception does not differ from the perception itself (cf. R´ep. 43). His response is that the two must differ since the perception of daylight has daylight as its object, while the object of reflection on that perception is the perception itself. For Descartes’s admission that doubt covers memory of clear and distinct perceptions, see his remarks at AT 7:140–46.

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Several elements of Huet’s critique are anticipated in Bourdin. For instance, Bourdin countered Descartes’s understanding of the cogito by introducing the materialist who infers to the existence of his body on the basis of the fact that he is thinking (AT 7:489f ). Moreover, he insisted with the Aristotelians that sensory thought occurs in a body both in the case of humans with immaterial souls and in the case of animals with material souls (7:506). Similar to Huet, Bourdin allowed that the “reflex act” by which we consider our sensations itself belongs to an immaterial mind (7:533f ). However, he also concluded, again with Huet, that the view that we can reflect on our sensations even though we have no body is “quite unsound” and “an arbitrary and unacceptable claim” (7:535). These similarities raise the question whether Huet was simply adopting a common Jesuit line. Indeed, there is the claim in Bouillier that “one cannot separate Huet from the Jesuits.”34 There are, in fact, strong personal connections between Huet and the Jesuits. Huet even sought to join the order in the 1650s, though his confessor ultimately convinced him not to join. Nevertheless, he did donate his extensive personal library to the House of the Jesuits on the rue Saint-Antoine in Paris, and after his retirement in 1710 he lived there for the rest of his life. More to the point, though, Huet’s attack on the Cartesian conception of mind is quite similar to the one we find in the Jesuit Bourdin, and the charge in Huet that Cartesianism is incompatible with the doctrines of the faith is familiar from the work of the Jesuits. Even so, Bourdin did not anticipate the point in the Censura that the difficulties with the Cartesian method derive primarily from Descartes’s hypothesis of a God who can do the impossible. Nor could Jesuits concerned about countering the Jansenist’s emphasis on the complete corruption of our natural faculties have been entirely comfortable with the fideistic suggestion in Huet that difficulties with methodical doubt are not restricted to Descartes but reveal more generally the feebleness of any reason that is not underwritten by faith.35 Even though Huet was an important source for various critics of Cartesianism, he clearly was his own man.

5.2.2 Regis’s R´eponse to Huet Huet’s critique of the Cartesian philosophy in the Censura is complemented by a satirical account of Descartes’s life in his anonymously published Nouveaux M´emoires pour servir a l’histoire du cart´esianisme.36 This 1692 text is dedicated to “the prince of the Cartesian philosophers,” who is said to 34 35 36

Bouillier 1868, 1:592. Compare the tension mentioned in note 11. Huet 1996. This was Huet’s answer to Baillet’s 1691 Vie de Descartes (Baillet 1970), the primary purpose of which was “tourner en ridicule la philosophie cart´esienne” (see the 1692 letter from Huet to Bossuet, in Bossuet 1909–25, 5:108f ). For more on the political context of the publication of Baillet’s Vie, see Sebba 1982.

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be “more Cartesian than Descartes himself.” In a 1711 edition, it is revealed that this prince is none other than Regis, who died some four years earlier.37 This was the same Regis who had rushed into print a point-by-point R´eponse to Huet’s Censura. Given Huet’s highly negative view of the philosophical worth of Cartesianism, it is something of an insult to be dubbed the principal leader of this sect. Indeed, Huet told Huygens that while the critiques of the Censura by Cartesians abroad “have little weight,” Regis’s reply “has even less, and nothing has given me a better opinion of my objections or a worse one of the sect I have attacked than seeing that those who are at the head of this party defend it so poorly.”38 However, Regis at least deigned to respond to the Censura, in contrast to Malebranche, the other prime candidate for Cartesian prince.39 Huet’s compliment to Regis was certainly back-handed, but it does involve the recognition that he was a main Cartesian player. Regis published his R´eponse to Huet in 1691, one year after the publication of his massive Syst`eme de philosophie. He had first requested the privil`ege for publication of the Syst`eme in 1680, at a time when he was returning from the provinces to take Rohault’s place as the chief Cartesian conf´erencier in Paris. However, perceived tensions between Cartesian philosophy and eucharistic theology loomed large, and the political pressures were such that the Paris Archbishop Harlay advised Regis that it would be in his own best interests to suspend his public Cartesian conferences.40 Regis followed this advice, but even so his request for publication was denied. The furor over the Eucharist had died down by the end of the 1680s, however, and Regis received permission to publish his Syst`eme in 1690, albeit on the condition that he eliminate any reference to Descartes from its title.41 Having finally published this work, Regis set himself the task of responding to the new threat to Cartesian epistemology in the Censura. Like Huet’s text, Regis’s R´eponse addressed points that go beyond the issues of methodical doubt and the cogito, but also like the Censura, such issues were front and center in his reply to Huet. Regis began by protesting in the preface to the R´eponse that the title of Huet’s text is inappropriate since one can recognize him “neither as Judge, nor as legitimate Examiner of the works of this great philosopher [Descartes]” (R´ep. pref.). In the text itself, moreover, he denied that Huet 37 38 39 40 41

Huet 1996 from the unpaginated preface. The reference to Regis is found in the unpaginated preface to L’A. 1711. In a 16 September 1691 letter, in Huygens 1888–1950, 10:144. As indicated in §5.4.3, however, Malebranche’s disciple Lelevel offered a response to the Censura. As reported in Fontenelle’s e´loge for Regis, in Fontenelle 1989–94, 6:145. The retitled 1691 edition of this work, the Cours entier de philosophie, presents itself in its subtitle as a Syst`eme general selon les principes de M. Descartes. This subtitle was possible because the edition was published in Amsterdam rather than (as in the case of the original edition) Paris.

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had any evidence for the charge that Descartes’s philosophy conflicts with the teachings of the faith. In particular, Regis claimed that the Cartesian account of body does not preclude the Real Presence in the Eucharist. Since this account allows for the distinction between the unchanging essence of a body and its quantity at a particular time, it is consistent with the declaration of the Council of Trent that Christ’s body is present in the sacrament according to its essence but not according to its quantity (Cpc 263f ).42 However, Regis also protested that it was useless for Huet to undertake a new examination for Descartes since Descartes himself has already answered the best objections. New critiques can only serve either “to repeat the first objections, or if they say anything different, they appear to be more worthy of pity than of response” (R´ep. pref.). In line with this remark, Regis offered in response to Huet’s objections to the method of doubt a position similar to the one Descartes’s had offered against Bourdin. Descartes countered Bourdin’s charge that his doubt is too radical by emphasizing that it is merely “metaphysical and exaggerated and in no way to be transferred to practical life.” He added that his doubt does not include what we are actually clearly and distinctly perceiving, which is totally beyond doubt (AT 7:460). Regis incorporated this position into his response to Huet by noting that Descartes “has never said that reason deceives us,” and that the purpose of his merely “hyperbolic” doubt is to eliminate errors in judgment that preclude a clear and distinct perception of the truth through reason (R´ep. 6f ). Regis was on his own in responding to Huet’s charge that Descartes’s hypothesis of a God who can do the impossible renders doubt ineliminable. One might expect that, at this point, he would defend the view that God can do the impossible in some sense but eliminate skepticism by appealing to the indefectibility of the substances that God has created. However, Regis’s radical views on these matters did not emerge fully in his R´eponse. Instead, he asserted that “far from it being necessary that Descartes believe that God can make things that are repugnant, he has taught the contrary in several places in his works” (R´ep., 18). In a later passage, he conceded that Descartes may have allowed that God can make 2 and 2 not be 4, but he added that “that must be understood only with respect to the extraordinary power of God, by which we know that He can make things we cannot conceive.” Regis explained that this sort of power is to be contrasted with “the ordinary power of God, by which if God cannot bring it about that 2 and 2 not make 4, He also cannot bring it about that evident things not be true” (113f ). In the R´eponse, Regis indicated – in anticipation of the view that he later developed in the Usage (see §5.3) – that God’s ordinary power governs a “natural order” determined by natural laws, while His extraordinary power governs a “supernatural order” determined by laws inscrutable to us

42

On this distinction in Regis, see §4.7, after note 95.

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(R´ep. 220). However, this sort of distinction will not help with respect to the issue of the eternal truths, since Regis would presumably have wanted to deny that God can violate these truths even by use of His extraordinary power. In the same section that contains the ordinary/extraordinary power distinction, he insisted that “the Cartesians” would say that things that are inconceivable according to their essence are “absolutely impossible” (218). Earlier in this text, however, he claimed that God can bring it about that 2 and 2 not make 4 by His “absolute” power (92). His final position seems to be that God’s absolute power to change eternal truths or essences is distinct from His extraordinary power to perform the miraculous. Even so, Regis did little to develop this position in the R´eponse. It is true that Regis was concerned in the R´eponse not so much with developing his own position as with replying to Huet’s critique on Descartes’s behalf. However, his discussion there of the method of doubt appeals at times to views that Descartes himself could not have fully endorsed. A primary instance is indicated by Regis’s version of the truth rule, on which “the property that our ideas have of representing one thing rather than another supposes an exemplary efficient cause, and that this exemplary cause must formally contain all the perfections that our ideas represent” (R´ep., 99).43 Although Regis attributed this version of the truth rule to Descartes, the version itself left out Descartes’s own insistence on the possibility that an efficient cause contains its effect eminently rather than formally. I have indicated that this difference is crucial since Regis used this principle to argue that we know the existence of body “by the same view” that we know the existence of the soul. On this point, there is an implicit opposition to Descartes’s own conclusion that the existence of mind is better known to us than the existence of body (see §3.7). This opposition does not surface in the R´eponse; indeed, Regis was concerned there about defending the tenet in Descartes that the knowledge of our existence “is the first and most simple of all our knowledge, since it precedes all knowledge and it is impossible to have any knowledge that does not contain it” (R´ep. 23). To be sure, Regis noted that the cogito has priority only in the method of analysis, which begins with “what is the most particular and the most clearly known in its existence,” while the general truth rule has priority in synthesis, which begins with “what is most general and most known” (81). However, it is precisely the conclusion that the soul is “most clearly known in its existence” that conflicts with Regis’s mature conclusion, which he borrowed from Desgabets, that the existence of soul and body are equally well known to us.44 Regis’s replies to Huet’s specific objections to the cogito argument hew closely at times to Descartes. Thus, in response to Huet’s charge that this 43 44

Compare R´ep. 91f, 103. See also Regis’s claim that it can be shown “that M. Descartes knows his mind more certainly and more easily than he knows his body” (R´ep. 143).

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argument relies on a general principle connecting thought and existence (Cpc 15f ), Regis cited Descartes’s claim that the cogito is not a syllogism that employs such a principle but rather is something “known by itself,” that is, “by a simple inspection of mind” (R´ep. 50f). Moreover, he argued, again in line with Descartes’s remarks, that since “general cognitions never precede singular ones,” the cognition of the general principle that Huet cited does not precede singular cognition of the existence of the self (26).45 Regis did not have a clear Cartesian precedent on which to draw in responding to Huet’s claim that the I think cannot be present in the mind at the same time as the I exist. He began by conceding to Huet that the reflection involved in the I think must be distinguished from the affirmation of I exist, since the former is merely a perception of intellect while the latter is an act of will. However, Regis protested that these two states “are nevertheless in the mind at the same time, the one in the intellect that conceives, the other in the will that affirms” (R´ep. 39). He allowed that the perception of I think has some sort of priority over the affirmation of I exist, but he added that this is not “a priority of time, but a simple priority of nature, which does not suffice to prevent the two truths from being known by a simple view” (52). Even in this case, though, Regis’s response may have some basis in Descartes. In the so-called Conversation with Burman, Descartes is reported as accepting the basic point that the mind can have more than one thought at the same time.46 Burman anticipated Huet in objecting that since one can be conscious (conscius esse) of a thought only by a distinct thought, “you cannot be conscious that you are thinking, but only that you have thought.” According to Burman’s record, Descartes responded that even though one can reflect (reflectere) on thought only by a distinct thought, nonetheless “the soul can think of many things at the same time and persevere in its thought” (AT 5:149). The claim in Regis and (if the Burman report is to be trusted) Descartes that the mind can be in more than one state at the same time provides a legitimate challenge to an assumption underlying Huet’s main objection to the cogito argument. Yet another part of Regis’s response to this objection is more problematic. I have in mind his defense of the claim that a distinct reflective act is not required for knowledge of thought since all thought “is known by itself ” (R´ep. 36). The claim itself is not unusual; indeed, Regis’s position here was in line with the view of the international group of Cartesians who had objected to Huet that consciousness of a perception is an element 45

46

Regis was drawing on Descartes’s claim in the “Second Replies” that the cogito “is a thing known as if per se by a simple intuition of mind” and that “it is the nature of our mind to form general propositions from particular cognitions” (AT 7:140f ). On the latter point, compare AT 9-1:206. On the Burman record, see Chapter 4, notes 72 and 74.

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of the perception itself.47 The problems are connected rather to a defense of this position in Regis that appeals to the claim in Thomas that the angels “know themselves by their own substance” (36).48 In the 1694 edition of the Censura, Huet exploited a weakness in this defense by noting that Aquinas himself distinguished the angelic intellect from the human intellect on the grounds that the former knows itself directly by means of an intellectual grasp of its essence, while the latter knows itself only indirectly by means of reflection on its operations on material provided by the senses.49 The difficulty here goes beyond any misuse of Thomas on Regis’s part. What is most problematic is his attempt to explicate human knowledge in terms of the Thomistic account of the intellectual knowledge of disembodied angels. Such an explication is in some tension with his later endorsement in the Usage of the maxim of the ancients that everything in the human intellect was first in the senses (see §4.3). Indeed, in the R´eponse itself he drew attention to the distinction between mind “considered in itself,” which “never needs body to think,” and soul or mind considered as united to body, which “never thinks without body” (R´ep. 151). Regis also asserted in this same section of text that “mind has no need of body to think of itself, because it thinks of itself by itself, that is to say by its own nature” (147). Yet surely he must concede the point – central to Huet’s objection to the cogito – that our reflection on the self occurs in time. Given Regis’s own view that the temporal succession in our thought is tied to motion, it follows that not even in the case of the cogito do we have a thought of ourselves that is independent of the body. In reaction to Huet’s charge that Descartes adopted a misguided Platonism passed down from Pythagoras, Regis countered in the R´eponse that when Descartes said that we can know mind even while doubting body, that does not mean that he took the whole nature of man to be mind; it signifies only that the man that is composed of body and mind knows himself more by the part that is the mind than by that which is the body. This has no relation with what Pythagoras and the Platonists have dreamt on this subject. (R´ep. 169)

Of course, Regis had standard Cartesian reasons for resisting Huet’s more orthodox Aristotelian view that our sensory perceptions are themselves bodily states. However, his point here is that the fact that the mind knows itself first does not entail the Platonic position that the whole nature of man consists in the mind. Thus, the cogito is consistent with the position, which Regis 47

48 49

See the passages cited in [Rodis-]Lewis 1950c, 118–21. To defend this position, it would be useful to sharpen the distinction between consciousness and reflection that is broached in the passage cited earlier from the Conversation with Burman. Compare Syst`eme 1:150. The passage cited in both texts is from S.Th. Ia, 56, 1. See the passage from the 1694 Censura quoted in [Rodis-]Lewis 1950c, 119, n. 8. For the corresponding position in Thomas, see S.Th. Ia, 87, 1.

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himself endorsed (see §4.2), that the nature of man consists of the union of the human mind with its body. Even so, Regis did adopt the Platonic rhetoric of the necessity “of separating from the commerce of the senses in order to cling uniquely to a consideration by reason of the things that one wants to know” (R´ep. 126f ). There is a marked contrast with Desgabets’s criticism of Descartes’s attempt “to separate himself from all commerce with the senses” (RD 5:174). Once again, though, Regis accepted one of the main reasons that Desgabets had for criticizing this attempt, namely, that our thoughts have a temporal duration that they could not have apart from their union with motion. The implication here, which is not evident in his reply to Huet, is that even thoughts involved in our conception of the cogito depend on this union. The radical nature of the account of the union that Regis borrowed from Desgabets remains largely hidden in the R´eponse. The same is true of the radical nature of the views bequeathed to him by Desgabets concerning the creation of eternal truths and the rule that our ideas conform to real objects. Even so, enough of his Radical Cartesianism was present in this text for at least one reader to recognize its connections to Desgabets. Thus, Desgabets’s old adversary Foucher wrote to Leibniz in 1691 that the R´eponse to Huet “said practically nothing but what Dom Robert Desgabets has already said, such that by replying to this author I had replied in advance to Regis.” Foucher added that “a former philosophy professor in Paris is currently at work on a reply to him.”50 The respondent most likely was the Paris philosophy professor Jean Du Hamel.51 The connection to Desgabets that Foucher found in Regis’s exchange with Huet is even more evident in his subsequent exchange with Du Hamel.

5.2.3 The Du Hamel–Regis Exchange Although Huet made several notes in his copy of Regis’s R´eponse that were incorporated into the 1694 edition of the Censura, he never responded in print to Regis. That task was left to Du Hamel, who published in 1692 a set of R´eflexions critiques on Regis’s form of Cartesianism. There he praised Regis’s Syst`eme for offering “what is best in the tradition of the ancients and in the invention of the moderns in physics, medicine, optics and other subalternated sciences,” but he also charged that this text contains “some paralogisms and contradictions.” Regis answered that same year with what obviously was a hastily composed R´eponse to Du Hamel. In his reply, Regis complained that “instead of proposing new difficulties,” his critic is “content 50 51

Leibniz 1965, 1:397f. Not to be confused with the first secretary of the Acad´emie des sciences, the Oratorian Jean-Baptiste Du Hamel (1623?–1706).

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to renew those that have already been proposed” (R´ep. R´ef. pref.). Du Hamel did rework some of the same ground that Huet had already plowed, but he also drew attention to radical features of Regis’s system that Regis himself had consigned to the margins of his R´eponse to the Censura. The R´eflexions is divided into two main parts, the first of which concerns Regis’s brand of Cartesian metaphysics and the second of which concerns his version of Cartesian physics. Predictably, the second part includes the objection of “the theologians” that Cartesianism can allow neither that Christ’s body lacks extension in the Eucharist nor that the eucharistic species subsist apart from substance (R´ef. 193–201). In reply, Regis begged off any philosophical debate over this issue (R´ep. R´ef. 121f), thereby anticipating his emphasis in his later work on the fact that truths of faith are incomprehensible to us. I will return in the next section to Regis’s final account of the distinction between faith and reason. For the moment, though, I want to focus on his exchange with Du Hamel over issues raised in the first part of the R´eflexions. Du Hamel had the same departure point as Huet, namely, the Cartesian method of doubt. He even cited Huet’s conclusion in the Censura that “evidence does not have a certain mark of truth” (R´ef. 17). Like Huet, Du Hamel focused on the possibility that God deceives in arguing for the ineliminability of Cartesian doubt, and like Huet again, he connected that possibility to the Cartesian hypothesis of a God who can do the impossible (26). His critique of the cogito is also similar to Huet’s insofar as it raises the objection that the cogito contains a petitio principii and that it depends on general principles (45f, 48f ). Finally, Du Hamel revisited the point in Huet that a God who can do the impossible can bring it about that something that does not exist thinks (46f). Nonetheless, Du Hamel was more concerned than Huet with articulating a positive scholastic alternative to Cartesian philosophy that does not itself rest on faith. This concern is particularly evident in his claim in the R´eflexions that the scholastic identification of the objective reality of an idea with the object that is perceived supports, as the Cartesian account of objective reality does not, the conclusion that our clear ideas of things correspond to reality (R´ef. 32f ).52 Du Hamel is further distinguished from Huet by his attempt to grapple with radical features of Regis’s system. In particular, he addressed three points in Regis: the first, that the presence of the idea of extended substance in us suffices to establish the existence of that substance; the second, that God has freely created substances that are themselves indestructible; and the third, that the human soul is a mode that includes only states that are connected to bodily states. Here, as we are in a position to recognize, are the three main tenets of Regis’s Radical Cartesianism. 52

In the “First Objections,” the Dutch theologian Johannes Caterus had earlier defended a similar scholastic alternative to Descartes’s view of objective reality (AT 7:92–94).

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With respect to the first tenet, Du Hamel cited a passage from the Syst`eme that offers the “simple and natural” argument that we could not have an idea of extended substance if there were no “exemplary cause” that formally contains the properties that idea represents.53 He astutely observed that Descartes allowed in the “Third Meditation” that our mind can be a cause of this idea that contains extension only eminently (R´ef. 65f ). Regis protested that Descartes meant to say only that the mind is a cause of this idea “considered according to its formal being” and not “considered according to its objective being” (R´ep. R´ef. 37). It seems clear, however, that on this exegetical point Du Hamel had the better of the argument. If he pressed his advantage here, I think that he could have shown that the differences between Regis and Descartes go even deeper, right down to the thesis in Descartes that mind is better known than body.54 Du Hamel’s critique of Regis’s account of divine creation introduces two somewhat conflicting objections. The first is that Regis’s claim that God cannot destroy the substances He has produced implies that these substances are “necessary with an absolute and independent necessity” (R´ef. 75f ). The charge of Spinozism is not explicit here, but Du Hamel’s remarks certainly lead in that direction. However, this emphasis on problems with the necessity of created substances is juxtaposed with the objection that Regis introduced an incurable skepticism by claiming that all truths depend on God’s free will. As expressed in Du Hamel, this further objection against Regis is that if the possibility and impossibility come originally from the decree of the will of God, we could not be assured of the possibility and impossibility of things, and by consequence their truth and falsity, at least to be assured of the decree of the will of God that has made them possible or impossible, true or false. (84)

But Regis would seem to have the upper hand here, since he could say that the mere fact that God cannot change or destroy the substantial natures He has freely created shows that we can be assured of the possibility and impossibility of things. In fact, however, Regis’s own response emphasizes not this point but rather that created eternal truths that are true “only with a necessity that is hypothetical or by supposition” are grounded in the truth that God’s action is immutable, and this latter truth is “necessary with an absolute necessity” (R´ep. R´ef. 49).55 53 54

55

Compare §3.3 at note 36. Du Hamel challenged Regis’s endorsement of this thesis in a later chapter on the scholastic grounds that we know bodies directly by perception but know our soul only indirectly by reflection (R´ef. 124–30). Here Regis was addressing the charge in Du Hamel that his claim that all impossibilities depend on the divine will contradicts his admission that God cannot do what is absolutely impossible (R´ef. 81f ). On the distinction in Desgabets and Regis between the hypothetical necessity of created truths and the absolute necessity of truths concerning God, see §§2.2 and 2.6.

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The R´eflexions also addresses Regis’s account of the human soul and the union. Here again, Du Hamel offered conflicting objections. On the one hand, he objected to the claim in Regis that the human soul is merely a modal being on the grounds that faith requires that our soul is immortal (R´ef. 97). On the other, he charged that Regis’s view that the union of our soul with a body consists in a divinely ordained mutual dependence of our states and the states of that body is misguided since that dependence derives instead from a “physical and natural union” that distinguishes the human soul from that of an angel. Du Hamel even applied to Regis the charge that Desgabets had earlier directed against Malebranche (see §4.3), namely, that of confusing the human soul with an angelic mind (103f ). In response to the first objection, Regis quite reasonably appealed to the distinction in his writings between the mind considered in itself, which is an indestructible substantial being, and the human soul or the mind considered as united to a body, which is a modal being that does not survive death (R´ep. R´ef. 53f ). He further dismissed Du Hamel’s second objection on the grounds that there is no intelligible account of the union that does not identify it with this mutual dependence (57f).56 However, Regis’s own system may provide the material for such an account. Here one could draw on his position that the distribution of motion is determined by a modal nature that God “superadds” to the nature of extension (see §2.6). Why could he not also say that God superadds to the nature of mind a modal nature that determines the manner in which human thoughts depend on bodily motions? Had he said this, Regis could have accommodated the position in Du Hamel that the union involves more than the dependence of mental and bodily states. In any event, it seems to me that as in the case of Du Hamel’s objections to his proof of the existence of extended substance, so here Regis was too quick to dismiss his critic’s remarks on the issue of the union. The R´eflexions provides a traditional scholastic perspective on the new Cartesian system. Even so, this text is sensitive to the fact that Regis did not merely repeat Descartes’s views but developed them in novel ways. In this respect, the Regis attacked in the R´eflexions is quite different from the Regis represented in the R´eponse to Huet. These differences did not prevent Du Hamel from considering Regis to be one of the primary expositors of Cartesianism. Indeed, the very existence of the R´eflexions bespeaks the importance of Regis to the debate over Cartesianism within the schools. Moreover, some of the views that Regis expressed in his responses to Huet and Du Hamel are directly relevant to issues raised in the main Cartesian condemnation of Descartes in the University of Paris at this time, namely, the 1691 formulary. This is especially so with respect to the issue of the relation between faith and reason, which is central to Regis’s final work, L’Usage de la raison et de la foy. 56

Compare the similar view in Arnauld, cited in §1.4.4, at note 133, that the union consists simply in the mutual correspondence of human thoughts and brain traces.

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5.3 regis’s usage : faith and reason The main theme of Regis’s Usage is indicated by its subtitle: L’Accord de la foy et de la raison. More specifically, there is the claim in the “avertissement” to this text – which is anticipated in the earlier Syst`eme and R´eponse to Huet – that reason and faith “can have no opposition” since “their objects are so disproportionate that it is impossible to explicate one by the other” (Usage 14).57 The objects of reason are found only in “the order of nature,” while the objects of faith are restricted to “the order of grace.” Regis presented this position as a middle way between those who hold that “it is necessary to submit faith to reason, since reason is the sovereign human law” and those who claim that “it is necessary to submit reason to faith, since faith is more assured than reason” (14f). Regis thus set himself in opposition to the position, condemned in the 1691 formulary, that one must follow reason even when it appears incompatible with faith, while also rejecting the principle in Huet that reason must submit to faith. In the Usage, Regis claimed that his endorsement of this middle way allowed him to stand above the battles over the Christian mysteries between the scholastics and their modern critics. To defend this claim, he focused initially on the various explications of the Eucharist. He began by noting that even in the scholastic camp, there were disputes among Thomists and Scotists over the nature of transubstantiation.58 He also urged that the common scholastic position that parts of matter can be “composed of accidents or modes without substance” leaves us “without any means of distinguishing the true parts of the world from the false or apparent.” He concluded that such a position is in line with the claim in “some philosophers” that our perception of the world is grounded only “in the idea of intelligible extension that they suppose to be in God,” and thus that we cannot be certain “whether all that we see is not taking place in a dream, whether there are true humans, a true Religion, etc.,” all of which “seems to go too far” (Usage 636f ). This is, of course, a swipe at the idealism of Malebranche and his followers, which as we know is to be contrasted with a realism in Regis’s writings that is connected to his doctrine of the indefectibility of material substance. But Regis’s claim that the scholastics (and Malebranche) leave us in doubt as to whether there are true humans or a true religion also echoes the charge in Desgabets’s Consid´erations, mentioned in §1.3, that those who allow for quantity without substance bring into question “whether there are any men on earth, whether there is a true world, a true religion,” and thereby support a position “which far surpasses all the excess of the Pyrrhonians.” Little wonder, then, that the chapter following the one containing his remark concerning intelligible extension is the one that records Regis’s judgment 57 58

Compare R´ep. 241f, which cites the account of the relation between faith and reason in Syst`eme 3:519–22. Compare the discussion of these differences in §1.2.2.

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that Desgabets is “one of the greatest metaphysicians of our century” (639). The same section that contains this compliment, however, includes Regis’s conclusion that “there is nothing easier than to show the fault of this particular explication” of the Eucharist in Desgabets (Usage 645). In particular, Regis objected that the eucharistic bread cannot be changed into Christ’s body merely by means of its union with His soul, since this change requires in addition some sort of physical alteration. The claim here is that “the explication of the moderns is no more solid than that of the ancients,” and that both ancients and moderns “must take for a constant maxim that all the mysteries of the Christian religion are above reason, not only according to their substance, but also according to their manner of being” (650f). In this case, the maxim dictates that we can clearly know neither the precise nature of the body that is present after consecration under the eucharistic species nor the manner in which that body comes to be present there. At the University of Paris, it was a common strategy among Cartesian professors to sidestep objections concerning the Eucharist by restricting Descartes’s account of body to the natural sphere.59 Though this can have the appearance of being an ad hoc move, it is coupled in Regis with a general account of the relation between faith and reason. On this account, reason or intelligence is the source of our knowledge of necessary truths concerning immutable relations, while the senses or judgment is the source of our knowledge of contingent truths concerning mutable relations.60 In contrast, faith rests not on the perception of necessary or contingent truths but rather on a trust in the authority of those who bear witness to the truth (Usage, 121–25). In particular, the source of the acceptance of revealed truths, such as the Real Presence in the Eucharist, is the authority of the interpretation of Scripture offered by the Church (471–77). In the case of reason and judgment, evident ideas can be our only guide, while in the case of revealed truths, the authority of the Church is required since we can perceive such truths only obscurely. We have here a philosophical articulation of the Augustinian slogan that Arnauld offered against Desgabets, namely, that “what we know, we owe to reason; what we believe, to authority” (see §1.4.4). Indeed, Regis himself noted with approval that, in his battles with the Huguenot Claude over

59 60

For discussion of this view in the work of Pourchot, see Schmaltz in press. Regis sometimes spoke of raison as a discursive operation distinct from intelligence and sometimes spoke of both interchangeably as involving the perception of necessary truths. To add to the confusion, he also spoke of raison as the clear perception of any truth, whether necessary or contingent, thereby taking it to cover not only intelligence and raison in a more restricted sense but also jugements concerning contingent truths. For the distinction among intelligence, raison, and jugement, see Usage 89–93.

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the nature of the Eucharist, Arnauld had restricted himself to what the Church teaches about the sacrament (Usage 700f ).61 However, I argued earlier that even Arnauld was forced to appeal to philosophical principles in his discussions of the Real Presence. In the Censura, moreover, Huet criticized Descartes for claiming that reason “wounds the dignity of faith” on the grounds that “similitudes, comparisons and motiva credibilitatis” can serve to reinforce faith (Cpc 178f). No doubt he would have been sympathetic to the comment of his nineteenth-century translator that Regis’s attempt to distinguish reason and faith “by a sort of treaty of partition between the two” is problematic since the “apparent preciseness [of the partition] vanishes in practice.”62 The charge that Regis’s partition is somewhat artificial has a basis even in his own system. In the case of the Eucharist, for instance, Regis’s reason seems to dictate that the quantity present in the consecrated Host either does or does not inhere in Christ’s body. Given his further commitment to the Cartesian identification of body with extension, Regis appears to be forced either to distinguish the extension of Christ’s body from this quantity, as Arnauld did, or to identify them, as Desgabets insisted a Cartesian must do. I have already indicated the option that I think is preferable from a Cartesian perspective. The point here, however, is that Cartesian reason has something to say about this issue and, thus, is not completely silent on matters pertaining to faith. Regis followed Arnauld in favoring a “positive theology” that does not go beyond the Scriptures and tradition. Like Arnauld, moreover, he set himself against a “scholastic theology” that attempts to explicate the mysteries by means of principles drawn from the natural sciences (Usage 711–14). Regis attempted to illustrate the problems with such a theology by noting “useless” speculations concerning angelic thought (715–27). As I noted earlier, though, his acceptance of the view that angels have a succession of thoughts similar to our own, which he took to be sanctioned by Church tradition, conflicts with his own conclusion from reason that the succession in our thought is by its very nature tied to motion (see §4.5). Regis attempted to dodge this problem by appealing to the inconceivability of revealed truths (727). However, his own metaphysical principles show that it is not merely inconceivable that angelic thought has a succession similar to our own, but also impossible.63 61 62 63

For more on the exchange between Arnauld and Claude, see Snoeks 1951. From the editorial notes in Huet 1810, 2:308f. Regis’s claim that angels “have a duration and a succession that we cannot conceive” (une duration et une succession que nous n’y pouvons conceivoir) (Usage 727) may be seen to indicate that what is inconceivable is the succession itself and not merely how angels can possess successive thought. However, the central thesis in this chapter is that angelic thought has “a duration entirely similar to that of our thought” (une dur´ee toute pareille a` celle de nos pens´ees) (715).

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There is a further problem in Regis with the boundary between faith and reason that he himself did not address in the section of the Usage on the mysteries, but that is in some way more fundamental than the other difficulties I have mentioned. This problem is connected to Regis’s repeated claim that even though God always produces effects by secondary causes that act in accord with natural laws when He acts by His “ordinary power,” He can immediately produce miraculous exceptions to these laws by means of His “extraordinary power.”64 The relevant difficulty concerns not the admission of deviations from laws but rather the suggestion that God can act by Himself to introduce new effects in nature. Such a suggestion seems to run up against his own claim that God cannot immediately produce a certain shape since “this figure is changing, and all that God produces immediately is as immutable as He is” (Usage 267). Regis attempted to restrict this claim to the “order of nature,” asserting that in the order of grace God can produce modes immediately (274). However, the backing principle that what God produces immediately must be as immutable as He is does not seem to be restricted in this way. Indeed, this principle is central to the argument in Regis that God cannot annihilate the substances He creates even by His extraordinary power (see §2.6). Perhaps there is a way out of this problem that emphasizes the differences between God’s immediate creation of atemporal substances and His unassisted production of temporal modes.65 Given Huet’s charge in the Censura that Descartes appealed to the eternal truths doctrine in order to reconcile faith and reason, however, it is ironic that there is even a prima facie tension between Regis’s argument for the indefectibility of substances and his defense of what faith teaches about miracles. After all, this argument is an important step in his development of Descartes’s doctrine. Far from reconciling faith and reason, Regis’s version of this doctrine creates (perhaps not insuperable) difficulties concerning the relation between these two. In any event, it is clear that Regis did not understand this doctrine to be an ad hoc device that the philosopher uses to save the authority of reason. Quite the contrary; he claimed that the authority of reason provides the basis for the acceptance of this doctrine. In particular, Regis held that philosophical reflection on causal principles lead us to the conclusion that God differs in both essence and existence from His effects (see §2.7). This conclusion leads, in turn, to the rejection of the identification in Malebranche of God with a “universal Reason” that contains the atemporal essences of creatures (see §2.8). Such essences must instead be effects external to God that derive from His indifferent will. Whatever may be the case for Descartes, it is clear 64 65

See, for instance, Usage 192–94 and 567–71. This proposal is connected to Desgabets’s point, considered in §2.3, that the immutability of necessary truths follows principally not from the fact that God is outside of time but rather from the fact that what He produces has an indivisible existence.

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that for Regis, as well as for Desgabets, the doctrine of the creation of eternal truths is a fundamental feature of an account of reality that has its source in natural reason. Although his account of reason undermines Huet’s view of the Cartesian created thruths doctrine, Regis’s claims concerning faith are not far from Huet’s in certain respects. As we have seen, Huet insisted on the epistemic priority of faith. In the Usage, though, Regis also claimed that when faith is “considered in itself,” its certainty surpasses the certainty of reason since “the authority of God is more infallible than the evidence of reason” (Usage 504). To be sure, he went on to admit that faith is not more certain than reason when it is “considered in relation to us” given that Church tradition cannot provide a noncircular justification for the acceptance of that tradition as authoritative. Here reason is required in the form of an appeal to certain motifs de cr´edibilit´e that confirm the choice of that tradition as authoritative (e.g., the popularity of the tradition, the fidelity of those who accept its authority) (528). But as we have seen, Huet also emphasized in the Censura that reason supplies certain motiva credibilitatis that provide support for what faith teaches. In his response to this emphasis in the Censura, Regis claimed that although the motifs supplied by reason can show that the mysteries were revealed by God, they can do nothing to explicate these mysteries since truths of faith belong to a supernatural order that differs entirely from the natural order (R´ep. 221–23). We have drawn from Regis’s own system reasons to question the absolute distinction between these two orders. But just as Huet’s stress on the weakness of reason did not prevent him from appealing to reason in support of faith, so Regis’s insistence on the autonomy of faith did not prevent him from propping up faith by appealing to reason. By the same token, Regis was as concerned as Huet with distancing himself from the view, condemned in the 1691 formulary, that reason has absolute authority even in matters of faith.

5.4 regis--malebranche--lelevel: platonic themes In his introduction to the Usage, Regis drew on the commonplace that the authority of Plato was initially important to theological speculations concerning the mysteries, only to be replaced later by the authority of Aristotle. His point here – in line with a major theme in the work itself – was that both sorts of appeal are misguided since no philosophical system should be invoked in theological discussions of the mysteries. Even so, Regis showed a decided preference in the text of the Usage for the use of Aristotle in philosophical matters. Thus, he favored the claim in the “disciples of Aristotle” that natures or essences are present in the created world over the view of the Platonists that they are contained in ideas or exemplars in God. He explicitly connected this Aristotelian position to his own conclusion that eternal truths depend on the divine will (Usage 207–16). Moreover, I have noted

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his endorsement in the Usage of the principle in “the ancients” (read, the Aristotelians) that “there is nothing in the intellect that does not pass mediately or immediately through the senses.” Here the contrast is with the view of “the moderns” (read, the Cartesians) that our soul has a pure intellect that does not depend on the senses (see §4.3). Regis, therefore, understood his development of the doctrines of created truths and the union to yield a broadly Aristotelian alternative to the sort of Platonism found in the work of his fellow Cartesians. As we have seen (in §5.2.1), Huet charged Descartes with accepting an overly Platonic account of the mind. However, when Regis spoke of the Platonism of the Cartesians, he had in mind principally Malebranche and the malebranchistes. In what follows, I consider the manner in which the issue of Platonism plays into the debates involving Regis and Malebranche. That these two were the main defenders of Descartes during this period is indicated by a sketch of the history of philosophy that lists them as two of the three “most celebrated Cartesians.” I begin with a discussion of this sketch, which is related in interesting ways to the discussion of Cartesianism in Huet’sCensura. Then I turn to the battle between Regis and Malebranche. While the most prominent point between the two Cartesians concerns the nature of ideas, it turns out that the deepest differences between them derive from their different attitudes toward Descartes’s created truths doctrine. The connection of these differences to the issue of Platonism is most apparent in Regis’s subsequent exchanges with the malebranchiste Henri de Lelevel.

5.4.1 “The Most Celebrated Cartesians” In the same year in which the anti-Cartesian formulary was first offered in Paris, a third edition of Regis’s Syst`eme de philosophie appeared in Amsterdam with the new title, Cours entier de philosophie; ou, Syst`eme general selon les principes de M. Descartes.66 Whereas the text of this new edition is for the most part the same as that of the original 1690 edition, there is the addition to that earlier text of a “Discours sur la philosophie, ou` l’on voit en abr´eg´e de cette science.”67 The “Discours” provides an histoire abr´eg´ee that starts with the “superstitious theology” of the ancient Egyptians and then runs from the bewildering array of positions offered by the ancients, through various periods of scholastic philosophy dominated by a slavish devotion to the authority of Aristotle, to the advances in physics in the work of the moderns. 66

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Regis 1690 is the original Paris edition of the Syst`eme, and Regis 1691b is an edition of this text published in Lyon. The title page of the Cours notes that the work is based “sur l’imprim´e de Paris.” The “Discours” is somewhat oddly positioned after the “avertissement” for the first part of the Cours, on logic.

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This historical progress leads to Descartes, but it does not end with him, since his followers have extended his results and corrected his principles. This group of followers includes Rohault, Malebranche, and Regis, who are proclaimed to be “the most celebrated Cartesians” (“Disc.” [43]).68 It may seem odd that this list excludes Antoine Arnauld, who at the beginning of the 1690s was both celebrated and recognized as a Cartesian. However, the exclusion is understandable given the emphasis in the “Discours” on Cartesians who have contributed to Descartes’s physics. Thus, Rohault is cited as one who has “treated thoroughly several matters that Descartes has only touched on, adding several experiences that serve to confirm the hypotheses of this philosophy.” Likewise, what is singled out in Malebranche is the chapter of the Recherche where he criticized Descartes’s rules for the communication of motion. Finally, Regis is praised for providing a complete system “that neither Descartes nor any Cartesian has yet made,” one that places physics alongside logic, metaphysics, and morals (“Disc.” [43]). In all three cases, we have examples of followers of Descartes who, unlike Arnauld, are associated with recent advances in the sciences. The “Discours” emphasizes such advances in order to counter the view of those “admirers of antiquity” who claim that “antiquity holds and always will hold the highest point in nearly all of the sciences” (“Disc.” [1]). There is an allusion here to the “battle of the ancients and moderns” that had just recently erupted at a 1687 session of the Acad´emie fran¸caise.69 Indeed, this text appeals explicitly to a defense of the moderns in the work of the academician Fontenelle that stresses that the ancients were not immune to error and that there is nothing in the past that can match recent scientific achievements.70 In line with this defense, the conclusion in the “Discours” is that “the ancients have not been such good philosophers, that it does not suffice to understand their sentiments to know all of the secrets of nature, and that philosophy has been very much perfected in this century” (“Disc.” [2]). A Latin translation of this work was published in 1705 under Regis’s name.71 However, there are reasons internal to the text to doubt that he was its author. It is significant, for instance, that the historical sketch does not push an exclusively Cartesian line. While the Cours announces in its subtitle that it is constructed “selon les principes de M. Descartes,”72 the “Discours” praises Descartes’s opponent Gassendi as one who “enriches physics with an infinity of reasonings” and also concludes with a warning against being

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70 71 72

The page numbers are in brackets since the “Discours” itself is unpaginated. This battle was triggered by the reading by Charles Perrault of his poem, Le Si`ecle de Louis le Grand, which asserts the superiority of the age of the Sun King to the Augustan age. See Rigault 1965, chs. 12–13. In “Disc.” [2], Coste cited Fontenelle’s 1688 Digression sur les Anciens et les Modernes. Regis 1705. On this portion of the title, see note 41.

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“infatuated with Descartes or any other modern philosopher” (“Disc.” [37]). Moreover, the sketch does not promote the views of Regis in particular. As we have seen, it instead places him alongside Malebranche and Rohault as a celebrated Cartesian. The evidence indicates that the author of the “Discours” is Pierre Coste, the Amsterdam editor now known primarily for his French translation of Locke’s Essay.73 Coste belonged to a group of Huguenot authors in the United Provinces, such as Jean Le Clerc, Pierre Bayle, and Henri Basnage de Beauval, who had a strong interest in history.74 Such an interest can no doubt be explained by the fact that these thinkers were raised on the Calvinist principle that faith is edified by history (ex historia aedifiicanda fides).75 In the case of the “Discours,” what is offered is a history that is supposed to edify the science of philosophy. The emphasis in this history on the recent progress in philosophy reflects an optimism about the perfectibility of reason that anticipates later Enlightenment historiography. In the “Discours,” Huet clearly was one of the targets of the ridicule of those who claim that “all that we can do is to discover the sublime truths that are contained in the work of the ancients” (“Disc.” [1]). In his Censura, Huet charged that Descartes’s philosophy is not new but borrowed from the ancients. Thus, methodical doubt is borrowed from the ancient skeptics, the cogito from Augustine, and the ontological argument from Anselm, to name the most prominent examples (Cpc 201–10). In a way, Huet took this borrowing to be to Descartes’s credit. Whereas some of his followers really were ignorant of the past, Descartes himself merely feigned ignorance for rhetorical effect.76 Even so, Huet saw Descartes’s rhetoric as encouraging his followers “to declare war not only on belles-lettres, but also on abstruse scholarship, except for what seemed known to them, as if wishing to return us to that boorish wild barbarity so struggled against by the studious efforts of the centuries” (196).77 For Huet, then, Cartesianism marks a decline in the state of learning. Huet’s rather pessimistic historiography contrasts notably with the general line in the “Discours,” but the treatment of Cartesianism in the latter text is in one respect close to the one in the Censura. As we know, Huet’s text begins with the method of doubt and the cogito. Here Cartesian epistemology is most prominent. Likewise, Coste indicated in the “Discours”

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75 76 77

As indicated in Piaia 1979, 88f, 98f; compare Leduc-Fayette 1983. Thus Basnage de Beauval was the author of the Histoire des ouvrages des Savants, Bayle was the author of the Dictionnaire Historique et Critique, and Le Clerc was the editor of the Biblioth`eque universelle et historique. Coste also was the author of a Histoire de Louis de Bourbon. Leduc-Fayette 1983, 290f. In the Nouveaux M´emoires, Descartes is made to admit to this strategy; see Huet 1996, 10. As shown in Lennon forthcoming, Huet had in mind here the attack on historical scholarship in the work of Malebranche.

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that Descartes’s philosophy “intends that we begin by doubting all, until an entire evidence forces us, if it is necessary to say so, to give our consent to some truth.” Such doubt leads us to question “if there is any mind, any sky, any earth, and if we ourselves have a body”; nonetheless, it obliges us “to admit this principle, je doute, je pense, donc je suis” (“Disc.” [38f ]). Coste’s comments here serve to confirm the transition to an emphasis on Cartesian epistemology that is marked by the publication of Huet’s Censura. Huet argued that the method of doubt can yield nothing superior to what can be found in the work of past thinkers. In contrast, Coste concluded that this method is “better than all the philosophy of the ancients.” Yet just as Huet granted in the Censura that Descartes made some advances, particularly in mathematics (Cpc 185–87), so Coste allowed that one can find in ancient writings “something reasonable to serve to make new discoveries in knowledge of the truth.” Coste noted, for instance, that Socrates anticipated Descartes in demanding that one “receive as true only what one clearly conceives to be true” (“Disc.” [8]). However, he did not emphasize in the same way the ancient precursors of Descartes’s substance dualism. Indeed, he asserted that prior to Descartes, the distinction between mind and body was something that “no one had yet known well” (“Disc.” [39]). Thus, he did not follow Huet in holding that Descartes’s own identification of the self with a mind that is wholly distinct from body derives from Plato (cf. §5.2.1). Coste’s Plato focuses rather on the fact that our knowledge derives from “simple, eternal, and immutable ideas” that we grasp by means of reason (“Disc.” [11]). It will turn out, however, that both the dualistic Plato and the Plato of immutable ideas are relevant to the debate internal to the Cartesian camp involving Regis and Malebranche.

5.4.2 Malebranche and Regis on Ideas When the Syst`eme appeared in 1690, Malebranche wrote with respect to Regis’s views in this text that “his metaphysics, his morals and his logic are pitiful for a Cartesian, and in his physics where he has collected what others say, he often makes a very bad choice, in a word, this [book] is no great thing” (OCM 19:560f). Malebranche noted in an “avertissement” to his 1693 R´eponse a` Regis that he had initially thought that he would not need to reply to this text since he had heard that “a certain person” had defended him in writing by refuting Regis’s views “principally in metaphysics and in morals.” The reference here is to Henri de Lelevel, who was prompted by Regis’s exchanges with Huet and Du Hamel to defend a Malebranchean sort of Cartesianism very different from the one found in the Syst`eme. In 1693, however, Lelevel’s La vraye et la fausse m´etaphysique had not yet appeared, and Malebranche was no doubt getting worried that the objections in the Syst`eme to his own views would go unanswered. In any case,

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he decided to take matters into his own hands by publishing a reply to Regis (OCM 17-1:259f ).78 Malebranche’s R´eponse appeared in November 1693, and triggered the successor to the debate over Cartesianism initiated by Huet’s Censura. Regis rushed into print a series of Repliques to Malebranche and then provided extracts from these replies in February editions of the Journal des sc¸avans, the semiofficial journal of the Acad´emie des sciences. In March 1694, this journal published “attestations” by four members of the Acad´emie to the superiority of certain of Malebranche’s views to their counterparts in Regis. There was also a subsequent exchange there between Regis and one of these members over the impartiality of this judgment. The first volume of Lelevel’s commentary on the Huet–Regis–Du Hamel exchange then appeared in April 1694, followed by the publication in May of a second volume containing documents pertaining to the public dispute between Regis and Malebranche. There was a final exchange between Regis and Lelevel, again in the Journal des sc¸avans, with the last shot being fired in June 1694. Initially, the debate between Regis and Malebranche focused on three sections of the Syst`eme in which Regis addressed explicitly the views of “the author of the Recherche de la v´erit´e.” The first is a chapter devoted to a critique of Malebranche’s doctrine that “we see bodies in God” (Syst`eme 1:184–88), the second is a brief defense of the charge that Malebranche is committed to “manifest contradictions” in affirming that all pleasures are equally good (1:245f ), and the third is a chapter devoted to the refutation of the account in Malebranche of why the moon appears to be larger when it is on the horizon than when it is at the meridian (3:244–46). Malebranche’s R´eponse devotes a chapter to each of these sections, and Regis provided a separate Replique to each of these chapters. Only when Lelevel’s Vraye et fausse m´etaphysique appeared did broader differences between Regis and Malebranche begin to be addressed. Regis and Malebranche have the least to say about the point concerning pleasure, which concerns mainly the proper interpretation of certain passages from the Recherche.79 I have no more to say here about their rather restricted dispute concerning this point.80 However, I would like to pause 78 79

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Malebranche’s correspondence indicates that he composed the R´eponse during the summer of 1693; see OCM 19:607. Regis charged Malebranche with asserting in a particular passage in the Recherche the contradictory position that all pleasures are good since they render us happy, but that the pleasures of the senses are inferior to other pleasures (OCM 2:81). Malebranche protested that he claimed in that chapter only that all pleasures render us happy in some manner, and that such a claim is consistent with his conclusion that the senses render us happy in a defective way (OCM 17-1:311–20). It is worth noting, however, that the exchange between Regis and Malebranche on this issue is connected to some larger issues concerning the intentionality of pleasure sensations. In a 1694 letter, Arnauld used this exchange to return to an objection he had made in his 1685

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a bit over the technical point concerning the perception of the moon. The dispute over this point has some sociological significance since it prompted the public attestation by the four members of the Acad´emie des sciences in support of Malebranche’s optical account of size perception. At this time, the Acad´emie was becoming an intellectual center in France as well as the main outlet for Cartesianism outside of the universities. Thus, in contrast to Descartes, who had earlier attempted to curry the favor of the Paris Theology Faculty by dedicating his Meditations to it, Regis dedicated both his 1690 Syst`eme and his 1704 Usage to individuals associated with the Acad´emie.81 Yet Regis’s entanglements with the academicians on the issue of the perception of the moon seem to have diminished his reputation in the natural sciences.82 Even though he was admitted with Malebranche as an honorary member of the Acad´emie during its reorganization in 1699, Regis came nowhere close to having the sort of influence on this institution that Malebranche had.83 As important as the issue of size perception may be, what Regis and Malebranche treated in the most detail was the doctrine in the Recherche of the vision in God. In his Syst`eme, Regis devoted a chapter to an exploration of the question, “in what sense one can say that we see bodies in God” (Syst`eme, 1:184–88). He began there with a critique of the suggestion in Malebranche that we see bodies by means of a “union” with those features in God that serve to represent them.84 Regis objected that such a union cannot be conceived in terms of our experience of finite mental and bodily substances. God obviously is not related to the soul by contact, as different bodies are, and because He is not passive He cannot be related to it by a

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R´eflexions philosophiques et th´eologiques that Malebranche had conflated bodily and spiritual pleasures (OCM 9:1039–41). In his 1685 Nouvelles de la R´epublique des Lettres, Pierre Bayle responded to this earlier objection in Arnauld on Malebranche’s behalf by defending the view that spiritual and bodily pleasures differ only extrinsically. In a 1687 Dissertation sur le pr´etendu bonheur des plaisirs des sens, Arnauld insisted against Bayle that these pleasures differ intrinsically since they differ in representational content. For discussion of the issues raised here, see Nadler 1992a. The Syst`eme is dedicated to the abb´e de Louvois, the son of the French minister in charge of the Acad´emie, the marquis de Louvois, Michel Le Tellier, whom the letter of dedication praises as “the promoter of the Arts and Sciences.” The Usage is dedicated to the abb´e JeanPaul Bignon, who was at that time the president of the Acad´emie and who, as the letter of dedication indicates, had been the force behind the 1699 renovation of that institution. This is suggested by Fontenelle’s remarks in his official e´loge for Regis, which while trying to remain neutral on the issue, nonetheless emphasized the importance of the scientific authority of Regis’s critics (Fontenelle 1989–94, 6:147f ). This difference in level of influence was due in part to the fact that Regis’s illnesses left him unable to participate in the Acad´emie (as indicated in Fontenelle 1989–94, 6:150). In contrast, Malebranche was an active member of this institution (as documented in Robinet 1970, 7–14). Malebranche emphasized the union with God already in 1674, in the preface to the first edition Recherche ; see OCM 1:9.

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mutual dependence of states, as a human mind and its body or as different minds are related (1:184f). Regis did grant that God can be united to the soul as a totally independent cause is to its effect, as one who “has created it, has conserved it, and has produced in it all its ideas and all its sensations in virtue of being the first cause” (1:185). However, he emphasized that this understanding of the union with God is perfectly consistent with the claim that we see bodies “by means of ideas that are in us, and that depend on the bodies that they represent” (1:188).85 In his R´eponse, Malebranche insisted that there is a distinctive sort of union with God that derives from the fact that “an intelligible reality of the sovereign Reason. . . can act on minds and communicates to them some understanding of the Truth” (OCM 17-1:294). God’s idea of extension is thus united to us insofar as it “acts on” our mind by “affecting” it with our limited perceptions of the nature of extension. Here we have the introduction of Malebranche’s mature theory of “efficacious ideas” that is reflected in the comment, added to the 1712 edition of the Recherche, that an idea is “the immediate object of mind” in the sense that it “touches or modifies the mind with the perception that it has of an object” (OCM 1:414).86 Just as on Malebranche’s general occasionalist position, God alone can act on creatures, so on his theory of efficacious ideas, only features of the divine intellect can instruct the mind. Regis’s response to this line of argument emphasizes not his rejection of Malebranche’s occasionalism but rather his denial that ideas of bodies are distinct from our perceptions of the material world. As indicated in §3.3, his defense of this denial involves a return to a position that Arnauld had defended earlier in his polemical exchanges with Malebranche on the nature of ideas. In the 1680s, Arnauld appealed to Descartes in support of the position that an idea can be identified with the “objective reality” of a perceptual modification of our mind, that is to say, that modification considered as representing a particular object. Drawing on his remarks in the Recherche, Malebranche rejoined that the objective reality of our perceptions of the geometrical features of extension cannot exist in us since this reality is infinitely complex and general, whereas our modifications are only finite and particular (OCM 6:58–60).87 Later, Malebranche put into Regis’s mouth the objection that ideas pertaining to extension can be infinite and general in repraesentando without having these features in essendo. Though the chapter in his Syst`eme on the

85 86 87

Compare Regis 1694, 10, 21. For the groundbreaking discussion of Malebranche’s account of efficacious ideas, see Robinet 1965. Compare the consideration of this account in Schmaltz 2000a. See, for instance, the remark in the Recherche that we can know “abstract and general truths only through the presence of Him who can enlighten the mind in an infinity of different ways” (OCM 1:384).

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vision in God did not employ this particular distinction,88 Regis embraced it in his R´eplique to Malebranche.89 Arnauld weighed in on Regis’s side, noting to Malebranche that the in repraesentando/in essendo distinction is something “M. Regis correctly maintained to you” and concluding that “you are not happy with this distinction; too bad for you” (OA 40:88f ). With respect to the issue of the relation between ideas and perceptions, Regis’s contributions serve only as a footnote to the earlier dispute between Malebranche and Arnauld. Toward the end of his response to Regis, however, Malebranche drew attention to differences connected to a development of Descartes’s created truths doctrine in Regis that has no clear counterpart in Arnauld. In particular, he contrasted his own conclusion that these truths are “eternal, independent, preliminary to the free decrees of God” with the claim in Regis that “they consist in the substances that God has created, being that the soul considers these substances in a certain manner” (OCM 17-1:308f ). Such a claim is found not in the discussion in the Syst`eme of the vision of bodies in God but rather in an earlier chapter of this text on the nature of “the truths that one calls eternal.” In that chapter, Regis distinguished between the matter of the eternal truths and their form. He held that the matter “consists in substances and modes,” while the form consists “in the action by which the soul considers substance and modes in a certain manner.” For instance, extension and three angles provide the matter for eternal truths concerning triangles, while the action by which we consider the extension and angles provides their form (Syst`eme, 1:178). Regis concluded by drawing attention to the fact that this account of the eternal truths “is very different from that of certain philosophers who believe that we see these truths in God, because all souls conceive them in the same way” (1:180). Regis’s account of eternal truths indicates one way in which he can overcome the conflict, noted in §2.8, between his claim that the essence of matter “exists only in thought” and his identification of this essence with an indefectible substance. Insofar as this essence is identified with eternal truths concerning matter, it has a “form” that is supplied by our own mind. Yet the “matter” of the truths is still provided by an atemporal substance that is independent of our own mind. This last requirement precludes any conceptualist reduction of essences to our thoughts concerning them. Since he held that eternal truths are grounded in eternal and immutable ideas in God, Malebranche also must resist any such reduction. The difference from Regis that he himself emphasized turns not on the issue of conceptualism, but rather on the nature of the external element 88

89

Malebranche himself cited a later chapter in the Syst`eme, in which Regis distinguished between the finite “formal being” of our idea of God and the infinity that this idea has “according to the property that it has of representing its object” (Syst`eme 1:194f, cited in OCM 17-1:302). Regis 1694, 23f.

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that provides the matter of the eternal truths we consider. Here we are right back at the dispute between Malebranche and Regis over the created truths doctrine. The fact that it involves this doctrine serves to distinguish their dispute from Malebranche’s dispute with Arnauld, who consistently refrained from addressing directly Descartes’s views on the eternal truths.90 In contrast, the doctrine is central to the account of the eternal truths that Regis offered as an alternative to the account in Malebranche. For this reason alone, Malebranche’s exchange with Regis cannot in the end be considered as a mere footnote to his more famous debate with Arnauld. Regis later expressed his disagreements with Malebranche on created truths in terms of the old debate between the Platonists and the Aristotelians. A decade after publishing his response to Malebranche, he distinguished in the Usage between “the disciples of Plato” who hold that God knows creatures prior to creation by seeing them in His own essence and “the disciples of Aristotle” who claim that it is due to the will of God that creatures participate in the divine nature in a particular manner (Usage 207f ). Regis urged that the opinion of the Platonists is unacceptable since God’s perfection requires that He be the cause of both the essence and the existence of creatures. Prior to the divine act of producing their essence and existence, the creatures themselves “do not differ from nothing” (210). Regis also disputed the Aristotelian position, noting that since “the being of God and that of the creature have nothing in common,” not even God can make creatures participate in His nature by means of His will. Even so, he did see himself as being closer to the Aristotelians in holding that God knows creatures by knowing the essences He has created. Certainly, one could question the claim here that the Aristotelians anticipated the position that God’s knowledge of His creatures pertains primarily to His will.91 However, Regis offered a further distinction between Platonists and Aristotelians with respect to the issue of our knowledge of the material world. In this case, the Platonists hold that this knowledge derives from ideas distinct from such a world. Augustine put these ideas in God, and later thinkers (most notably, Malebranche) went so far as to say that God has an “intelligible extension” that does not differ from His essence (Usage 229f ). In contrast, the Aristotelians deny that our knowledge derives from an ideal world. Rather, they claim that “we see material things in themselves by means 90

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He refrained, for instance, in his exchanges with Malebranche and Leibniz, both of whom explicitly rejected Descartes’s views on this issue. Gouhier defends the thesis that Arnauld was concerned with upholding an “augustinized” form of Cartesianism “sans cr´eation des v´erit´es e´ ternelles” (Gouhier 1978, 156–64). However, we saw in §3.7 that Arnauld’s remarks to Leibniz suggest a kind of “actualism” that supports the claim of Desgabets’s creation doctrine that God’s power can include no “pure possibilities.” Particularly questionable is Regis’s claim that Thomas anticipated such a position; see Usage 208f. As indicated in §2.2.1, Thomas’s own view seems closer to the position in Malebranche that God has prevolitional knowledge of creatures through divine ideas.

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of idea that are modalities of the soul” (232). According to Regis’s version of this Aristotelian position, what we see in the case of eternal truths concerning extension is a created but atemporal and indefectible material substance. Regis, therefore, set himself in opposition not only to a conceptualism that reduces essences to features of our own mind, but also to a kind of Platonic idealism that takes the intelligible structure of reality to derive from eternal and immutable ideas distinct from the created world. All this is in addition to his opposition, which is even more evident in Desgabets, to a Cartesian “problematic idealism” that denies any essential connection of our experience to events in the material world (see §4.7). Along with Desgabets, Regis offered a broadly Aristotelian realism that places in a mindindependent material world both the motions that make our temporal experience possible and the essences that provide the content of our thoughts concerning that world. Regis’s Aristotelian account of our temporal experience is reflected in his endorsement in the Usage of the maxim from “the ancients, following Aristotle” that “all that is in the understanding has passed through the senses” (Usage 223). As indicated previously, he contrasted those who accept this maxim not with the Platonists, but rather with “the moderns,” that is to say, with the Cartesians. For Desgabets, it was Malebranche who was the most prominent Cartesian representative of the position that we have a pure intellect that operates apart from body (see §4.1). Perhaps because it was not raised in the chapter of the Syst`eme on the vision in God, the question of whether human thought can occur without body never found its way into the exchange between Regis and Malebranche. However, the issue was joined, along with the issue of Platonic idealism, in Regis’s exchange with Malebranche’s disciple, Lelevel.

5.4.3 The Lelevel–Regis Exchange In 1694, the former Oratorian and tutor to the duc de Saint-Simon, Henri de Lelevel, published a two-volume collection of various documents and the author’s own judgments concerning late seventeenth-century Cartesian controversies involving Regis and Malebranche. The first volume of this work, entitled La vraye et la fausse m´etaphysique, is a commentary on Regis’s disputes with Huet and Du Hamel as well as a defense of Malebranche against Regis’s objections. The defense is backed by the reproduction in the second volume of various responses to Regis on the part of Malebranche and the malebranchistes.92 92

Much of this material is reproduced in the section on the Malebranche–Regis exchange in the standard edition of Malebranche’s Œuvres ; see OCM 17-1:238–366. One work not reproduced there is a “Defense de la Recherche de la v´erit´e” (Vfm, 2:169–229), by ‘M. D. G.,’ probably a certain Oratorian named Guigne or Guignes.

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Lelevel addressed a number of issues regarding Regis’s views in “metaphysics and morals,” several of which I do not consider here.93 A good starting point for the issues I do consider, however, is the contrast in the preface to the first volume of Lelevel’s text between those who “want to overturn [the Cartesian philosophy] without having penetrated to its foundations and without being assured of its principles” and those who “ruin it or discredit it in seeking to establish it.” Lelevel castigated Regis, in particular, for defending Cartesianism so ineptly in his exchange with Huet that the latter would have won the day for the Peripatetics were it not for the intervention of Du Hamel, who made Regis look good by offering an outdated scholasticism full of useless distinctions. The only way out of the morass surrounding the Huet–Regis–Du Hamel exchange, according to Lelevel, is to return to a Cartesianism of the sort found in Malebranche. To illustrate the confusions deriving from this exchange, Lelevel considered Huet’s claim that the object of the thought, say, of the sun differs from the thought itself. Regis countered by identifying the object with the thought, while Du Hamel could offer only the obscure scholastic distinction between an idea’s esse in mente and its esse ad objectum. A more attractive alternative, according to Lelevel, is to grant Huet’s distinction but to hold that the object of the thought of the sun is not a further internal feature of our thought but rather an “intelligible object” that is distinct both from finite minds and from the material object it represents (Vfm 1:13–21). As Malebranche had earlier in his polemic with Arnauld, Lelevel attempted to argue that Descartes himself had allowed for the conclusion that the objective reality of an idea is something distinct from our thought.94 On this point, Regis and Arnauld surely had the upper hand. However, Lelevel was most concerned about countering the view in Regis that the idea of extension in us must have extension itself as its exemplary cause. He offered as an alternative to such a view the position in Plato that “the ideas that we have of corporeal beings are the exemplars of these beings” (Vfm 1:5). Lelevel endorsed in particular the version of this Platonic alternative in Malebranche, on which these ideas are eternal and immutable features of God’s intellect that serve as the archetypes for His creation of material objects. Even if there is no extension, our thoughts concerning bodies can be true by virtue of conforming to the archetypal ideas of these objects in God.95 93

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For instance, I do not consider Lelevel’s discussion toward the end of his text of Regis’s account in the Syst`eme of the will and freedom, of the moral law, and of political power and social organization. Compare Malebranche’s remarks at OCM 6:217 and the remarks in Vfm 1:34f. Lelevel noted that “I certainly recognize M. Descartes as a great philosopher, but if he had spoken the language of M. Regis, I would not have been his disciple” (1:35). Lelevel focused on the case of ideas of bodies here because he followed Malebranche in thinking that we do not have access to an idea of the soul. For a dicussion of this view in Malebranche, see Schmaltz 1996.

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Lelevel offered this position as an alternative not only to Regis’s identification of ideas with our own thoughts, but also to his view that possibilities depend entirely on God’s indifferent will. For Lelevel, such a view “reverses religion and the perfect sciences” (Vfm 1:42) and thereby serves to reinforce Huet’s objection that Descartes and his followers offer no reliable criterion of truth. Even worse, this view gives aid and comfort to the suggestion in Du Hamel that the mere fact that something is evident cannot show that it is true, since God could have used evidence as a rule for falsity. Lelevel did mention Regis’s attempt to respond to this skeptical line by appealing to the truth of ideas in us that we receive by means of the “natural light.” However, he urged that this response fails to address the central question of why we should trust these ideas. This question is especially pressing given the skeptical argument that a God who can do the impossible can also deceive us by making what is evident to be false (1:53). According to Lelevel, there can be no doubt that these ideas conform to objects given Malebranche’s view that they are the divine archetypes for the creation of those objects. Not even God can produce a world that does not conform to such ideas. One commentator has correctly noted that “the desire to avoid Cartesian voluntarism and to defeat skepticism in a way Descartes could not is one of the major motives for Malebranche’s whole theory of ideas.”96 Now we can see that one of Lelevel’s motivations for accepting such a theory is to avoid a voluntarism in Regis that he took to result in a skepticism of the sort found in Huet and Du Hamel. Lelevel recognized the argument in Regis that eternal truths must be immutable since they depend on substances that are outside of time and thus are incapable of change. However, he objected that this alternative to Malebranche’s form of Platonic idealism results in “a world as old as God Himself, as eternal as God,” and therefore “is wholly open to Spinozism” (Vfm 1:74). On this alternative, there is no way to “evade the excess of Spinoza, who feigns that the substance of the universe is not different from that of God” (1:87). The charge that Regis’s view leads to skepticism or Spinozism is anticipated to a considerable extent in Du Hamel (see §5.2.3), though, not surprisingly, this scholastic received no credit from Lelevel. As in the case of Du Hamel, Lelevel also objected to Regis’s claim that “the soul never thinks without a body.” What is new in Lelevel is the charge that such a claim supports Huet’s Epicurean objection to Descartes that thought cannot be conceived apart from body (Vfm 1:113f). Lelevel insisted that we can resist both Regis’s claim and Huet’s objection by appealing to the fact that God can make a soul out of a mind without uniting this mind to an organic body. For if God, without having created any body, acts in a mind as He acts on it when [the body] is present and according to bodily motions, this mind would no longer be simply a 96

Jolley 1990, 11.

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substance that thinks. This would be a substance that also has an infinity of sensations in relation to possible bodies, sensations as real as those we feel presently. (1:97)

Since God can produce the sensations that are usually conjoined with bodily motions even when such motions do not exist, it cannot be the case that such thoughts require the existence of the corresponding motions. There is one respect in which Lelevel’s position here goes beyond the sort of Platonism in Malebranche that Desgabets attacked in his Critique. Whereas Desgabets objected to the claim in Malebranche that we have a pure intellect that does not depend on body (see §4.1), Lelevel was offering the possibility that we have even sensory thoughts apart from body. However, this possibility is at least implicit in Malebranche’s denial that we can prove on the basis of our sensory experience that there is a material world.97 Moreover, Lelevel connected his views on sensation to the basic Platonic point against Regis that “it is a violent state for the soul to depend on the body” (Vfm 1:105f ). The contrast is even clearer in the case of Desgabets, who had urged in a 1674 letter to Malebranche that, in the case of our soul, “the state of separation from the body is violent for it” (OCM 18:85f ). We have in Lelevel, then, an opposition to the broadly Aristotelian view in Desgabets and Regis that human thought bears an essential relation to body. Lelevel indicated that this opposition is connected, in turn, to his support for Platonic idealism when he claimed that just as the soul that animates a body “does not have a necessary connection to the existence of this same body,” so the ideas we perceive “are the models and not the copies, . . . the models independent of all that is formed by them” (Vfm 116). Both positions lead to a problematic idealism that denies any essential dependence of our experience of a created material world on that world itself. Though he refrained from offering any official response to Lelevel, there is reason to think that Regis was the author of a “compte rendue” of the Vraye et fausse m´etaphysique that was published anonymously in the Journal des sc¸avans in May 1694.98 This summary answers the charge that Regis’s view on the eternal truths overthrows “the certainty of the sciences” by emphasizing that the cause of created truths is not only “free and independent” but also “immutable” in a way that preserves the certainty of the sciences (OCM 17-1:357). The charge that Regis has fallen prey “to the excesses of Spinoza” is then quickly dispatched with the ad hominem argument that it is Malebranche and Lelevel who “have truly fallen in these excesses” in holding “that we see bodies in God” (17-1:357f).99 97 98

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See §3.1 at note 13. The text is reproduced in OCM 17-1:356–62. Lelevel treated Regis as the author in his response in the Journal des sc¸avans ; see OCM 17-1:363–66. As in the case of Lelevel’s text, so this review addresses issues concerning morals and politics that are not considered here. Compare the rejoinder in Lelevel’s response to this review that Malebranche’s claim that the extension in God is purely ideal or intelligible allows him to distance his view from Spinoza’s

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The Lelevel review also revisits the charge that God can create a soul without uniting it to an organic body. The response here, predictably, is that the “succession of sensations suppose necessarily motions in the body to which the soul is united” since “it is only a succession of motions in this body that can produce that which one finds in the sensations of the soul” (OCM 17-1:358).100 In his own response to this review, Lelevel asked whether the essential connection between successive sensations and motion is “one of the necessary truths of M. Regis” (17-1:364). Here, of course, the irony is that the same person who has denied that God is constrained by the eternal truths also suggests that God cannot create a soul with successive thoughts that are independent of motion. Lelevel offered the diametrically opposed position that even though God cannot violate the eternal truths, He can “give to my soul, without the body, all the sensations that it presently has with the body” (17-1:364f). Certainly, Lelevel’s view that God cannot violate the eternal truths is consistent with his claim that He can produce sensations in the soul even in the case where there are no bodies. In particular, he could say that even though God has an eternal idea of the soul, that idea does not show that He cannot create sensations in a soul that is not related to a body. But likewise, Regis’s view that eternal truths derive from the divine will does not preclude his claim that even God cannot produce sensations in the soul in the absence of any bodily motion. He could say that even though God freely creates the nature of the human soul, that nature dictates that such a soul cannot have successive states apart from its relation to body. One source of the differences here between Lelevel and Regis is their different attitudes toward occasionalism. Lelevel attacked Regis’s claim that successive changes in us must be caused by secondary causes, since God’s immutable will cannot produce such changes directly. Here he defended the contrary view in Malebranche that the divine will is the only cause that can produce such changes. Whereas Regis concluded that God can produce sensory changes in us only by uniting our mind with the appropriate bodily cause, Lelevel claimed that God can produce such changes directly in a mind not united to a body, just as He so produces them in a mind united to a body (Vfm 1:121–29). On this issue, Regis provided a clearer alternative to Lelevel than did Desgabets. As indicated in §2.6, Desgabets defended an occasionalist account of the “force” behind bodily motion. However, he also insisted that motions are the true causes of our successive thoughts. Desgabets never

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in a manner Regis cannot (OCM 17-1:364). On Malebranche’s own response to Spinoza, see §§2.8 and 3.5. The review also adds that the thoughts of minds that are independent of motion are in contrast “fixed and immutable” (OCM 17-1:358). As indicated in §4.5, there are scholastic grounds for resisting this additional claim.

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did address the question of how his occasionalist denial that motions can cause other motions can be combined with his assertion that certain motions can cause human thoughts. In contrast, Regis claimed that secondary causality is involved in both body–body and mind–body relations. In the body–body case, the production of motion is grounded in a freely created “formal motion” (see §2.5), and in the mind–body case, God brings it about that the thoughts in a human soul and the motions in its body stand in a certain causal relation. It is true that Regis did not say very much about how precisely God institutes the causal relations in the latter case. In line with his account of the body–body case, however, he could have said that these relations are grounded in certain modal natures that God freely creates.101 In any case, it is clear that Regis was more consistent than Desgabets in his rejection of an occasionalism in Lelevel and Malebranche that relates creatures directly to God. He thereby offered a deeper argument against a Platonism in these thinkers that detaches our mind from the created material world. Even so, Desgabets did join with Regis in defending a broadly Aristotelian alternative to such a Platonism, on which our sensations and thoughts concerning extension both require an essential relation to a created material world. This Aristotelian Cartesianism is no doubt unfamiliar today, but as we will see presently, it was recognized as a major competitor by one later defender of a more Platonic form of Cartesianism.

5.5 platonism in genest’s ‘‘lettre a` regis’’ Upon its publication, Regis sent a copy of his Usage to abb´e Charles-Claude Genest, whom Bouillier places “among the better disciples of Descartes and Malebranche.”102 Genest was a member of the Acad´emie fran¸caise who produced in 1716 a summary of Descartes’s Principles composed entirely in verse. Although the composition is none too memorable, the text includes as an appendix a noteworthy letter to Regis in which Genest commented on the Usage. While this undated letter begins with an endorsement of Regis’s attempt to distinguish the sphere of faith and reason, it focuses on two “difficulties” in his text, the first of which concerns “the pure intellection that you do not admit in the soul united to body,” and the second of which concerns “the innate ideas that you recognize in the soul only due to its union with body” (“Lettre” 280f ). Genest’s conclusion is that the only way to avoid these difficulties is to endorse an account deriving from Socrates and Plato that emphasizes the “nobility of the soul” by affirming “ideas proper to the soul, unmixed with the body” (294). 101 102

Compare the comments toward the end of §5.2.3, as well as the discussion in §4.7 of Lennon’s interpretation of Regis. Bouillier 1868, 2:362.

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The second difficulty concerns the claim in Regis that certain ideas are innate to the soul. This claim was introduced in the Syst`eme, where Regis spoke of the “simple ideas” of the soul or mind and of body as n´ees avec l’ˆame. In the case of soul or mind, the idea is always present since all perception involves a consciousness (conscience) of the self that perceives.103 In the case of extension, the idea is always present “being that the soul is united to body, being that it is impossible that a mind is united to body without knowing the body” (Syst`eme 1:171). Descartes insisted that innate intellectual ideas are in the soul apart from its union with the body,104 but Regis linked the conclusion that the idea of extension is innate to the claim that the soul cannot be conceived apart from its union with the body. This connection carries through to the Usage, where Regis held that innate ideas are those “that result in the soul in virtue of its union with the body, that is to say, that are produced with the man and are inseparable from the man” (Usage 83). Genest insisted on a more traditional form of Cartesian innatism, according to which innate ideas are formed apart from the senses (“Lettre” 293). Just as Descartes had earlier connected this sort of innatism to the famous passage from Plato’s Meno in which Socrates led the slaveboy to recognition of truths implanted in his mind,105 so Genest cited the doctrine in Socrates that “we remember only what we know already” (294).106 Although neither Descartes nor Genest endorsed the full Platonic doctrine of recollection and the preexistence of the soul, both appealed to Platonism in support of the conclusion, as expressed by Genest, that we have “ideas proper to the soul, unmixed with the body” (294). The fact that Genest endorsed Cartesian innatism reveals the need to qualify Bouillier’s characterization of him as one of the better disciples of Malebranche.107 Malebranche had devoted a chapter of his Recherche to the refutation of the claim that “all ideas are innate or created with us” (OCM 1:429).108 His main argument is that the pure ideas we perceive have an infinite complexity and immutability that can pertain only to the 103 104

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This point is clearest in Syst`eme 1:68. See, for instance, Descartes’s claim in a 1641 letter to Hyperaspistes that the soul does not acquire innate ideas, and that “if it were released from the prison of the body, it would find [these ideas] within itself ” (AT 3:424). In a 1643 letter to his Dutch critic Voetius, at AT 8-2:166f. Compare Descartes’s conclusion, in the letter cited in note 105, that we discover truths implanted in our mind “by means of the power of our own native intelligence [ex proprii ingenii viribus], without any sensory experience” (AT 8-2:166). As noted in Rodis-Lewis 1963, 333, n. 6. Rodis-Lewis also mentions Genest’s endorsement of the Cartesian doctrine, which Malebranche opposed, that we have a clear knowledge of the nature of the soul. The particular argument here against such a claim is that it is implausible to think that the soul has an infinite store of ideas, and, even if the soul did have such a store, that it can know which idea to select at the appropriate time.

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divine mind. Even so, Genest’s description of innate ideas does employ a Malebranchean terminology that is present as well in Lelevel’s response to Regis. Just as Lelevel urged against Regis that eternal truths are grounded in “immutable ideas” (Vfm 1:42), so Genest insisted to Regis that innate ideas cannot be attributed to the union since they are “true, immutable, natural, eternal” (“Lettre” 291). What Genest did not consider was the question of how immutable and eternal ideas could be attributed to our minds. Thus, he did not address the point in Regis, which Lelevel treated explicitly, that the immutability of the eternal truths derives from the fact that created substances have an atemporal existence that is not subject to change. Of course, the realist view here that this immutability is grounded in extramental essences in the created world contrasts with Lelevel’s idealist view, which he borrowed from Malebranche, that it is grounded in uncreated divine ideas. Nonetheless, Regis and Lelevel both were committed to the rejection of the conceptualist suggestion in Genest that the immutability of eternal truths is grounded in features of our own mind. Genest was a traditional Cartesian not only in endorsing innatism, but also in concluding that “the soul can act without the body in purely intellectual functions, where the sensory organs have no use” (“Lettre” 296). As we saw in Chapter 4, Descartes and Malebranche alike insisted that we have a “pure intellect” that operates apart from the body. However, Genest followed Lelevel in going beyond such a claim by holding that the soul can have even its sensory states apart from the body. In particular, Genest insisted against Regis that it cannot be the case that the body is necessary for certain thoughts since “if the soul could not exercise this quality without the body, it is as if it did not have it” (296). Moreover, as in the case of Lelevel, this additional point is connected in Genest to an occasionalist account of sensation. Thus, Genest noted that the bodily senses are not the “efficient cause” of our perceptions, but only an “instrument” that “gives [the soul] the occasion to think of what it perceives” (285). There is a difference here from Lelevel in that Genest did not mention God’s role in producing the sensory states. However, I take the basic line of argument to be similar. The fact that the body is not an efficient cause of sensory perceptions reveals that it serves only as the occasion for these perceptions. Since the connection is merely occasional, however, it cannot be necessary. But if the connection is not necessary, then it should be possible for our soul to have sensations even apart from the body. The conclusion in Lelevel is that God can make a soul out of a mind even in the absence of body, whereas the conclusion in Genest is that “it is the soul alone” that has all of its faculties “independently of the body” (“Lettre” 284). It is not entirely clear that Descartes himself could have accepted this line of argument. Admittedly, he did claim at one point – in a manner more reminiscent of Genest than of Lelevel – that motions in the brain merely “give occasion to the mind” to form its own sensory perceptions

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(AT 8-2:359).109 Even so, Descartes also used straightforwardly causal language in talking about the relation between mind and body in sensory experience.110 More to the point, he suggested that our sensations bear an essential relation to bodily states. There is such a suggestion, for instance, in his claim in a 1649 letter to More that “the human mind separated from the body does not have sensation properly speaking” (AT 5:402). In general, we have seen an emphasis in his thought on the distinction between the intellectual states that the soul has by virtue of being a thinking thing and the sensory states that it has by virtue of being united to a body (see §4.2). It is this distinction that Regis was exploiting in arguing that the states of our soul necessarily suppose the body to which it is united. Even if he did not always recognize it, Regis’s full argument requires that there are no states that our soul has simply by virtue of being a thinking thing. Naturally, Descartes could not have accepted this premise. But the defense of this premise in Regis, and especially in Desgabets, relies on a point that neither Lelevel nor Genest – nor Malebranche, for that matter – ever directly addressed. This point, which emerges from our discussion in Chapter 4, is that all our thoughts have a continuous temporal duration that can be measured by motion. There is the question of how mental states that are totally disengaged from the body could possibly have this sort of duration. The denial of pure intellect follows in Desgabets and Regis both from the claim that such mental states could not have that duration and from the observation that all our own thoughts do, in fact, have it. Although Genest’s response does not directly address this aspect of Regis’s argument against pure intellect, it does draw attention to the two steps in Regis toward non-Platonic realism. The first step involves the invocation of created essences in an extra-mental material world, whereas the second step involves the positing of the bodily motions in that world required for our temporal experience. Genest was the last in a line of early modern critics who felt the need to respond to this form of Cartesianism. This line extends several decades back to Du Hamel and, several decades before the publication of his R´eflexions, to the Cardinal de Retz and Desgabets’s Cartesian respondents at Commercy. After Regis, however, no one took on the task of responding to Genest’s critique of the Usage, and, thus, there was no need to continue the discussion of the distinctive form of Cartesianism in Desgabets and Regis. One final event confirms that we are at an end. In 1720, just four years after the publication of Genest’s letter to Regis, the University of Paris instituted new statutes that incorporated Descartes’s writings into 109

110

Here Descartes responded to the rejection of “innate notions” in the work of his fallen disciple Regius by making the provocative point that even our sensory ideas are innate to mind. For discussion of this response and its context, see Schmaltz 1997. On this point, see Wilson 1991.

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the curriculum. The statutes were written by a university official, Edme Pourchot, who was one of the targets in the condemnation of Cartesianism in 1691.111 Less than thirty years after this condemnation, there was a total reversal in the attitudes toward Descartes within the university.112 What is most significant in light of the Aristotelian tenor of Regis’s remarks in the Usage, however, is that the 1720 statutes took Descartes’s writings to illustrate “the wondrous doctrine of Plato,” and so to serve as a counterweight to the metaphysical views of Aristotle.113 Whatever opportunity there was to take Cartesianism in an Aristotelian direction was gone by the time Descartes was officially accepted in France as an establishment figure. 111 112

113

See Schmaltz in press. No doubt this reversal in attitude was made possible in part by the death of Louis XIV in 1715, as well as by the subsequent policy of the regent, Philippe, duc d’Orl´eans, of letting the university conduct its own affairs. The fact that the regency began with a more relaxed attitude toward Jansenism may also be thought to have played a role in this reversal. However, Louis allowed the admission of Cartesians to his Acad´emie des sciences in 1699, at just the time he was beginning a campaign against Jansenism that culminated in his endorsement of the controversial anti-Jansenist bull, Unigenitus (1713). Morever, the university statutes were adopted when the regent was starting to return to Louis’s old policy of repressing dissent to Unigenitus. The full story of the reversal of Descartes’s fortunes and of the relation between Cartesianism and Jansenism in early modern France has yet to be written. Jourdain 1862–66, 2:173v. The 1720 Paris statutes recommend in particular the use of Arnauld and Nicole’s Art de penser in matters pertaining to logic and the use of Descartes’s Meditations in matters pertaining to metaphysics.

Conclusion “A Forgotten Branch of Cartesianism”

Tels sont les cart´esiens les plus remarquables de cette premi`ere p´eriode de l’histoire du cart´esianisme. En g´en´eral, ils se bornent a` reproduire exactement la doctrine de Descartes ou, s’ils la modifient, c’est dans un sens empirique plutˆot qu’id´ealiste. Si quelques-uns sont les contemporains de Malebranche, tous lui sont ant´erieurs par leur d´eveloppement philosophique et e´chappent a` son influence. Such are the most remarkable Cartesians of this first period of the history of Cartesianism. In general, they limit themselves to reproducing exactly the doctrine of Descartes or, if they modify it, it is in an empirical more than an idealistic direction. If some of them are contemporaries of Malebranche, all are prior to him in terms of their philosophical development and escape his influence. – Francisque Bouillier, Histoire de la philosophie cart´esienne 1

In these very brief concluding remarks, I will not attempt to summarize all the historical and conceptual points I have made concerning the Radical Cartesianism of Desgabets and Regis. Instead, I will draw on my discussion of these points to respond directly to the charge that there is no good reason to devote a book-length study to a school of thought that Charles de Kirwan dubbed – in a rarely cited article written nearly a century ago – “a forgotten branch of Cartesianism” (un rameau oubli´e du cart´esianisme).2 As we will discover, remarks in Bouillier and Kirwan indicate competing ways in which this objection could be developed. The upshot in Bouillier, malgr´e lui, is that Desgabets and Regis did not go far enough beyond Descartes to warrant extensive study. In contrast, Kirwan explicitly argues that these Cartesians went too far beyond Descartes insofar as they introduced idiosyncratic views that do not warrant our intellectual respect. 1 2

Bouillier 1868, 1:538. From the title of Kirwan 1903.

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Bouillier places Desgabets and Regis among “the most remarkable Cartesians in the first period of the history of Cartesianism,” thus intimating a favorable view of their contributions. What is damning, though, is his further comment that these Cartesians were concerned mainly with reproducing Descartes’s views, albeit with minor “empiricist” modifications. However remarkable they may be, in Bouillier’s view, it seems, a consideration of Desgabets and Regis can yield at best only footnotes to the study of Cartesianism. One natural conclusion here is that there is little point to expending considerable effort in exploring the merely derivative position of these Cartesians. Certainly, Desgabets and Regis reproduced significant portions of Descartes’s brand of physics. Indeed, Desgabets went so far as to defend Descartes’s speculations concerning the physics of the Eucharist. As indicated in Chapter 1, this defense placed him in the center of the controversy over Cartesianism that raged in France in the decades following the death of Descartes. Yet Desgabets’s eucharistic theology was grounded, as Descartes’s was not, in the philosophical thesis of the indefectibility of matter. Moreover, the argument in Chapter 2 is that Desgabets’s thesis is connected, in turn, to his quasi-Spinozistic position that matter, as a “substantial being,” is an atemporal essence of which particular bodies are temporal modal determinations. Regis ultimately rejected Desgabets’s views concerning the Eucharist (for the questionable reasons indicated in §5.3); nevertheless, he wholeheartedly embraced this radical position. Thus, Desgabets and Regis both transformed Descartes’s system by reconstructing its metaphysical foundations. With the revisionary metaphysics went a revisionary epistemology. Desgabets and Regis alike understood the general rule in Descartes that all clear and distinct ideas are true to establish the result that distinct ideas of external substances correspond to real extra-mental objects. For Desgabets and, to a lesser extent, Regis, such a result blocks the sort of hyperbolic doubt that provides the point of departure for Descartes’s Meditations. The realism that Desgabets and Regis defend may intially seem to be overly na¨ıve, but I argued in Chapter 3 that their principle that ideas correspond to their objects is best read as entailing the actual existence only of the substances we conceive. The existence of such substances is required here since they are identical to the essences that allow for the conception of both the substances and their modes. In the particular case of the material world, the existence of the substantial essence of extension is required for the mere conceivability of the particular material objects that provide the temporal determinations of this essence. These developments in Desgabets and Regis surely belie the implication in Bouillier that they were mere epigones who revised Cartesianism only in a slightly empiricist manner. For one thing, neither their quasi-Spinozistic

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metaphysic nor their realistic account of ideas are particularly empiricistic. For another, these features of their system most assuredly do not simply fall out of Descartes’s own work. Even so, such features bear a deep connection to Descartes by virtue of their relation to his doctrine of the creation of eternal truths. Desgabets and Regis both understood Descartes’s claim that God has freely created eternal and immutable truths to indicate that He has indifferently produced the atemporal substances that are identical to their immutable essences. For these later Cartesians, the fact that this production is completely indifferent reveals that not even God can conceive these substances prior to creating them. The point about atemporality supports the thesis of the indefectibility of matter insofar as it reveals that no substance is subject to temporal change (see §2.3), while the point about divine indifference reinforces the claim that we can have an idea of material substance only if such a substance actually exists (see §3.5). Thus, results in Desgabets and Regis that go beyond anything found in Descartes have a clear Cartesian basis. Although Kirwan grants that Desgabets did not merely reproduce Descartes, he also urges that Desgabets’s contributions did not mark an advance over Descartes’s own views. Indeed, his article on the forgotten branch of Cartesianism ends on the negative point that Desgabets’s system is, “on the whole, inferior to that of Descartes,” and thus that “happily the small school attached to [Desgabets’s] doctrine does not appear to have gone beyond his generation or in any case that which follows.”3 It may seem somewhat odd that Kirwan goes to the trouble of revealing for us a branch of Cartesianism that he takes history to have happily covered over. However, he indicates that one reason for his discussion is to warn against the dangers of following the line of argument in Desgabets. Kirwan emphasizes in particular that Desgabets’s views lead “logically to the pantheism of Spinoza,” a consequence that Desgabets himself, as a “pious Benedictine,” would have “rejected with horror if his mind had perceived [it].”4 An initial response here is that even if this counterfactual claim concerning Desgabets is correct, there does not seem to be any good reason to conclude that his views are unworthy of consideration. Yet Regis provided the material for an argument that the claim itself is unwarranted. As indicated in §2.7, he appealed to Descartes’s doctrine of created eternal truths in support of the conclusion that perfections can be predicated of God and creatures in only an “equivocal” manner. In his “R´efutation” of Spinoza, Regis further emphasized that such a conclusion suffices to overturn a Spinozistic monism. Therefore, he shows us that Desgabets had no need to fear that his views lead to the identification of God with the created world. 3 4

Ibid., 402. Ibid., 401f.

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Indeed, Regis’s work reveals that such an identification is incompatible with a doctrine of eternal truths in Descartes that is central to Desgabets.5 The use of this doctrine to establish such an incompatibility seems to me to constitute, in addition to his use of it to construct an antioccasionalist account of motion (see §2.6), Regis’s primary contribution to Radical Cartesianism. Beyond warning against the dangers of Spinozism, Kirwan urges that Desgabets would have abhorred the “empiricism and epicurean gassendism” that results from his claims concerning the human soul.6 However, we saw in Chapter 4 that Desgabets’s critique of Descartes’s psychology differs in several fundamental respects from the critique that Gassendi offered. Most notably, Desgabets adopted the claim in Descartes that humans are distinguished from the brutes by virtue of the fact that they possess sensory thoughts that require an immaterial mind. Furthermore, there is little reason to think that he would have shied away from the “empiricist” implications of his account of the human soul. Indeed, he openly defended, as Regis did later, the principle that everything in the intellect derives from the senses. In both of these thinkers, such a principle amounts ultimately to the claim that temporal human thoughts bear an essential connection to bodily motion. The pre-Kantian “refutation of idealism,” which Regis did not fully appreciate, seems to me to constitute one of the most remarkable results of the development of this claim in Desgabets (see §4.6). For Kirwan, however, Desgabets’s refutation has little value since it fails to address the plausible assumption in Descartes that “independently of all motion and thus of all extension, there is a succession in the operations of mind.”7 This objection is hardly novel; indeed, the Cardinal de Retz had offered it in the course of the conferences on Desgabets at Commercy (see §4.5). Nonetheless, one important point in Chapter 4 is that this line of response fails to take into account the fact that Descartes required the relatively strong claim that it is essential to created thought as such that it has a duration that matches the continuous duration of motion. In contrast, Desgabets’s refutation of idealism needs only the relatively weak claim that it is possible that created thought lack such a duration. On this crucial issue, there is no good reason to follow Kirwan in thinking that Desgabets’s additions are clearly inferior to Descartes’s own views. Beyond its philosophical significance, Desgabets’s distinctive account of the human soul played an important role in the history of French 5

6 7

This problem with Kirwan’s objection to Desgabets is broached by his comment that Desgabets’s views “fall into one of the errors of Jean Huss” (ibid., 397), presumably Huss’s thesis, condemned at the 1415 Council of Constance, that God must create just the souls He has and cannot annihilate them (see RD 3:63n). In his Trait´e de l’ind´efectibilit´e des cr´eatures, Desgabets explicitly distanced himself from this thesis by emphasizing against Huss the absolute indifference involved in God’s act of creation (RD 3:63f). Kirwan 1903, 401f. Ibid., 397.

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Cartesianism in the decades following his death. In particular, we have seen in Chapter 5 that Regis’s acceptance of this account serves to distinguish his broadly Aristotelian view from the Platonism found in the work of his main Cartesian critics, Malebranche and Lelevel. The exchange with Lelevel, in particular, makes clear Regis’s opposition to the strong position that none of our thoughts depend in any essential way on body. This opposition reinforces Regis’s rejection of a Platonism in Malebranche that takes our knowledge of the material world to depend on an uncreated ideal realm in God and not on real created objects in that world. The case of Regis thus provides considerable support for the thesis in the opening passage from Bouillier that the first Cartesians escaped the influence of idealistic developments in Malebranche. However, the fact that Regis depended for his response to Malebranche on the quasi-Spinozistic version of the creation doctrine that he inherited from Desgabets is in some tension with Bouillier’s suggestion that the resistance to idealism derives primarily from an inclination toward empiricism. This is why I emphasized the insistence in Desgabets and Regis on a realism that requires a basis in the created material world not only for possibilities pertaining to bodies (see §3.7) but also for the continuous temporality of our own thought (see §4.7). This sort of realism remains as neglected as when Kirwan wrote about Desgabets’s forgotten branch of Cartesianism. However, the views of Desgabets and Regis were not always neglected. Indeed, they played an important role in French debates concerning Cartesianism in the second half of the seventeenth century. Moreover, their views are not merely the half-baked speculations of disciples who had a poor understanding of the master. A central thesis in this work has been that they, in fact, offered a deep and systematic counter to Malebranche’s branch of Cartesianism that starts from Descartes’s own doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths. Although there has been significant interest recently in Arnauld’s response to Malebranche, the response in Desgabets and Regis is more profound insofar as it addresses fundamental issues connected to Descartes’s foundational doctrine. The Radical Cartesians also challenged, in a manner Arnauld and other Cartesians never did, the problematic idealism connected to Descartes’s discussion of the cogito. In neglecting the thought of Desgabets and Regis, then, we deprive ourselves of philosophical fruit that issues only from their branch of Cartesianism.

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Index

Acad´emie des sciences, 7n, 9, 246, 247, 260n Acad´emie fran¸caise, 220n, 243 Alexander VII, 44n Alqui´e, F., 77–8n ancients and moderns, 180, 238, 242, 243 angels, 11, 38, 52, 55, 73, 168, 173, 186–93, 195–6, 204–5, 207, 236, 239 see also intellect, pure; mind(s), indivisible thought in; soul vs. mind; time vs. aevum animals, relation to humans, 168, 171–2, 174–5, 264 Anselm, 244 Aquinas, T., 35, 40, 55, 66, 67n, 91, 96, 106n, 114–15, 118n, 137, 138n, 168, 173n, 180–1, 186–7, 189–90, 191, 192, 193, 204, 232, 250n see also Eucharist, Thomistic account of Aristotelianism, 9n, 11, 24, 29, 63, 65–7, 183–5, 226, 232, 241–2, 250–1, 256, 265 see also Aristotle; realism, Aristotelian; time, Aristotelian account of Aristotle, 30, 61, 64n, 65, 138, 180, 183–4, 217, 241, 242, 260 see also Aristotelianism Armogathe, J.-R., 2n, 46n, 47n

Arnauld, A., 4, 13–16, 19, 21, 28, 34n, 35, 37, 41–2, 45, 47–8, 51, 523, 53–67, 68n, 69, 78n, 80, 82, 100n, 119n, 126n, 131, 140–1, 143–4, 150, 163–4, 176, 187–8, 192, 195n, 200–1, 203, 236n, 238–9, 243, 246n, 247n, 248–50, 252, 260n, 265 actualism in, 163–4, 250n (see also Leibniz, G. W. von, possibilism in) “Examen d’un trait´e,” 54–62, 66–7 see also Eucharist, Arnauld on; idea(s), Malebranche vs. Arnauld on Arthur, R., 202n atomism, 10, 11, 97–8, 100, 192–3 Augustine, 43, 56, 63–4, 65, 78n, 80n, 89–90, 91–2, 94n, 141n, 216, 244, 250 Baillet, A., 40n, 227n Baius, M. de, 219–20 Balon, P., 40n Barth´elemy, A., 40n. Basnage de Beauval, H., 244 Bayle, P., 69, 244, 247n Beaude, J., 2n, 131n Belhomme, H., 39n Bellarmino, R., 48 Benedictines, 2, 4, 5–6, 41 Bennett, J., 81–2, 105–6 Berkeley, G., 193n

280

Index Bernier, F., 68–9 Bertet, J., 40n Beyssade, J.-M., 118n, 200 Bignon, J.-P., 247n Bitaud, J., 29n body “taken in general,” 99–102 two senses of, 36 see also extension; indefectibility of matter; matter; physics, Cartesian vs. Gassendist Boileau-Despr´eaux, N., 68n Bonaventure, 187, 188–9 Bossuet, J.-B., 38n, 53–4, 62, 119n, 223n, 224 Bouillier, F., 20, 45n, 216–17, 227, 256, 257, 261–3, 265 Bourdin, P., 221n, 224–5, 227, 229 Brockliss, L. W. B., 8n Broughton, J., 110n Brunti`ere, F., 220n Burman, F., 50n, 200–1, 231, 232n Callois, A., 58n Cally, P., 68, 69, 70, 71n, 78n, 89n Calmet, A., 4n Calvinism, 27, 36n, 41, 44–5, 54, 56, 66, 68, 70, 71 Carraud, V., 119n Cartesian circle, 156–7, 224–5 Cartesianism 1671 decree against, 4, 20, 27, 28, 29–34, 67, 215, 217, 218, 219 Radical, nature of, 17–19, 20–1, 24, 234 (see also creation doctrine, nature of; intentionality doctrine, nature of; union doctrine, nature of ) varieties of, 9–19 Catelinot, I., 4n, 7, 40n Caterus, J., 234n Caton, H., 15n cause(s) efficient, 112–13, 116–17, 144, 159, 230, 258 (see also dissimilarity principle) exemplary, 113–14, 143–4, 159, 161, 162, 230, 235

281

formal vs. eminent containment in, 113–14, 116–17, 143–4, 146–7, 158–9, 162, 230, 235 secondary, 109, 113, 240, 255–6 (see also God, as primary cause; occasionalism) Clarke, S., 13n Clauberg, J., 72, 200n Claude, J., 56, 238–9 Clave, E. de, 29n Clement IX, 45, 69 Clerselier, C. de, 3, 10, 33–4, 37–9, 40n, 87, 142, 221n cogito critique of: in Desgabets, 1, 6, 72–4, 156–7, 165–6, 167–8, 169, 194–5, 198–9, 203–6, 212, 264; in Gassendi, 167–8, 194–5, 264; in Huet, 212, 225–6, 227 in Descartes, 64–5, 71–2, 194, 198–201, 244–5, 265 Regis on, 157–9, 165–6, 207–8, 210, 212, 230–2 and time, 196–206, 225 (see also self, temporal) Commercy conferences, 5, 94–5, 101, 138, 141–2, 153–4, 185, 186, 187–8, 196, 198, 205–6, 254, 259, 264 see also Corbinelli, J. de; Paris meeting; Retz, Cardinal de Constance, Council of, 30n, 264n Cook, M., 92n, 131n Corbinelli, J. de, 6, 196n Cordemoy, G. de, 2n, 10–11, 72, 97 Coste, P., 244–5 Cousin, V., 5, 69n, 97, 216–17 creation doctrine, nature of in Descartes, 22, 80, 88, 127–8 in Desgabets, 22, 23, 73, 94–7, 119–21, 127–9, 153–5 in Regis, 22, 23, 74, 107–9, 113, 119–21, 127–9, 151–3, 235, 254–5 creation vs. conservation, 101, 107–8 see also, creation doctrine, nature of; God, power of; God as primary cause Della Rocca, M., 110–11 Demas, J. de, 41n

282

Index

Denis, J., 3–4 denomination(s), extrinsic vs. intrinsic, 208–12 Descartes, R. first fault of, 22, 132, 155–62 “objection of objections” in, 142–3 second fault of, 22–3, 174–8 see also cogito in Descartes; creation doctrine, nature of, in Descartes; eternal truths in Descartes; Eucharist, Descartes on; intentionality doctrine, nature of, in Descartes; time, nature of, in Descartes; union of soul with body, in Descartes; union doctrine, nature of, in Descartes Des Chene, D., 55n Desgabets, R. Consid´erations sur l’´etat pr´esent, 4, 28–9, 32–4, 42–7, 51–2, 61–2, 72–3, 237 Critique de la critique, 4, 13, 15n, 51, 71, 72, 88–91, 129, 132–7, 150–1, 154, 168, 169–74, 180 “Suppl´ement a` la philosophie de M. Descartes,” 4–5, 72–3, 93, 94, 130, 139–40, 147–8, 155–7, 162, 165, 167, 174, 179–80, 185–6, 208–9 “Trait´e de l’ind´efectibilit´e des cr´eatures,” 41, 91, 92, 94–5, 98, 101, 109, 155, 177, 182–3, 184n, 192 see also cogito, critique of, in Desgabets; Commercy conferences; creation doctrine, nature of, in Desgabets; doubt, Desgabets on; essence in Desgabets; eternal truths in Desgabets; Eucharist, Desgabets on; idea(s), Desgabets on; intentionality doctrine, nature of, in Desgabets; union of soul with body, in Desgabets; union doctrine, nature of, in Desgabets Dinet, J., 221n dissimilarity principle, 79, 113–21 doubt Desgabets on, 17, 22, 51–2, 129, 130–2, 136–7, 156–9, 162–3, 164–6, 169, 197–8, 206, 212, 262

Huet on, 215, 221–3, 224–5, 227, 234, 245 Regis on, 17, 22, 129, 131, 157–62, 165–6, 169, 207, 212, 229, 230, 262 see also evil genius; skepticism; truth rule Du Hamel, J., 9, 23, 204, 216, 217, 233–6, 245, 251–2, 253–4, 259 Du Hamel, J.-B., 233n Durand of Troarn, 41, 47–8, 70n duration, see God, existence tota simul of; self, temporal; soul, temporal thoughts in; substance(s), atemporal, vs.temporal modes; time Du Vaucel, L.-P., 58, 64, 66, 68 Elisabeth, Princess, 177 empiricism, 9n, 16, 149, 166, 181, 262, 263, 264, 265 essence being of, 102–4, 148–9 in Descartes, 72, 83–6 in Desgabets, 72, 96–7, 102–7, 128–9, 135–7, 145f, 148–9, 159, 164–5, 262, 263 indivisibility of, 102–7, 122–5, 240n (see also matter, indivisibility of ) modal vs. substantial, 103, 108–9, 147–50, 190, 208–9, 211–12, 236, 256 (see also substance(s), relation to modes) in Regis, 109, 128–9, 145f, 148–9, 151–2, 159, 211–12, 240–1, 249–50, 263 see also essence argument; eternal truths; extension, as essence of body; extension, intelligible, in Malebranche; God, essence of; matter, as essence; mind(s), as essence; substance(s), as essence; thought, as essence of mind essence argument, 132, 147–50, 159, 161–2, 163, 164–6 eternal truths conceptualist account of, 22, 81–2, 83–6, 93–4, 128–9, 150, 159, 249–50, 251, 258

Index in Descartes: ontological problem, 79, 83–6; scope problem, 79, 80–3, 127–8; similarity problem, 79, 86–8, 118–19 in Desgabets, 2, 8, 17–19, 22, 28–9, 71–4, 77, 79, 88–97, 102, 107–9, 127–9, 136–7, 153–5, 240–1, 262, 263 and Eucharist, 49–51, 72–3 of God vs. of creatures, 81–2, 85, 92, 95, 108–9, 149, 235n in Huet, 221–2, 225 and laws, 83, 93, 110–13 in Malebranche, 15, 78, 86, 88–90, 91–2, 93–4, 95, 120–1, 126–7, 128, 136–7, 151, 152, 249–51, 253, 255, 258 as metaphysical foundations for physics, 77–8, 79, 83, 97–102, 128, 163 in Regis, 8, 17–19, 22, 74, 77, 79, 107–9, 110–13, 116–18, 120–1, 126–9, 151–3, 154, 155, 229–30, 235, 240–1, 249–51, 253, 255, 262, 263 and skepticism, 126, 229, 235, 253 see also creation doctrine, nature of; essence Eucharist Arnauld on, 21, 28, 35, 41–3, 47–8, 52, 53–62, 64, 67 (see also Arnauld, A., “Examen d’un trait´e”) Descartes on, 3, 32, 34–8, 53–4, 61–2, 70, 215, 262 Desgabets on, 2, 3, 4, 20, 21, 27–9, 33–4, 37–52, 59–62, 67, 72, 99, 237–8, 239, 262 (see also Desgabets, R., Consid´erations sur l’´etat pr´esent) Regis on, 237–9 Scotistic account of, 40–1, 44–5, 47–8, 52, 72, 73, 99, 237 Thomistic account of, 28, 35, 40–1, 47, 55–6, 237 see also eternal truths, and Eucharist; species, eucharistic evil genius, 157, 161, 225 extension as essence of body, 42, 50, 56–9, 65, 97–8, 110–12, 121–4, 126, 219, 239

283 intelligible, in Malebranche, 121–3, 126–7, 140–1, 144, 147, 153, 237–8, 250, 252 (see also idealism, Platonic; Malebranche, doctrine of vision in God in) see also atomism; body; matter; physics, Cartesian vs. Gassendist; void

Fabri, H., 40n faith, relation to reason, 215, 220–3, 227, 228–9, 237–41 F´ed´e, R., 32, 65n F´en´elon, F. de, 119n Ferrier, F., 23, 33 fideism, 12, 222, 227 Fontenelle, B. de, 7n, 228n, 243 formulary (1691), 8, 23, 215–23, 236, 237, 241, 260 see also Cartesianism, 1671 decree against Foucher, S., 4, 79, 88–9, 93–4, 96, 128, 131, 132–7, 138n, 139n, 159n, 167, 168, 169–72, 180, 222n, 233 see also skepticism, Academic, in Foucher Frankfurt, H., 80–1, 82 Fromentier, 10 Garber, D., 83n Gassendi, P., 8, 10, 69, 71, 97–8, 142–3, 167–8, 171–2, 174–5, 194–5, 217n, 243–4, 264 see also cogito, critique of, in Gassendi; physics, Cartesian vs. Gassendist Genest, C.-C., 217, 256–9 God as deceiver, 156–7, 225 (see also Cartesian circle) essence of, 79, 82–3, 84–5, 92, 106–7, 117–18 existence tota simul of, 85, 187–8, 200–1 freedom of, 86–7, 92–3 immutability of, 85–6, 88–9, 240–1 incomprehensibility of, 77n

284

Index

God (cont.) power of, 16, 48–50, 57, 71–2, 92, 95, 117–18, 150–6, 163–4, 229–30, 240 as primary cause, 110, 113, 248 (see also cause(s), secondary; creation vs. conservation; occasionalism) relation to creatures, 86–8, 92–3, 113–21, 124–7, 153–4, 240–1, 250–1, 263 (see also eternal truths, of God vs. of creatures) supersubstantiality of, 120, 121, 125–7, 128, 155 unity of, 87–8, 91–2, 151, 152, 200 will of, 97–8, 91–5, 111, 118, 126, 151–4, 240–1 Gondi, Jean-Fran¸cois-Paul de, see Retz, Cardinal de Gouhier, H., 46n, 119n, 250n grace, order of, see nature, order of, vs. order of grace Grant, E., 9n Grignan, comtesse de, 6, 138n Gueroult, M., 201–2, 203 Harlay de Champvallon, F. de, 29, 33–4, 217–19, 228 Hennequin, A., 5, 107 Hennezon, H., 5–6 Hobbes, T., 8 Huet, P.-D., 8–10, 95n, 199n, 212, 215–7, 220–33, 234, 239, 240, 241, 242, 244–6, 251, 252, 253–4 see also cogito, critique of, in Huet; doubt, Huet on; eternal truths, in Huet; skepticism, Academic, in Huet Huss, J., 264n idealism, 9n, 17, 164–6, 169, 258 Platonic, 23–4, 216, 217, 245, 251, 252, 253, 254, 265 problematic, 23, 147, 166, 193–4, 197, 251, 254, 265 refutation of, 23, 166, 168–9, 193–4, 197–9, 205, 206, 207, 208, 212, 264 transcendental, 208 idea(s) Desgabets on, 15–16, 51, 130–47, 153–5, 156–8, 162–6, 262

innate, 84–5, 226, 257–9 Malebranche vs. Arnauld on, 15–16, 22, 57, 131, 140–1, 143–4, 146–7, 163, 248–9, 252 objective reality of, 15, 84, 131, 140–7, 154, 163, 164, 234–5, 248–9, 252 Regis on, 15–16, 131–2, 143–7, 159–62, 230, 235, 241–2, 248–9, 250–1, 252–3, 256–8, 262 simple/natural vs. complex/artificial, 159–62 indefectibility of matter, 3, 21, 28, 40–1, 72–3, 97–102, 128, 262, 263 meaning of term, 3, 94n of mind, 96, 189, 206, 236 of motion, 79, 109–13, 119–20, 128 of substance, 8, 47, 72, 73, 94–7, 128, 181, 189–90, 229, 235, 240 Innocent X, 44n Innocent XI, 70 intellect, pure, 11, 16, 65, 166, 169–74, 175–77, 179–80, 251, 254, 258, 259 intentionality doctrine, nature of in Descartes, 130, 146–7, 159, 162–3, 235 in Desgabets, 22, 23, 73–4, 129, 130, 132, 145f, 147–8, 159, 162–3 in Regis, 22, 23, 74, 129, 132, 143–4, 145f, 148–9, 159–62, 235 intentionality principle, 51, 73, 131, 137–40, 153, 154–5, 162–3 Israel, J., 18 Jansenism, 4, 8, 28, 43–5, 64n, 69–71, 219–20, 227, 260n see also Jansenius, C.; Port-Royal Jansenius, C., 43–5, 63–4, 71, 219–20 see also Jansenism Jesuits, 37n, 43–5, 48n, 219–20, 227 Jolley, N., 253 Jurieu, P., 58n, 68n Kant, I., 23, 166, 168–9, 193–4, 197–8, 204n, 206, 208 see also idealism, refutation of; idealism, transcendental Kirwan, C. de, 7n, 261, 263–4

Index Kremer, E., 57n Krop, H., 16 La Forge, L. de, 72 La Grange, J.-B. de, 68 Lallement, P., 31 Lamy, B., 30n Lamy, F., 116n, 126–7n Lateran Council, 191, 222 La Ville, L. de, 28–9, 68–74, 222 Le Bossu, R., 65–6 Le Clerc, J., 244 Leibniz, G. W. von, 100n, 107, 163–4, 250n possibilism in, 164 (see also Arnauld, A., actualism in) Lelevel, H. de, 9, 23, 217, 245, 251–6, 258, 259 Le Moine, A., 54–7, 66 Lennon, T., 2n, 17n, 142n, 181, 208–12, 244n, 256n Le Valois, L., see La Ville. Levine, J., 175n Locke, J., 160, 161n Longueville, duchesse de, 69–70 Louis XIV, 4, 5, 8, 18, 27, 29–32, 44, 45, 69–70, 71, 217–19, 260n Louvois, abb´e de, 247n Louvois, marquis de, 247n Maignan, E., 10 Maillot, N., 40n Mairan, J.-J. D. de, 121–3, 153–4 Malebranche, N., 2, 11, 13–17, 19, 21, 22, 24, 57, 66n, 73, 74, 78–9, 86, 88–90, 91, 92, 93–4, 96–7, 109, 119, 120, 121–3, 126–7, 128–9, 131–7, 138–9, 140–1, 143, 144–7, 150, 151–4, 158n, 159n, 163, 166, 167, 168, 169–74, 195, 212, 215, 216–17, 222n, 226, 237–8, 240, 241, 242, 243, 245–56, 257–8, 261, 265 doctrine of pure intellect in, 16, 73, 166, 167, 168, 169–74, 251, 254, 258 doctrine of vision in God in, 15–16, 78, 79, 126–7, 133, 135, 246, 247–51, 252–3, 257–8

285

see also eternal truths, in Malebranche; extension, intelligible, in Malebranche; idea(s), Malebranche vs. Arnauld on; occasionalism; size perception, Malebranche vs. Regis on Marion, J.-L., 88n, 114n, 118–19 matter annihilation of, 47–51, 95n, 98–9, 105–6 (see also indefectibility of matter) as essence, 96, 100–2, 105, 119 existence of, 22, 51–2, 73–4, 129, 130–1, 135–6, 143–4, 156–66, 169, 206, 212, 235, 262 impenetrability of, 55–9 indivisibility of, 102–7, 120, 122–5, 128 as quantit´e, 123–4, 209 simpliciter vs. secundum quid, 101–2, 164–5, 166, 206–12 see also body; extension, as essence of body Mazarin, J., 5, 18 memory, 169–71, 225–6 Mersenne, M., 35n, 50, 72, 77n, 80, 82, 84, 87, 88n, 91, 102, 146n, 151, 152, 225n Mesland, D., 3, 36–7, 39–40, 43, 46, 53, 61, 62, 70, 80, 81, 95n mind(s) as better known than body, 1, 7, 51–2, 73–4, 132, 155–6, 157–9, 165–6, 169–70, 230 distinct from body, 2, 167, 173, 175–6, 185, 195–6, 205, 226, 245, 257, 258 as essence, 165–6, 205–7, 211–12 and faculties, 138–9, 181–2, 258 Humean analysis of, 211 indivisible thought in, 186–8, 192, 203–4 (see also angels; time vs. aevum) plurality of, in Regis, 210–11 simpliciter vs. secundum quid, 165, 207–12 (see also self, temporal; soul vs. mind)

286

Index

mind(s) (cont.) see also indefectibility of mind; intellect, pure; Malebranche, doctrine of pure intellect in; nihil est in intellectu mode(s) and parts, 99–100, 122–3 and succession, 190–1, 207 see also place as mode of thought; species as modes; substance(s); time as mode of thought Molina, L. de, and Molinism, 43, 219 Montausier, duc de, 223–4 Montmor, H. de, 32 More, H., 49–50, 58–9, 88n, 110, 200, 259 motion force of, 109–12, 255–6 formal, 112, 119–20, 256 nature of, 102–3, 111–13, 183–6, 202–3 see also indefectibility of motion; time as essentially related to motion Nagel, T., 175n nature, order of, vs. order of grace, 229–30, 237, 240 Nelson, A., 164 Nicole, P., 4, 34n, 41–2, 45–6, 47, 48–50, 58n, 63, 192, 260n nihil est in intellectu, 65, 168, 178, 179–82, 217, 232, 251, 264 see also intellect, pure; Malebranche, doctrine of pure intellect in; senses, commerce with Noailles, L.-A. de, 220n Nolan, L., 84n, 85n object argument, 131–2, 140–7, 154–5 occasionalism, 109–10, 144, 248, 255–6, 258–9 Ockham, W., 67n, 137 Paquin, C., 40n Paris meeting, 6, 196–7 see also Commercy conferences Paris Parlement, 30, 39, 68

Pascal, B., 46–7, 48–9, 64 Pastel, 38–9, 67 Pastel, J. A., 53n Pelagianism, 44–5 Perrault, Ch., 243n Peterman, A., 221 Petit de Montempuis, G., 220, 222–3 Philippe II, 260n physics, Cartesian vs. Gassendist, 10, 97–9, 100, 105–6, 243–4 Pirot, E., 220, 222–3 place intrinsic vs. extrinsic, 55–6 as mode of thought, 58–9, 61–2 see also space, nature of Plato, 38, 216, 217, 241, 245, 250, 252, 256, 257, 260 see also Platonism Platonism, 23, 65, 66, 155n, 176–7, 178, 212, 216–17, 226, 232–3, 242, 245, 250, 254, 256, 257, 265 see also idealism, Platonic; Plato Poiret, P., 78n Poisson, N.-J., 2n, 20n, 39, 54n Pontchateau, S. J. de, 45–6, 49, 59 Port-Royal, 4, 28, 41–2, 44–6, 53, 54, 69–70 possibility, pure, 132, 147–50, 159, 164, 250n Pourchot, E., 220n, 238n, 260 qualities, sensory, 42, 138, 174–5 quantity, dimensive, 55–9, 61–2 Racine, J., 68n radical doctrines, see creation doctrine, nature of; intentionality doctrine, nature of; union doctrine, nature of rationalism, 9n, 16–17, 149 Real Presence, see Eucharist realism, 9n, 17–18, 24, 131, 169, 258, 265 Aristotelian, 24, 251, 259 Cartesian: first step toward, 162–6; second step toward, 206–12 direct, 137–8

Index Regis, P.-S. R´eponse au . . . Censura, 224n, 226n, 227–33, 237 R´eponse aux R´eflexions, 204, 216, 233–4, 235, 236 Syst`eme de philosophie, 7–8, 13, 15n, 20n, 108n, 111–12, 117n, 124n, 143–4, 155, 157–8, 159–61, 178n, 183n, 204, 209, 210, 211–12, 216, 228, 233, 235, 237, 242–6, 246, 247–8, 249. 251257 Usage de la raison, 107–27, 144, 148–9, 151–2, 154, 155, 158–9, 161, 165, 177–8, 180–2, 183–5, 186, 188–9, 191, 207–8, 209, 210, 216, 217, 236–41, 247, 256, 257 see also cogito, Regis on; creation doctrine, nature of, in Regis; doubt, Regis on; essence in Regis; eternal truths in Regis; Eucharist, Regis on; idea(s), Regis on; intentionality doctrine, nature of, in Regis; mind(s), plurality of, in Regis; size perception, Malebranche vs. Regis on; union of soul with body in Regis; union doctrine, nature of, in Regis Regius, H., 11–12, 66n, 172n, 259n Retz, Cardinal de, 5, 94–5, 141, 142n, 188, 197n, 205–6, 207, 259, 264 Rodis-Lewis, G., 2n, 16n, 20, 42n, 257n Rohan, duc de, 9 Rohault, J., 7, 12–13, 14f, 16–17, 32, 45, 54, 65–6, 68, 72, 228, 243, 244 Rorty, R., 130–1, 162n Rozemond, M., 177n Saint-Cyran, abb´e de, 44n Saint-Simon, duc de, 251 Schmitt, C., 11 Schotan, J., 221n Schweling, E., 221 Scotus, D., 40, 114n, 137–8 see also Eucharist, Scotist account of Scribano, E., 152n, 153n, 164n self, temporal, 165–6, 196–7, 203–6, 207–8, 210–12

287

Senocq, B., 40n senses, commerce with, 155–6, 167, 168, 179–80, 195–6, 233 S´evign´e, marquise de, 6, 138n Shoemaker, S., 178n size perception, Malebranche vs. Regis on, 246–7 skepticism Academic: in Foucher, 133, 136; in Huet, 222–3, 227 Pyrrhonian, 51, 133, 136, 162, 167, 237 see also Cartesian circle; doubt; eternal truths, and skepticism; evil genius; fideism; truth rule Socrates, 245, 256, 257 Sorbonne (Paris Faculty of Theology), 15n, 29–30, 32, 35, 176n, 218, 220, 247 soul vs. mind, 10–11, 73, 74, 175, 180–2, 193–4, 207–12, 232–3, 236 temporal thoughts in, 185, 186, 187–8, 190t, 193, 196–9, 201, 203–6, 207–8, 212, 259, 264, 265 (see also self, temporal; thought, succession in) see also mind(s); union; union doctrine, nature of space, nature of, 56, 100, 105–6, 124 see also place species eucharistic, 27, 28, 30–1, 32, 34–6, 42–3, 51–2, 53–4, 56, 59–62, 100 and impenetrability, 59–62 as modes, 35–6, 59–62 Spinoza, B., 18–19, 51, 79, 102–7, 108f, 115–7, 120–3, 124–6, 128, 129, 150, 151–3, 202–3, 204, 205, 210, 253, 254, 263 see also Spinozism, quasi Spinozism, quasi, 18, 22, 51, 79, 102, 107, 113, 116–17, 128, 132, 150, 154, 155, 164, 165, 262–3 see also Spinoza Su´arez, F., 35n, 38n, 55–8, 83n, 114–15, 118, 184n, 189, 190t, 191–3, 201, 204–5

288

Index

substance(s) atemporal, vs. temporal modes, 22, 51, 74, 94–5, 101, 103–5, 127, 135, 165, 177–8, 182–3, 189–90, 205–6, 211, 240, 262 (see also matter, simpliciter vs. secundum quid; mind(s), simpliciter vs. secundum quid ) as correlative of mode, 125–6 as essence, 22, 84, 96, 101–2, 122–3, 148–9, 206, 211, 249–50, 262, 263 (see also matter, as essence; mind(s), as essence) relation to modes, 22, 51–2, 60–62, 74, 100–1, 105, 107–8, 135, 147–9, 162, 189–91, 206–12 see also God, supersubstantiality of; indefectibility of substance; mind(s), plurality of, in Regis; mode(s) Sylla, E., 67n theologia Cartesiana, 63–7 theology, positive vs. speculative, 54, 63–4, 239 Thiel, U., 210n, 211n thought as essence of mind, 10–11, 167, 175, 195, 205, 226 succession in, 85, 181–2, 185–94, 196–7, 198–201, 202–6, 255 see also place as mode of thought; soul, temporal thoughts in; time as mode of thought; union of thoughts with motion time vs. aevum, 168, 182, 188–93 Aristotelian account of, 166, 168, 182–6, 251, 254 continuous nature of, 23, 166, 168, 183–4, 198–206, 209, 259 discrete, 190t, 191–2, 199–204 divisibility of, 103–5, 183, 192–3, 199–205 as essentially related to motion, 23, 103, 136, 182–6, 196–9, 209, 259 as mode of thought, 183–4, 209 nature of, in Descartes, 199–206 objective vs. subjective, 197–8

see also cogito and time; self, temporal; soul, temporal thoughts in Transubstantiation, see Eucharist Trent, Council of, 29–30, 40, 229 truth rule, 139–40, 156–9, 230, 262 Tschirnhaus, E. H. von, 116n union of soul with body: in Descartes, 66, 176–77, 195, 205, 259; in Desgabets, 8, 17, 22–3, 28, 52, 66–7, 74, 155–6, 166, 173–4, 176, 178, 185–6, 195–6, 205, 264–5; in Regis, 8, 17, 22–3, 74, 166, 177–8, 186, 207, 232–3, 236, 253–4, 265 of thoughts with motion, 11, 66, 74, 166, 181–2, 185–6, 196–7, 205–8, 233, 255, 259 (see also self, temporal) see also soul; union doctrine, nature of union doctrine, nature of in Descartes, 176–7, 195–6, 258–9 in Desgabets, 23, 52, 66, 74, 166, 182, 196–7, 206, 212 in Regis, 23–4, 74, 166, 177–8, 181–2, 207–8, 212, 232–3, 236, 255, 259 see also soul; union University of Paris, 4, 8, 29, 31–2, 69, 215, 217–19, 236, 238, 259–60 see also Sorbonne Vardes, F.-R. de, 7 Viaxnes, T. de, 40n Villecroze, C. de, 30n, 67 Villon, A., 29n Vinci, T., 146n, 147n Vinot, A., 40n Viogu´e, F., 38 Voetius, G., 12n, 257 void, 10, 47–51, 60–2, 97–8, 106 Volder, B. de, 221n Wahl, J., 199–200, 203 Watson, R., 2n, 37n Wilson, M. 151, 159n, 172, 175n Yolton, J., 138n Zeno, 202–3