Descartes on Causation
Tad M. Schmaltz, Descartes on Causation (New York: Oxford University Press, Inc., 2008)
Ex nihilo nihil fit.
– Principia philosophiae, Part I, Article 49
The Islamic world has always placed great emphasis on deity in its metaphysics, sometimes to the point of crowding out everything else. Islamic art typically depicts abstract patterns, rather than figures, since the depiction of the human form has idolatrous theological implications; this is especially true for art related to the purpose of Islamic worship. It is no accident that occasionalism, the stance that God is the only cause in the cosmos, occasionally makes a guest appearance in Islamic philosophy. As a contrast, no occasionalist position can be found in the scholastic universe; its trinitarian principles, designed to preserve the autonomy of body and personality in the world, always had anti-occasionalist aims. Descartes on Causation is an effort to understand how Descartes believed the world is glued together through the prism of this scholastic context.
Contemporary philosophy understands causation in a horizontal manner; medieval philosophy understood philosophy in a vertical manner. What is meant by this? Modern philosophies usually attempt to analyze causation in terms of the roles that discrete elements manifest through the ways they relate to each other; the task for the philosopher then becomes explaining the nature of the causal relata and the causal relationship. Such a treatment of causation will assume the “blanks” in our analysis will include something before, something after, and some connection, all of it inert stuff, like states-of-affairs, counterfactuals, and whatnot. For example, in a neo-Humean analysis, our elements are events, which, through their constant conjunction, become candidates for instantiating causal laws, laws which do not exist over and above events so related, but reduce to them. In contrast, medieval philosophy interpreted causation in organizational terms as the activity of productive things.
This is no trivial distinction. When working with a horizontal analysis of causation, medieval arguments for the existence of God become obvious fallacies. For example, if a cosmological argument affirms that whatever comes into existence has a cause, it will seem like an arbitrary exception to a general rule to conclude that God is the uncaused cause at the beginning of a temporal causal chain. Perhaps our universe is a grand sequence of events that just is, and begins with a raw event that just is. But on a vertical interpretation, thinkers attempt to establish what is first in an order of causes. By order, I mean not a sequence, but a hierarchy. Consider social analogies. In a business, the causality of actions taken by a CEO have wider generality than the actions taken by a worker on an assembly line, just as in an army, the causality of actions taken by a general have wider generality than actions taken by a private. So cosmological arguments don’t stipulate something most general to explain a given, for if that was the case, it would be left open for us to do without the explanation and live with the given. Rather, cosmological arguments attempt to prove that something must be most general, perhaps that the actualization of potentials ultimately requires pure actuality, or that we cannot fundamentally have contingent existence without necessary existence, or that composite entities cannot exist in principle without a unified cause, and so forth. In a horizontal view, God looks like a silly wizard who magically creates the universe in an abracadabra fashion; in a vertical view, God is first in the order of being.
Such arguments created philosophical problems, not because they were too weak, but because they were too strong. If God is too integrated with the world, the result is pantheism, while if things are too integrated with God, the result is acosmism. Even Aquinas worried about causal overdetermination, that is, about God ultimately causing everything directly, and made a distinction between causes of being and causes of becoming, thus placing secondary causes distinct from direct acts of God at different levels of causal organization. A concurrentist solution was thus developed arguing that God conserves the being of things through a single act of creation, while contributing a discrete concursus to every creaturely action. Additionally, Duns Scotus (~1265-1308) attempted to avoid blurring God and the world by introducing a variety of intermediaries while streamlining the fundamental categories. This encouraged a division between real distinctions, modal distinctions, and merely rational distinctions, all used to indicate the order of metaphysical dependence. Scotus also protected thinghood by shifting the principle of individuation from quiddity to haecceity, that is, from “whatness” to “thisness.” And between acts of intellect and the cognized object, Scotus introduced “objective reality.” Many of these innovations were still in currency during Descartes’ life. This distinction between object and subject, for instance, had the opposite of its current meaning until the work of Alexander Baumgarten (1714-1762).
Such philosophical tools once used for intermediate fixes began to live lives of their own, eventually displacing the Aristotelian structure they were designed to reinforce. Francisco Suárez (1548-1617), a moderate realist, deviated from Aquinas in arguing that prime matter has its own essence apart from form as a potential recipient of change. The feature of the cause wouldn’t literally transfer to the effect; being flows forth from the cause to the effect, which produces a new being that is distinct from, though in some respect similar to, the being that the cause possesses. This could only occur because Suárez interpreted a causal action only existing as the mode of its effect; causality could therefore not exist over and above the action of a causal agent. The causal agent was still distinguished from the causal patient; the causal patient was still distinguished from the causal effect; the causal agent was still distinguished from the causal action. This kind of immanent realism, which allowed only qualities to be principles of action, had the consequence of elevating efficient causes above material, formal, and final causes as the only kind of causation in a full and proper sense. Since Suárez was thinking that causation inflows being, only efficient causation could perform this task.
Descartes had two causal axioms: the containment axiom, and the conservation axiom. The containment axiom states that the formal or eminent reality of an effect is contained in its cause. Suárez was a moderate realist in that he believed in universals in rebus, that is, immanent, Aristotelian universals. Yet Suárez was almost a nominalist in defending individuals as the only real unities in the world. Suárez theorized something very close to a layer-cake trope theory where unit-properties inhere in particular substances to make what he called “formal unities” of which only the intellect can apprehend their shared ideal unity. When Descartes discusses what kind of formal reality an idea contains, he is making it in this context, since any thing will have some degree of formal reality, depending upon where it is in the ontological hierarchy of things, in virtue of existing. Descartes does not believe we find detachable qualities in nature.
The conservation axiom states that no less a cause is required to conserve a thing than to produce it at first. Here, Descartes offered a deflationary thesis: God’s concursus is exhausted by God’s conservation of matter, both the forces of its parts and inclinations of its motions. Contemporary philosophers more often than not have a perdurantist model of persistence, believing things are sums of slices of space-time. But like his scholastic predecessors, Descartes had an endurantist model of persistence, building a philosophy around things rather than events, arguing we cannot distinctly think of a particular duration without thinking of a particular substance. While Descartes does have all body-body action occurring by means of contact action, all motion is merely a mode. Motion, since it is a mode, cannot migrate; it is produced by means of the application of force, which are themselves modes of duration. This resembles Suárez’s conception of the nature of prime matter, with an important distinction: while Suárez believed quantity exists directly in prime matter, quantity can neither be produced nor destroyed in Descartes.
Descartes employs natural teleology in the case of the soul-body union, and rational teleology in the case of the actions of created minds. In such instances, it can be said that we have finality, but without final causes. This is very much like Suárez, where directedness in the world ultimately comes from God as final cause, but only because there is no real distinction between God’s final and efficient causality. The occasional connection between body and mind is therefore grounded in divinely instituted natures; psychology, as for the scholastics, is still the science of the soul for Descartes. Concerning the soul-body union itself, Schmaltz warns us not to confuse issues of union and interaction. How body transfers motion to the mind isn’t an immediate problem for Descartes. While brain motions, when supplemented by the activity of the innate mental faculty, are efficient causes of sensations, he still has a modal conception of causation disallowing motions to be transferred even between bodies, as numerically distinct modes are always produced in a patient from an outside agent. Interaction has a foundation in the natures — ontically real powers — that God creates and conserves. God doesn’t produce the immediate effects of mind-body interaction, but creates and conserves the natures that make such interaction possible. Descartes had greater trouble getting his physical principles to line up in terms of motion and rest.
Philosophers following Aquinas subordinated will to reason. It was a scholastic commonplace that those who believe things unclearly believe willfully, for it was theorized our souls were directed toward the good and the true — a perfection of a determination, finality in the teleological sense, like being automatically drawn toward a certain end. The will was rational appetite, directed as appetite to goods as presented by the senses through the intellect. Suárez loosened this up a bit, believing our judgments of the good can be willful. With respect to necessary goods, the uncoerced will spontaneously assents, freedom here consisting in the perfection of an intellectual determination to good. But with respect to non-necessary goods, freedom is constituted by indifference, a perfection of control required for merit. Descartes innovated by extending Suárez’s model to truth. Concerning claims that are obscure and confused, freedom consists in indifference, our ability to withhold assent. In assenting to clear and distinct ideas, our freedom consists in spontaneity, the determination to the true. This becomes liberalized further in the Passions as the will assumes a larger role, Descartes placing more emphasis on the fact that attention depends upon the will. The pursuit of truth is subordinated to the pursuit of the good.
Descartes subjected all truths concerning creation, including eternal truths, to God’s will as their efficient cause. So instead of saying the source of divine knowledge is uncreated, Descartes makes it come from God’s will. Does this make God a universal possibilist, as if all necessity is relative to the character of our own minds? Harry Frankfurt and Jonathan Bennett concluded yes, though Frankfurt believes perceived necessity is only apparent in Descartes, while Bennett believes such necessity consists in our perception of it. Schmaltz disagrees, arguing for Descartes that the indifference of divine action is essential, which means there is not only no reason that we can comprehend for creation, but no reason for God to comprehend either. God is an efficient cause of himself only in a metaphorical sense.
