Descartes's Nomic concurrentism: Finite causation and divine concurrence

Journal of the History of Philosophy

Volumn 41, Issue 1, 2003, Pages 25-49

  Pessin, Andrew ^a  

^a KENYON COLLEGE   (United States)

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[No Author keywords available]

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EID: 0344342995     PISSN: 00225053     EISSN: 15384586     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1353/hph.2002.0104     Document Type: Article

References (61)

1. Andrew Pessin, "Malebranche's Natural Theodicy and the Incompleteness of God's Volitions," Religious Studies 36 (2000): 47-63;
2. "Malebranche's Doctrine of Freedom/Consent and the Incompleteness of God's Volitions," British Journal for the History of Philosophy 8 (2000): 21-53;
3. "Does Continuous Creation Entail Occasionalism? Malebranche (and Descartes)," Canadian Journal of Philosophy 30 (2000): 413-40;
4. "Malebranche's Distinction Between General and Particular Volitions," Journal of the History of Philosophy 39 (2001): 77-99.
5. In recent scholarship only the following even entertain the idea of Cartesian concurrentism: Kenneth Clatterbaugh, "Cartesian Causality, Explanation, and Divine Concurrence," History of Philosophy Quarterly 12 (1995): 195-207;
6. J. A. Van Ruler, The Crisis of Causality: Voetius and Descartes on God, Nature and Change (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1995);
7. Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996);
8. Helen Hattab, "One Cause or Many? Jesuit Influences on Descartes's Division of Causes," Rencontres de Philosophie Médiévale 7, Société Internationale pour l'Étude de la Philosophie Médiévale (1998), and also "The Problem of Secondary Causation in Descartes: A Response to Des Chene," forthcoming in Perspectives on Science. Of these, only Hattab ultimately defends Cartesian concurrentism, although in aversion quite different from my own. I discuss Van Ruler and Clatterbaugh below.
9. see Pessin, "Does Continuous Creation Entail Occasionalism?".
10. See the following: Malebranche, Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, David Scott, trans., Nicholas Jolley, ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), VII (henceforth Dialogues);
11. La Forge, Treatise on the Human Mind, D. Clarke, trans. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1997), XVI (henceforth Treatise);
12. for discussion, see: Wallace Anderson, "Cartesian Motion," in Motion and Time, Space and Matter, P. Machamer and R. Turnbull, eds. (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1976), 203-5;
13. Udo Thiel, "Individuation"
14. and Daniel Garber, John Henry, Lynn Joy and Alan Gabbey, "New Doctrines of Body and its Powers, Place, and Space," both in The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, D. Garber and M. Ayers, eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), chs. 9 and 18, respectively;
15. Thomas Lennon, "Philosophical Commentary on Malebranche's The Search After Truth," in Nicolas Malebranche, The Search After Truth, T. Lennon and P. Olscamp, trans, and eds. (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1980), 814-5.
16. for discussion, see n. 39 below, and John Cottingham, A Descartes Dictionary (Oxford: Blackwell 1993), 22.
17. In opposition, Gary Hatfield, in "Force (God) in Descartes's Physics," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science, 10,
18. In conversation, Daniel Garber suggested that the laws follow from God's immutable manner of conserving the material world without being explicitly willed by Him. I offer a more detailed reply in "Descartes's Nomic Concurrentism and its Implications" (in preparation); here I merely note that there is no reason for Descartes not to construe the laws as willed, and that Garber's suggestion seems inconsistent with Descartes's distinction between conservation and concurrence (part 2 below) and with his many references to laws as "causes." (For relevant discussion, see Janet Broughton, "Necessity and Physical Laws in Descartes's Philosophy," Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 68 [1987], 205-21,
19. and Tad Schmaltz, "Platonism and Descartes' View of Immutable Essences," Archiv fur Geschichte der Philosophie, 73 [1991] 129-70.)
20. Andrew Black, "Malebranche's Theodicy," Journal of the History of Philosophy 35 (1997), 27-44,
21. 2. (A) is "particular" insofar as it represents a particular state of affairs, involving a particular substance in a mode at a time; (B) is general in making no such reference.
22. In fact the term "laws of nature" may refer to at least five different things: the rules that God follows in forming some practical volitions (cf. Hatfield, "Force (God) in Descartes's Physics,"
23. and Stephen Menn, "Descartes and Some Predecessors on the Divine Conservation of Motion," Synthese 83 [1990]: 215-38), the contents of those volitions, the volitions themselves, the regularities in nature resulting from the volitions, or nature itself insofar as it is empowered by the volitions. Descartes does not distinguish these, and uses "laws" variably to refer to most or all of them. It is no surprise, then, that he does not distinguish between GC and PC.
24. (See Hattab, "One Cause or Many?" and "The Problem of Secondary Causation in Descartes" for relevant discussion.)
25. (i) Descartes offers no explicit statements of such laws (not that he should be expected to); (ii) it is unclear how such laws would be framed, for the ontologically basic variables concerning mind and its modes are not apparent (see Tad Schmaltz, Malebranche's Theory of the Soul [New York: Oxford University Press, 1996], chs. 2 and 3);
26. There are also numerous technical differences between the different scholastic versions of concurrentism (cf. Alfred Freddoso, "God's General Concurrence with Secondary Causes: Why Conservation is Not Enough," in Philosophical Perspectives, 5: Philosophy of Religion, J. Tomberlin, ed. [Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1991], 553-86), which we may ignore here. For further discussion of scholastic concurrentism, see work already cited by Van Ruler, Des Chene, and Hattab.
27. A. J. Benedetto, "Divine Concurrence," in The New Catholic Encyclopedia (New York: McGraw Hill, 1967), 125.
28. Cf. Alfred Freddoso, "God's General Concurrence with Secondary Causes: Pitfalls and Prospects," American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 68 (1994): [For concurrentists] . . . God's mode of acting when He concurs with secondary causes must be distinct from any mode of acting in which He produces an effect by Himself, without the cooperation of secondary causes (145). . . . when God concurs with a secondary agent to produce a given effect, God's immediate causal contribution and the secondary agent's immediate causal contribution are complementary, with neither rendering the other superfluous . . . Yet St. Thomas explicitly denies that an effect produced jointly by God and creatures is a conjunction of two independently produced per se effects: '. . . Rather, the whole [effect] is effected by both [God and the secondary cause] according to different modes' . . . In short, the effect is undivided and yet such that both its universal or general cause (God) and its particular causes . . . contribute to its production in distinctive and non-redundant modes . . . (145-7). . . . God and the secondary cause constitute a single total cause that produces the relevant unitary effect by means of a single, undivided, action. . . . (154-5)
29. Even where the laws a ated in a universal form not explicitly conditional, it was not uncommon at the time to treat such propositions as equivalent to conditionals; although Descartes's minimal interest in logic results in his not discussing the issue, see (for example), Hobbes, Opera Philosophica quae Latine scripsit omnia, Molesworth, ed. (London, 1839-45), I, 34-5, 48;
30. Leibniz, New Essays on Human Understanding, P. Remnant and J. Bennett, trans. and eds. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1982), IV.xi;
31. and for an account of Suárez on the issue, see Schmaltz, "Platonism and Descartes' View of Immutable Essences," 147.
32. Discussing Leibnizian concurrence, Robert Adams, in Leibniz: Determinist, Theist, Idealist (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1994) puts it well: God produces the creature's producing (97-8). In our idiom, given God's volitions, God causes the creature to cause motion by virtue of its states.
33. (pace Daniel Garber, Descartes' Metaphysical Physics [Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992]
34. and "Descartes and Occasionalism," in Causation in Early Modern Philosophy, S. Nadler, ed. [University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993], who sees Descartes as inclining towards occasionalism in dispensing with an earlier reference to bodily "active faculties," but who ignores the thorough causal context of the passage);
35. see also Eileen O'Neill, "Mind-Body Interaction and Metaphysical Consistency: A Defense of Descartes," Journal of the History of Philosophy 25 (1987): 227-45,
36. and Tad Schmaltz, "Sensation, Occasionalism, and Descartes' Causal Principles," in Minds, Ideas, and Objects: Essays on the Theory of Representation in Modern Philosophy, P. Cummins and G. Zoeller, eds. (Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview Publishin pany, 1992).
37. Others also seem to read Descartes as Clatterbaugh does, explicitly or implicitly, offering additional evidence: Peter Machamer, "Causality and Explanation in Descartes' Natural Philosophy," in Motion and Time, Space and Matter, P. Machamer and R. Turnbull, eds. (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 1976), 168-99;
38. Desmond Clarke, "Physics and Metaphysics in Descartes's Principles," Studies in the History and Philosophy of Science 10 (1979): 89-112,
39. and Descartes' Philosophy of Science (University Park: The Pennsylvania State University Press, 1982);
40. and Gary Hatfield, "First Philosophy and Natural Philosophy in Descartes," in Philosophy: Its History and Historiography, A. J. Holland, ed. (Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985), 149-64.
41. and "How God Causes Motion: Descartes, Divine Sustenance, and Occasionalism," Journal of Philosophy 84 (1987): 567-80-while not explicitly addressing concurrence, also seems to commit him to understanding concurrence this way.
42. See Van Ruler, The Crisis of Causality, 267-71,
43. and in addition to his already cited works, Alfred Freddoso, "Medieval Aristotelianism and the Case Against Secondary Causation in Nature," in Divine and Human Action, T. Morris, ed. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1988), 74-118. Although Garber does not explicitly make this error, his interpretation of Descartes's physics seems committed to it. Van Ruler is less clear: he seems to infer occasionalism from the identification of concurrence with conservation, but then admits ". . . there is reason to assume that Descartes accepted a distinct causality of secondary causes . . ." (276, n. 47).
44. Descartes's conception of a finite cause, for example, is broader than a typical scholastic one (see parts 3 and 4). Also, see Garber, "How God Causes Motion," 573, for differences between Descartes's and Aquinas's conceptions of conservation.
45. Of course this conception coheres with Clatterbaugh's and others' mentioned in part 2. There may be other important constraints on Descartes's conception of a cause, including what O'Neill, in "Mind-Body Interaction," refers to as t ntainment and reality principles (see also Schmaltz, "Sensation, Occasionalism, and Descartes' Causal Principles,"
46. and Geoff Gorham, "The Dilemma of Eminent Containment: Descartes and Suárez."
47. Gorham's paper appears in Dialogue: Canadian Philosophical Review, vol. 42, no. 1, 2001).
48. Cf. Peter McLaughlin, "Descartes on Mind-Body Interaction and the Conservation of Motion," Philosophical Review 102 (1993): 155-82.
49. Cf. Garber, "Mind, Body, and the Laws of Nature."
50. refers to C. D. Broad, Mind and Its Place in Nature (London: K. Paul, Trench, Trubner and Co., 1925) as holding this interpretation, then quickly dismisses it.
51. Desmond Clarke, in "Causal Powers and Occasionalism from Descartes to Malebranche," ms. (1999), develops this point in some detail.
52. For related discussion, see Clarke, "The Concept of Vis in Part III of the Principia," in Descartes: Principia Philosophiae (1644-1994) (Napoli: Vivarium, 1994), 331,
53. and Des Chene, Physiologia, 324.
54. For what is ultimately a similar interpretation of Boyle, see Timothy Shanahan, "God and Nature in the Thought of Robert Boyle," Journal of the History of Philosophy 26 (1988): 547-70,
55. and Peter Anstey, "Boyle on Occasionalism: An Unexamined Source," Journal of the History of Ideas, 60 (1999): 57-81.
56. I will focus on Clatterbaugh, "Cartesian Causality," but see also Clatterbaugh, The Causation Debate in Modern Philosophy 1637-1739 (New York: Routledge, 1999).
57. As a result, there is no reason here to rule out Thomistic instrumentalism. In light of what I said about pure deductions above, instrumentalism is consistent even with Clatterbaugh's conception of concurrence, and is not an alternative to it, as he suggests ("Cartesian Causality," 202).
58. Cf. Garber, "Mind, Body, and the Laws of Nature" and Descartes' Metaphysical Physics.
59. Cf. Des Chene, in Physiologia, 316ff., who discusses using the eternality of divine volitions to reconcile divine immutability with the variability of the effects of divine action.
60. Cf. Garber, "How God Causes Motion," 572ff.,
61. and "Descartes and Occasionalism," 13-4.