Cartesianism

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CARTESIANISM

According to one panoramic view of modern philosophy, René Descartes is the father and Cartesianism an inherited characteristic or family trait. With no disparagement intended of this assessment of Descartes's influence, the term Cartesianism will be used here in a less contentious way to refer to the multifarious, more or less self-conscious efforts on the part of his contemporaries and immediate successors to supply what they found lacking in his ambitious attempt to reconstitute human knowledge. Three directions of their activities can be distinguished and, corresponding to them, three particular applications of the term Cartesianism.

(1) It was evident that Descartes's project of a universal and all-encompassing science of nature was not fully realized. His intended summa philosophiae, Principia Philosophiae (Principles of Philosophy, Amsterdam, 1644), lacked the proposed parts on plants and animals and man; and his posthumously published and widely read Traité de l'homme (Treatise on Man, Paris, 1664) ended abruptly. Moreover, in his Discours de la méthode (Discourse on Method, Leiden, 1637) and in the letter prefacing the French translation of the Principles (Paris, 1647), he asked for assistance in carrying out his program for the sciences, suggesting that cooperative endeavor in the acquisition of expériences would be necessary to decide among equally possible explanations of the more particular facets of nature. His early admirers, attracted as much—and often far more—by his physics than by his metaphysics, accepted the invitation, and, working within the framework of his methodological prescriptions and cosmologic theory, distinguished themselves not only from their scholastic opponents of the academic establishment but also from other non-Aristotelian scientists of the time whose work went against views they had inherited. In the seventeenth century, les cartésiens were predominantly Descartes's followers in physics; and the term Cartesianism has acquired some of its less favorable associations from its application to this maligned movement in the history of science.

(2) A second line of development can be traced from Descartes's novel use of the term idea in presenting what has sometimes been considered the characteristically Cartesian view that knowledge is attained by way of ideas. These "as it were images of things" (tanquam rerum imagines, veluti quasdam imagines ), as they were introduced in the Third Meditation, were variously described in his works, and a host of questions arose about their origin and nature. "Orthodox" Cartesians differed in their interpretations of Descartes's answers to these questions, while the more independently minded, accepting the thesis that knowledge is attained by way of ideas, produced deviant answers of great subtlety and originality. Since John Locke and his followers accepted Descartes's general thesis although they disagreed on the subject of innate ideas, Cartesianism, in a second application of the term, has been taken to cover a considerable domain, including family squabbles among rationalists and empiricists as well as more recent disputes, such as that about the genesis and status of sense data. (It should be noted that this use of "Cartesianism" to refer to the "way of ideas" differs from another use, in which "Cartesianism" and "rationalism" are roughly coextensive and connote a view or views about innate ideas or principles.)

(3) When Descartes was presented with objections to his metaphysics framed in terms of traditional categories and distinctions, a number of thorny problems became apparent; notably, concerning the substantiality and causal efficacy of his seemingly formless and inert corporeal things and concerning the union in man of a body and a soul, or mind, that is alleged to be really distinct from the body. In these sensitive areas, Descartes's teachings were interpreted and developed in various ways; and those who chose to follow the natural light rather than Descartes came to conclusions far removed from, and incompatible with, his. Yet, because of a common view concerning the distinction of mind and matter, Nicolas Malebranche and Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza, as well as some less celebrated metaphysicians, have been called Cartesians; and Cartesianism, in a third acceptation of the term, comprises various monist, pluralist, and occasionalist variations on a common metaphysical theme. Within the limits of this general survey of Descartes's influence, Cartesianism will be mapped in each of the three general areas to which the term has been applied.

Physics and Derivative Sciences

Like Descartes, the Cartesians attracted to his program for the sciences thought of themselves as possessing a powerful method for investigating nature; and, though they disagreed with him and among themselves on particular applications, they accepted a general theory in physics, salient features of which were the laws of motion in Part II of the Principles ; the theory of vortices in Part III; and the doctrine of subtle matter that underlies explanations of various phenomena, both celestial and terrestrial, in Parts III and IV of the Principles. Although Descartes's laws of motion became increasingly troublesome—Malebranche accepted them at first but was later forced to modify them beyond recognition—the cosmogonic picture of which they were part was altered but not effaced. It was an integral feature of the picture that Earth, like the other planets, was transported in a whirlpool that centered about the sun; and, while Descartes took pains in the Principles to distinguish his view from that of Nicolas Copernicus and to point out that, in his view and according to his definitions, Earth, though indeed a planet, was, strictly speaking, at rest, his followers were less concerned to establish a difference. They, too, rejected the possibility of unoccupied space or a vacuum, and claimed that apparently empty spaces—the heavens, the "pores" of bodies, and experimentally produced vacuums—were actually filled with subtle matter. Like Descartes, they made free use of the adaptable particles of subtle matter in their jigsaw-puzzle explanations of the workings of nature. There was some question as to what they conceived the vaunted "true" method to be, as evidenced by Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz' skeptical queries. Nonetheless, some general characteristics of their practice were apparent.

Following the rule of evidence in the Discourse, they understood Descartes's injunctions against preconception and precipitancy as condemnations of merely accepted opinion and of idle speculation; and contrary to a popular conception of their apriorism, they were keenly interested in the detailed observation of nature and in experiments, thinking of themselves as countering the bookish physics of the Scholastics and the wanton practices of alchemists, astrologers, and the like. Lenses, Torricellian tubes, and sundry apparatus were much in evidence; and, like Descartes, many of them took pleasure in anatomical and physiological investigations. To what use they put their observations and experiments is one thing; their cult of expériences, another—and an indisputable fact. The requirement of clear and distinct ideas was met in the doctrine that matter is extension and the corollary that change is local motion, or translatio. The methodological implications of these complex views were manifold. Negatively, they ruled out explanations involving qualitative entities or "real" qualities, such as light, heat, and weight, in physics, and substantial forms, such as vegetative and sensitive souls, in biology. Also banished were final causes, including natural place, gravitation, and attraction; faculties, virtues, and powers as causes of change; and sensible qualities supposed to inhere in bodies and to be mysteriously purveyed to us by intentional species. Distinctly conceived, bodies were geometrical solids occupying parts of space and were subject to alteration by the crowding, or impact and pressure, of their neighbors. A vacuum, or void, was thought impossible, as were, at least for the "orthodox" Cartesians, indivisible particles or atoms. Sharing corpuscular and mechanistic assumptions with other nonscholastic scientists, they showed the mark of the master in their geometrical notions of—or, as some would have it, their lack of concepts of—mass and force. Quantity of matter was volume; weight was a centripetal reaction in a vortex of bodies of a certain size. Force, as effort or action on the part of bodies, was as suspect as were the powers and virtues of the Scholastics. Distinctly conceived, it was derived from a principle of inertia, and the force of a body in motion was reckoned as the product of mass (volume) and velocity.

holland: regius and clauberg

During Des-cartes's long expatriation in Holland, he made a number of converts to his program for the sciences; and despite outbreaks of official opposition, Cartesianism made an impression on academic life that it did not make in France.

Regius

Of special note is Descartes's sometime friend and disciple Henry de Roy, or Regius (1598–1679), professor of medicine at the University of Utrecht, who typified Cartesian scientists in following the master more or less closely in physics and the derivative sciences while departing from his views in metaphysics. His Fundamenta Physices (Amsterdam, 1646), which appeared two years after the Principles, recapitulated the physics of Parts II, III, and IV, to which were added views from the earlier Meteors and Dioptric and also from unpublished work. Regius's physics, unlike Descartes's in the Principles, was not represented as derived from metaphysical principles. Moreover, in the concluding chapter on man, adverting to issues concerning the soul, he presented views to which Descartes could only take exception. In the preface to the French translation of the Principles (1647), Descartes disowned both the physics and the metaphysics of his disciple; and Regius in turn circulated a defense of his metaphysical theses, arguing for an empiricist view of the origin of ideas and against the necessity of a real distinction of mind and body. Descartes's reply to Regius, his Notae in Programma (1648), contained the prototype of later defenses of innate ideas against empiricist incursions. Innate ideas, he maintained, need not be actually present in the mind. Moreover, certain ideas—for example, of God—differ in kind from "adventitious" ideas; and even the latter do not, strictly speaking, come to us from the senses, that is, the sense organs.

Clauberg

From Holland, Cartesianism was taken to Germany by Johannes Clauberg, who attempted to explain and defend both Descartes's physics and his metaphysics. Working out apparent implications of the metaphysics in De Cognitione Dei et Nostri … (Duisberg, 1656), he too came to hold a deviant view of the relation of mind and body (though not Regius's), a view linking him with the occasionalists. Clauberg also faced the problem of the relation of traditional logic and Cartesian methodology, and his work in logic anticipated the more famous Logique, ou L'art de penser (Port-Royal Logic, 1662) of Antoine Arnauld and Pierre Nicole, which was the chief contribution of the Cartesians (Leibniz, of course, excluded) to logic.

france: rohault and rÉgis

In France, Cartesianism, though it was not received in the universities and was, in effect, interdicted in 1671, flourished in extra-academic circles. Dissemination of Descartes's unpublished works and letters was in the hands of his devoted admirer Claude Clerselier (1614–1684), while leadership of his scientific enterprise devolved upon Jacques Rohault.

Rohault

The most gifted of the Cartesian scientists, Rohault devised ingenious experiments for his popular weekly meetings and presented the results of his work in his influential Traité de physique (Paris, 1671; translated by John Clarke as System of Natural Philosophy, London, 1723). Like Regius, he was inclined to separate Descartes's physics from his metaphysics; and, in line with this, he developed Descartes's notion of hypothesis or supposition, eliminating, however, any qualification to the effect that hypotheses were to be accepted for lack of something better.

Régis

Pierre-Sylvain Régis succeeded Rohault as leader of the Cartesian school. In his Système de philosophie … (Paris, 1690), a comprehensive work containing sections on logic, metaphysics, and moral philosophy as well as his extensive physics, he assimilated work that had been done since Descartes's death. The apogee of the Cartesian movement in physics has been set at about the time of Régis's Système and of Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle's imaginative exploration of the vortices in his Entretiens sur la pluralité des mondes (Paris, 1686).

critical reception

While receiving acclamation, the Cartesians were simultaneously threatened—and eventually discredited—by discoveries, such as that of the finite velocity of light, that contravened crucial parts of their system and by the objections and strictures of Leibniz and of Isaac Newton and his followers. These adverse judgments have been generally accepted. It is commonplace (and true) that Newton showed beyond the shadow of a doubt the incompatibility of the theory of vortices and Johannes Kepler's laws, while Leibniz neatly proved the inconsistency of Descartes's laws of motion with Galileo Galilei's. Citing Leibniz' derogatory characterization of the Cartesians, the not unsympathetic historian Charles Adam has reiterated comments on the paucity of equations in their work and on the uncontrolled play of their imagination in assigning jobs to the ubiquitous particles of subtle matter. His verdict was that Descartes's physics threatened to become as harmful to the progress of science as Aristotle's had been.

Yet, more recently, some less disparaging comments have been made. The picture is considerably brightened when Malebranche and especially Christiaan Huygens (1629–1695) are, by virtue of obvious influences, included among the Cartesians (as in Paul Mouy's [1934] account.) It has also been suggested that the attempted geometrization of physics was premature rather than perverse (Mouy; Max Jammer, Concepts of Force, Cambridge, U.K., 1957) and that the unstable and indeterminate particles of the Cartesians, not the billiard-ball atoms of the opposition, were in line with things to come (Geneviève [Rodis-] Lewis, L'individualité selon Descartes, Paris, 1950). Nonetheless, Descartes's followers in physics and the derivative sciences, Malebranche and Huygens aside, have not, on the whole, enhanced his reputation.

Theory of Knowledge

Proposing, in the Third Meditation, the term idea for those of his thoughts that are the "as it were images of things," Descartes proceeded to classify ideas according to their apparent origin—as innate or adventitious or made by him. He introduced distinctions bearing on their nature—between formal and material truth or falsity, and between objective and formal reality. Discussions generated by these passages concerned both Descartes's intent and the tenability of the views attributed to him. Four main problems can be distinguished, two relating to the tentative classification of ideas according to origin and two having to do with the distinctions bearing on their nature.

innate ideas

The contratraditional notion of innate ideas—that is, of ideas not derived in some way from the senses but instead having their source in the mind itself—presented an obvious difficulty; namely, how could such an idea, taken to be the form of a thought, exist or preexist in a person's mind if he did not in fact have the thought or indeed never had it? It seemed that Descartes's metaphor of a treasure house in which these ideas were stored needed to be cashed—a process that he attempted and that was carried out in various ways, in the face of some formidable difficulties, by supporters of his doctrine of innate ideas.

adventitious ideas

It was evident that ideas provisionally classified as adventitious—for instance, of a sound, the sun, or a fire—could not, strictly speaking, come to us from external objects; for, in Descartes's view, there was nothing in the objects or in the sense organs exactly like these ideas, or at least like many of them. Although these ideas could, in some sense, be said to be caused by external objects, they could not, strictly speaking, originate there; and some other cause or source more in keeping with their nature seemed to be necessary. Descartes suggested that the mind had the faculty or power of forming these ideas on the occasion of motions in the brain and that ideas seeming to come to us from without were in fact innate. Both suggestions were explored by his successors.

materially false ideas

Noting that falsity (formal falsity) was to be found in judgments and not in ideas, Descartes added that nonetheless certain ideas—for instance, the idea of cold—might be materially false; that is, if cold were a privation, then the idea of cold, representing a privation or what is not a thing, as if it were a thing would be materially false. The implications to be drawn from this remark were that, in his view, ideas of sensible qualities—of heat as well as cold, of sounds, colors, and the like—were materially false; and questions arose as to whether the notion of a materially false idea (literally, an idea misrepresenting what is not a thing) made sense, and whether sensations of heat, cold, and the like were, in a strict sense of the term, ideas. Two models seemed to be at work in Descartes's account of sense perception, and a problem bequeathed to his followers was that of specifying the latent distinction between the nonrepresentational and the representational elements—sensations and ideas properly so called—that were supposed to be ingredients of sense experience.

ideas of extended things

There was also a problem concerning ideas of extended things derived from the dual reality—objective and formal—accorded them. As representations, it seemed that they must have something in common with, or be in some respect like, the extended things they represented. Nevertheless, it was taken to follow from their formal reality as modes of thought that they were totally unlike extended things. A dilemma presented itself: Either ideas of extended things were totally unlike extended things, in which case they could not represent them; or, if they were in some respect like extended things, then they could not be accommodated in the mind.

malebranche

Malebranche, among others, addressed himself to these problems; and, in his elaborate discussions of the nature and origin of ideas and in the numerous polemics to which they gave rise, various answers were surveyed and the major lines of development of Descartes's theory of knowledge were represented. Regarding the problem of materially false ideas and the difficulty concerning ideas of extended things, Malebranche, in the numerous editions of De la Recherche de la vérité (first published 1674–1675) and in the Éclaircissements added to them, drew a sharp distinction between the perception of heat, color, and the like and the perception of objects as extended. The former consisted in sensations or feelings (sentiments ), nonrepresentational modifications of the mind conceived on the analogy of feelings of pain, and did not, in his precise use of the term, involve ideas (idées ). The latter required ideas, which were distinguished from the mind's awareness of them and were not, in his view, modifications of the soul. Approaching the problem of the location or status of these ideas, Malebranche investigated a number of possibilities suggested by Descartes's tripartite classification (adventitious, made by the mind, and innate). Finding difficulties in the suggested sources, he concluded that ideas of extended things were neither adventitious nor made by the mind nor innate. The arguments against these possibilities served as indirect evidence for his own thesis: that these ideas were (as in a medieval use of the term) archetypes of created things in the Divine Understanding and that the human mind, intimately united with God, perceived created, extended things by way of ideas in him. Because, in this theory, ideas of extended things were not modifications of the human mind, the problem of their existence in an unextended mind did not arise, though, as became evident in the ensuing controversies, there was a related problem about the possibility of their existence in God.

foucher

Two of the polemics were especially revealing. In his Critique de la recherche de la vérité … (Paris, 1675) and subsequent writings, Simon Foucher, though he misunderstood parts of Malebranche's tortuous theory, raised problems worthy of serious consideration. First, he urged that, if ideas of extended things had to have something in common with what they represented, they could not be, as he at first wrongly interpreted Malebranche, modifications of the mind or—as Malebranche in fact believed—inhabitants of the divine understanding. Second, granted that ideas of extended things were not modifications of the human mind but were divinely situated, could they be immediately perceived? The basis of the question was that, if immediate perception were tied to Descartes's views about indubitability and the cogito, then we could not be immediately aware of anything outside or apart from the mind. Third, he also questioned the distinction (to use Locke's terms) of primary and secondary qualities along lines that were continued by Pierre Bayle and George Berkeley, noting what, in Malebranche's distinction of sensation and idea, seemed to require explanation: that, when we perceive an object, we are aware of one uniform appearance of something having both shape and color. Unfortunately, Malebranche was inclined to dismiss Foucher's criticisms on the ground of misinterpretation, but Dom Robert Desgabets (d. 1678), in his Critique de la Critique de la recherche de la vérité … (Paris, 1675), attempted to defend Cartesian views (though not Malebranche's peculiar versions of them) against this attack.

arnauld

The most interesting controversy was with Arnauld, who, in Des Vrayes et des Fausses Idées (Cologne, 1683), attacked Malebranche's view of ideas as entities distinct from the mind's perception of them by tracing the source of this view to a misconceived analogy with ocular vision and a confusion of presence in the mind with local presence. For Arnauld, as for Descartes, ideas were modes of thought; and, as Descartes was content to explain the objective presence of objects in the mind as the way they were wont to be there, so Arnauld took it to be the nature of thought or mind, requiring no explanation of the kind Malebranche proffered, to represent objects—near or at a distance, present or absent, real or imaginary. Though Malebranche was not moved by this attempt to impugn his theory as the answer to a pseudo problem, in the course of the controversy he was forced to articulate his view that we perceive extended things in God, not by way of individual archetypes but by way of infinite, intelligible extension, which is the common archetype of all extended things, actual or possible.

locke and leibniz

A significant event in the annals of the Cartesian theory of knowledge was the publication of Locke's An Essay concerning Human Understanding (London, 1690). Locke's attack on innate ideas and principles and Leibniz' defense in his Nouveaux essais sur l'entendement (published posthumously, Amsterdam and Leipzig, 1765) are a long story, that cannot be told here. Suffice it to say that, in this division of Cartesianism into empiricism and rationalism, Leibniz used arguments like Descartes's in the Notae in Programma and, on this question, represented the orthodox Cartesian point of view.

Metaphysics

The occasionalist, monist, and pluralist developments included in the third application of the term Cartesianism were foreshadowed in Descartes's views about corporeal substance.

occasionalism

In the Principles (II, 36), maintaining that God was the primary and universal cause of motion, Descartes explained that, when God created matter or extension, he created it with motion and rest; and Descartes implied that, but for God's imparting motion to matter, it would have been motionless and undifferentiated, and that motion and rest, and the resulting differentiation of matter, did not follow necessarily from its nature or essence. He further explained that, in conserving matter from moment to moment, God preserved the same quantity of motion that He originally introduced; and it seemed to follow that God's continuing to impart motion to matter was a necessary condition of the continued existence of motion and that bodies of themselves did not have the power of remaining in motion or of producing motion in other bodies. The conclusion toward which Descartes was drawn was that, although motion (translatio ) was a characteristic or mode of bodies, the moving force of bodies was not in bodies themselves but in God. He did not, however, draw this conclusion. In a letter to Henry More, he noted that he was reluctant to discuss the question of the moving force (vis movens ) of bodies in his published works, for fear that his view might be confused with that of God as anima mundi ; and the view that he apparently wished to maintain was that, though the moving force of bodies was from God and in a sense was in God, it was also a characteristic or mode of bodies.

The occasionalists, taking the views that matter was inert and that the motion ascribed to bodies was simply change of position, did not hesitate before the conclusion that the force required to move bodies was not in bodies themselves but in the primary and universal Cause of motion, God. According to their conclusion, when a billiard ball that was in motion came in contact with a second ball that was at rest, there was no power or force in the first ball capable of moving the second, and the movement of the second ball required the action of God, who, on the occasion of impact, moved the second ball in accordance with rules that he had established for the motion of bodies. By virtue of the uniformity of God's action, the first ball could be called the cause—the particular or occasional cause—of the second ball's moving; but, without God's action, it was inefficacious, and the primary and universal cause of motion, that is, God, was the effectual cause of the second ball's moving. The occasionalists took it to be true a fortiori that bodies of themselves lacked the power of producing, as in sense perception, changes in the mind; and they offered a number of arguments to show that the mind in turn lacked the power, as in volition, of moving the body. The true cause of both sensations and voluntary movements was God, who instituted laws for the union of mind and body and acted accordingly in particular instances.

The originators of the occasionalist movement were Louis de La Forge and Géraud de Cordemoy.

La Forge

In the Traité de l'esprit de l'homme (Paris, 1666), La Forge represented himself as continuing work that Descartes had left unfinished in his Treatise on Man and undertook to explain and develop the notion of a mind or soul distinct from, yet united to, the body. Facing problems concerning the possibility of the body acting on the mind and vice versa, he noted that these problems were not isolated and that there was a related problem concerning the possibility of one body acting on another. In his discussion of these problems, La Forge did not deny that bodies acted on one another or on the mind, or that the mind acted on the body; on the contrary, he insisted that God in his omnipotence could delegate the power of acting to created things. Yet, distinguishing two senses of "cause," he denied that created things were unambiguously the causes of the effects attributed to them and called them the "occasional" or "equivocal" causes.

Cordemoy

In Le discernement du corps et de l'âme (Paris, 1666), Cordemoy, unlike La Forge, was not concerned with presenting views necessarily in harmony with Descartes's, and he denied outright the action of bodies on one another or on the mind and the action of the human mind on the body. In his formally presented proof that God was the true cause of the movement of bodies, he made use of principles that Descartes would have accepted but drew conclusions from them that it would be safe to say would have greatly disturbed Descartes. Descartes had written of a motion in the brain as giving occasion (donnera occasion ) to the soul to have a certain sensation or thought, and Cordemoy may have had these passages in mind in employing the expression cause occasionelle to refer to what, as in the case of a motion in the brain, might be thought to be the true cause of an event. But, unlike Descartes, he denied that the occasion or occasional cause was, strictly speaking, the cause of the event and maintained that the true cause was God.

Geulincx

Arnold Geulincx apparently developed his version of occasionalism independently of La Forge and Cordemoy. Illustrating the lack of causal relation between mind and body, he used the analogy of synchronized clocks, which was later taken up by Leibniz; and, to prove a lack of genuine causation, he made use of the principle that nothing can be done unless there is knowledge on the part of the putative agent or cause of how it is done.

Malebranche

Malebranche, the most celebrated of the occasionalists, was familiar with the work of Cordemoy and adapted, for his own purposes and with great originality, the theory of causation he found in Cordemoy. He added powerful arguments, extended the view to cover volitions not pertaining to bodily movements (such as the volition to form an idea), and presented it as an integral part of his theocentric vision of the universe.

monism and pluralism

It has been argued that the dualisms and pluralism found in Descartes's statements about substance—of uncreated and created substance, corporeal and spiritual substance, and individual substances—contradicted his own definitions and principles and that Spinoza's doctrine of the unity of substance was the consistent and pure form of Cartesianism. It has also been maintained that Spinoza's monism and Leibniz' pluralism were the opposite poles to which philosophers accepting a notion of substance like that of Descartes were inescapably driven. Discussions of these views and of Spinoza's and Leibniz's metaphysics of substance is beyond the limits of this article, though it need hardly be added that the historical and logical relations of Descartes's assertions about substance and those of Spinoza and Leibniz have figured importantly in discussions of Cartesianism and that the essence of Cartesianism has sometimes been located in a common notion of, or presupposition about, substantiality.

It may be noted, however, that Descartes's assertions about corporeal substance also gave rise to conflicting theories among less renowned students of his metaphysics. On the one side, Geulincx, following Descartes's inclination to think of particular bodies as portions of a common stuff or substance, contended that "body itself" (corpus ipsum ) was primary and substantial and that particular bodies were limitations or modes of corporeal substance. On the other side, Cordemoy, sharing Descartes's inclination to think of particular bodies as objects really distinct from one another, came to the unorthodox conclusion that body in general, or matter, was an aggregate and that the parts of which it was composed were indivisible extended substances, or atoms.

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Encyclopedia of Philosophy