Concurrence or Divergence - Hattab

49concurrence or d ivergence?

Journal of the History of Philosophy, vol. 45, no. 1 (2007) 49–78

[49]

Concurrence or Divergence? Reconciling Descartes’s Physics

with his MetaphysicsH e l e n H a t t a b *

1 . t h e p r o b l e m

since the seventeenth century philosophers have struggled to reconcile ele-ments of Descartes’s scientific program with his metaphysical claims about material substance and causation. the problem in a nutshell is this. by redefining matter as essentially extended, Descartes deprives bodies of intrinsic forces and powers. as he puts it, matter is in itself is passive and inert, requiring the divine first cause to set the parts of matter in motion and constantly maintain their motion. but Descartes also insists that the immutable, simple action of God cannot be the cause of particular, changing motions. In Le Monde he instead attributes particular motions to “nature,” which he defines as matter and its qualities. Since matter can have no qualities other than the attributes shared by all substances (such as existence and duration) and the modes of extended substance (such as size, shape and position), attributing causal powers to nature explicitly contradicts Descartes’s definition of matter as passive extended substance. and yet in his writings on natural philosophy, Descartes is quite happy to talk as though the physical world is populated by bodies that possess forces and exert causal powers. In the Principia Philosophiae Descartes revises his earlier attribution of particular motions to matter and its qualities, and instead states that the secondary and particular causes of these motions are the laws of nature (i.e., the rules or laws governing nature, not nature itself in the sense of matter and its qualities). the revision does not seem to get around the original contradiction as laws are not normally thought to possess any agency and, at most, are said to describe the forces in matter.

In short, according to Descartes’s metaphysics, matter as pure extension is strictly passive, requiring an external cause to move it. In his physics, however, Descartes appeals to physical causes and attributes forces to matter. Seventeenth-century Cartesians did one of two things to resolve the apparent conflict between

* Helen Hattab is assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Houston.

50 journal of the history of philosophy 45:1 january 2007

Descartes’s metaphysical commitments and his natural philosophy: either they became occasionalists, designating God as the only genuine cause of motion and downgrading bodies to mere occasions for God’s causal action; or they re-introduced some form of causality into material substance so as to make bodies genuine secondary causes.1 the first solution betrays Descartes’s commitment to the scientia sought by natural philosophers in the classic sense of the knowledge of natural causes.2 the second preserves this commitment, but at the expense of amending Descartes’s metaphysics.

Contemporary scholars have approached this problem in three ways. the first line of interpretation tries to remove the conflict by taking seriously Descartes’s commitment to forces in his physics and finding ways to account for them by means of amendments to his metaphysics. For example, Martial Gueroult attempted (unsuccessfully) to derive all physical forces from the attributes of existence and duration that extended substances have in virtue of being substances.3 alan Gabbey provided additional support for this interpretation by using Descartes’s characterization of God as both a causa secundum esse (cause of being) and a causa secundum fieri (cause of becoming) to argue that Descartes considers God the cause of substantive changes, whereas bodies as causae secundum fieri are merely the causes of modal changes.4 However, this still does not explain how the passive res extensa acquires the intrinsic forces required to cause these changes. Desmond Clarke addresses this by introducing a special kind of mode into Descartes’s on-tology so as to attribute to Descartes the view that God injects various forces into

1 the first approach is taken by more well-known Cartesians such as Geraud Cordemoy, louis de la Forge, and nicolas Malebranche; the second by Pierre-Sylvain Regis. For an overview of Cartesian philosophies see Desmond Clarke, Occult Powers and Hypotheses: Cartesian Natural Philosophy under Louis XIV (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989). For a study of de la Forge’s version, see Steven nadler, “the Oc-casionalism of louis de la Forge,” in Causation in Early Modern Philosophy, ed. Steven nadler (University Park, Pa: the Pennsylvania State University Press, 1993), 57–73. Finally, for a helpful discussion of the disagreement between Malebranche and Regis on this issue, see tad Schmaltz, “Cartesian Causa-tion: body-body interaction, motion, and eternal truths,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 34 (2003): 737–62.

2 Despite Descartes’s rejection of Scholastic substantial forms and real qualities, he shares the Scholastic aristotelian view that scientific knowledge is necessary and certain precisely because it gets at the underlying essences of natural things. For Descartes, as for the Scholastics, scientific, demonstrative knowledge is distinguished from less reliable forms of knowledge found in the arts by the fact that it identifies the true causes of observed effects. that knowledge of these causes must be grounded in a metaphysical account of the essence of material substance is clear from Descartes’s critique of Galileo, of whom he says, “without having considered the first causes of nature, he [Galileo] has merely looked for the explanations of a few particular effects and he has thereby built without foundations” (Oeuvres de Descartes [at], ed. Charles adam and Paul tannery [Paris: librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1996]: vol. II, 380). I share Desmond Clarke’s view that, even though Descartes introduces a new metaphysi-cal account of matter that brings with it a new view of what counts as a scientific demonstration (and, I would add, what counts as a genuine cause), Descartes is still engaged in the same project as the Scholastics in that he is constructing a science rooted in metaphysics which makes possible demonstra-tive knowledge of the true causes found in nature. See, for instance, Desmond Clarke, “Descartes’s Philosophy of Science,” in The Cambridge Companion to Descartes, ed. John Cottingham (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), 258–85.

3 Martial Gueroult, “the Metaphysics and Physics of Force in Descartes,” in Descartes: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (Sussex: Harvester Press, 1980), 196–229.

4 alan Gabbey, “Force and Inertia in the Seventeenth Century: Descartes and newton,” in Descartes: Philosophy, Mathematics and Physics, ed. Stephen Gaukroger (Sussex: the Harvester Press, 1980), 230–320.


matter, which then inhere in it as modes.5 but there is no reason to suppose that Descartes’s ontology can accommodate such special modes.

the second line of interpretation privileges Descartes’s metaphysics and re-interprets the references to causes and forces in Descartes’s physics accordingly. On this reading, Descartes’s references to secondary material causes and forces in matter are not to be taken literally, and instead, he should be read as an occasion-alist about body/body causation. Gary Hatfield revived this seventeenth-century occasionalist interpretation of Descartes.6 He was followed by Daniel Garber who argued that, even though Descartes’s rejection of substantial forms ruled out that bodies could have genuine causal powers, since minds are substantial forms possessing powers as modes, they can be causes of motion in the sense of causae secundum fieri.7 More recently, Geoffrey Gorham has pursued a variation on this line of interpretation. He follows Garber in reading Descartes as an occasionalist with respect to body/body causation and treats mind/body causation as a separate case, arguing that Descartes upholds causal over-determination when it comes to God’s causal influence on the effects produced by mental secondary causes.8

On this interpretation, Descartes’s many references to causes in his physics must be reinterpreted as references to occasional causes. Michael Della Rocca points out that since occasionalism was not the standard view, this use of ‘cause’ would have generated confusion without some explanation that this meant occasional cause.9 thus it is odd that Descartes did not signal this unusual use of ‘cause’ somewhere in his physics. Of course, one could speculate that he omitted this explanation precisely to hide his occasionalism, but this is not plausible either. Descartes takes himself to have grounded his science in a solid foundation and to have achieved the highest degree of certainty possible, especially when it comes to the founda-tions of his physics. the standard view at this time was that knowledge was only properly scientific if it identified the principal causes that could be tied back to the essential natures of things. accidental causes, sine qua non conditions, and occasional causes were not thought to provide a sufficiently reliable foundation for the necessary and universal claims of science, in the strictest sense, since such factors can change in unpredictable ways—especially in light of the inscrutability of the divine will.10 the idea that, in the absence of necessary connections between

5 Desmond Clarke, “the Concept of Vis in Part III of the Principia,” in Descartes: Principia Philoso-phiae (1644–1994) (naples: Vivarium, 1996), 321–39.

6 Gary Hatfield, “Force (God) in Descartes’s Physics,” Studies in History and Philosophy of Science 10 (1979): 113–40.

7 Daniel Garber, Descartes’s Metaphysical Physics [Metaphysical Physics] (Chicago: the University of Chicago Press, 1992), 264–66, 299–305; and Daniel Garber, “How God Causes Motion: Descartes, Divine Sustenance and Occasionalism,” in Descartes Embodied (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 189–220.

8 Geoffrey Gorham, “Cartesian Causation: Continuous, Instantaneous, Overdetermined,” [“Car-tesian Causation”] Journal of the History of Philosophy 42 (2004): 389–423.

9 Michael Della Rocca, “‘If a body Meet a body’: Descartes on body-body Causation,” [“body”] in New Essays on the Rationalists, ed. Rocco J. Gennaro and Charles Huenemann (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 48–81.

10 John Duns Scotus (“Concerning Human Knowledge” V, in Philosophical Writings, trans. alan Wolter O.F.M. [Indianapolis: bobbs-Merrill, 1962], 118–19) gives a good explanation for this:

Sometimes, however, we experience a principle in such a way that it is impossible to discover by further division any self-evident principle from which it could be derived. Instead we


the underlying essences, divine legislation of regular concatenations of certain oc-casions and the events that follow them provide sufficient grounding for certainty gained currency only well after Descartes, due to the efforts of later Cartesians like nicolas Malebranche. eventually, this model of causation was taken up by David Hume, whose general view we have inherited.11 to read this more familiar modern approach to causation and scientific explanation back into Descartes is, of course, tempting, but we must be careful to resist such anachronism. While we can find the origins of this way of thinking about causation in Descartes, it is by no means as developed as it is in Cartesian occasionalists, and it is still heavily informed by the Scholastic aristotelian model of causation.12 Descartes regards it as self-evident, for example, that a cause must have at least as much formal reality as its effect. this kind of symmetry between cause and effect would be redundant if we were dealing with occasional causes, since there need not be any kind of isomorphism between two things for God to will one to always follow the other.13

Hence, a third approach giving equal weight to Descartes’s metaphysical claims and his physics has recently come to the fore. Kenneth Clatterbaugh reconciles the two domains by taking ‘cause’ in the context of Cartesian physics to mean “any proposition that occurs as a premise in a scientific explanation.”14 Dennis Des Chene argues that Descartes appropriates the Scholastic concept of divine concurrence, which Des Chene defines as the co-action of God with secondary causes. but in doing so, Descartes transforms this concept because there can be no “co-action” on the part of Cartesian matter.15 In the end, for Des Chene, the

must be satisfied with a principle whose terms are known by experience to be frequently united, for example, that a certain species of herb is hot. neither do we find any other prior means of demonstrating just why this attribute belongs to this particular subject, but must content ourselves with this as a first principle known from experience. now even though the uncertainty and fallibility in such a case may be removed by the proposition ‘What occurs in most instances by means of a cause that is not free is the natural effect of such a cause,’ still this is the very lowest degree of scientific knowledge—and perhaps we have here no knowledge of the actual union of the terms but only a knowledge of what is apt to be the case. For if an attribute is an absolute entity other than the subject, it could be separated from its subject without involving any contradiction. Hence, the person whose knowledge is based on experience would not know whether such a thing is actually so or not, but only that by its nature it is apt to be so.

11 While the divine legislator drops out of the picture for Hume, he employs essentially the same arguments against a necessary connection between cause and effect as does Malebranche. (See nicolas Malebranche, “the Search For truth,” in Philosophical Selections, ed. Steven nadler [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 1992], 94–96; and David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. eric Steinberg [Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company Inc., 1993], 39–53.) Malebranche’s arguments for occasionalism can be traced back to the ash’arite theologians and were known in europe via averroes’ and Maimonides’ discussions of the views developed by medieval Islamic theologians. See especially averroes’ critique of al-Ghazali’s occasionalism in Averroes’ Tahafut Al-Tahafut, trans. Simon van den bergh (london: Messrs luzac & Company ltd., 1969), vol. I, 316–33.

12 See Helen Hattab, The Origins of a Modern View of Causation: Descartes and His Predecessors on Ef-ficient Causes [Origins] (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Pennsylvania, 1998).

13 this point is recognized by the precursor to occasionalism defended by various Islamic theo-logians and philosophers; see note 11.

14 Kenneth Clatterbaugh, “Cartesian Causality, explanation and Divine Concurrence,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 12 (1995), 199.

15 Dennis Des Chene, Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought [Physiologia] (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1996), 341.


conflict between Cartesian metaphysics and physics remains, because Descartes’s secondary causes cannot be genuine efficient causes in the Scholastic sense, given that extended substances are not sources of motion and rest. Della Rocca argues that, nevertheless, bodies are considered to be genuine causes by Descartes though not in the same sense as Scholastic aristotelian causes. andrew Pessin has like-wise offered further evidence for this reading, which he labels the “concurrentist reading.”16 Della Rocca and Pessin differ from Des Chene in that they argue that Descartes regards bodies as genuine secondary causes by reinterpreting what counts as a genuine cause for him.

I situate myself within this third approach, and in prior publications, I have out-lined and defended a different kind of concurrentist reading based on the debates about secondary efficient causes (created causes) that formed part of Descartes’s intellectual context.17 My reading differs from other concurrentist interpretations in that I take seriously Descartes’s claim in the Principia Philosophiae that the laws of nature are the secondary and particular causes of motion, rather than individual bodies. I argue for this controversial claim on the basis that, in attempting to pre-serve both the causality of secondary efficient causes and their complete depen-dence on the omnipotent first cause (God), Scholastic aristotelian philosophers mentioned by Descartes offer a variety of options that lie between occasionalism and mere conservationism (the view that secondary causes act independently once created and conserved by the first cause). Some of these intermediate views do not require that the secondary cause have an independent source of activity in order to accord it a distinct causal role. I read Descartes as adopting the Jesuit solution which holds that God and the secondary cause produce the effect by the very same action—only Descartes substitutes the laws of nature for the individual substantial forms that do the work of specifying God’s indifferent and universal action on the Jesuit view.18 this alternative form of concurrentism has the potential to go further than Des Chene’s, Della Rocca’s, and Pessin’s versions of concurrentism in reconciling Descartes’s traditional understanding of scientia as knowledge of causes and his reliance on prevailing views about the relationship between divine and natural causes, with the new elements of his metaphysics.

In spite of good historical and textual reasons to attribute something akin to the Jesuit position to Descartes,19 the more straightforward and appealing (to the contemporary eye, at least) occasionalist interpretation often prevents concur-rentist interpretations from being taken seriously.20 a major stumbling block is

16 andrew Pessin, “Descartes’s nomic Concurrentism: Finite Causation and Divine Concurrence,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 41 (2003): 25–49.

17 Helen Hattab, “Conflicting Causalities: the Jesuits, their Opponents and Descartes on the Causality of the efficient Cause” [“Conflicting Causalities”], in Oxford Studies in Early Modern Philosophy, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003): 1–22; Hattab, “the Problem of Secondary Causation in Descartes: a Response to Des Chene” [“Secondary Causation”], Perspectives on Science 8 (2001): 93–118; “One Cause or Many?: Jesuit Influences on Descartes’s Division of Causes,” in Meeting of the Minds: The Relations Between Medieval and Classical Modern European Philosophy, ed. Stephen F. brown (brepols, 1998), 105–20.

18 See Hattab, Origins and “Secondary Causation.”19 See Della Rocca, “body,” for alternative translations and readings of passages that are often

given an occasionalist slant in english translations.20 For example, Jorge Secada does not even seem to consider it an option (see the passage cited

in note 51), and Gorham (“Cartesian Causation,” 391) writes that “close examination will reveal that


the all-too-familiar passage found in Descartes’s second proof for the existence of God in the third Meditation, where he concludes that as much power is needed to keep him in existence as to create him (often referred to as “the doctrine of continual recreation”). at first glance, this appears to commit him to what Henri bergson dubbed the “cinematographic view”: the view that God recreates the world at every moment. Since one normally reads the Meditations first, it is only natural that the few references to divine concurrence and conservation scattered around Descartes’s corpus are subsequently read as confirming the cinematographic view and hence as supporting occasionalism. after all, if Descartes holds the cinemato-graphic view, then divine conservation and concurrence with secondary causes collapse into divine creation and it becomes hard to see how Descartes could be anything other than an occasionalist.

My primary task in this paper is to remove this stumbling block. In doing so I will bracket the question of whether time is discrete or continuous for Descartes, since there is no scholarly consensus on this issue and I have, as yet, no settled view on the matter. Furthermore, Garber has shown that either view of time is consistent with the doctrine of continuous recreation.21 I will focus on the argu-ments that support an occasionalist reading of Descartes, while remaining neutral in the debate concerning Cartesian time. this debate took up the better part of the last century with strong arguments on both sides.22 therefore, Descartes’s supposed position on the nature of time cannot be used to elucidate his views on the relationship between divine creation, conservation, and concurrence. Rather, we are more likely to arrive at answers regarding Descartes’s views on divine and natural causation, which can then help us make sense of his scanty references to the nature of time.

the case for Cartesian concurrentism is weak. and in any event there is a simpler and more fruitful solution to the problem of reconciling continuous causation and human causality in the Cartesian framework.”

21 Garber, Metaphysical Physics, 271.22 Whereas norman Kemp Smith, Jean Vigier, etienne Gilson, Jean andré Wahl, and Martial

Gueroult all read the above-mentioned argument in the third Meditation as implying temporal atom-ism, and provide additional support for this reading (what Garber calls the ‘discontinuity thesis,’ which normally goes hand in hand with the cinematographic view), Jean laporte, Jean-Marie beyssade, and Harry Frankfurt have given compelling arguments in favor of interpreting the moments of time as limits rather than instants (the continuity thesis). See norman Kemp Smith, Studies in Cartesian Phi-losophy (new York: Russell & Russell Inc., 1962), 131–32; Jean Vigier, “les idées de temps, de durée et d’éternité dans Descartes,” Revue Philosophique 89–90 (1920): 321–48; etienne Gilson, René Descartes Discours de la Méthode Texte et Commentaire (Paris: librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1947), 340–41; Jean andré Wahl, Du rôle de l’instant dans la philosophie de Descartes (Paris: F. alcan, 1920); Martial Gueroult, Descartes’s Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons, trans. Roger ariew (Minneapolis: Uni-versity of Minnesota Press, 1984), vol. I, 193–200; Jean laporte, Le Rationalisme de Descartes (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1950), 158–61; Jean-Marie beyssade, La Philosophie Première de Descartes Le Temps et la Cohérence de la Métaphysique (Paris: Flammarion, 1979). Richard arthur (“Continuous Creation, Continuous time: a Refutation of the alleged Discontinuity of Cartesian time,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 26 [1988]: 349–75) gives the most complete discussion of arguments on both sides and successfully responds to the arguments for the discontinuity view, thus lending credence to the continuity view. However, while he favors the continuity view, he recognizes that the arguments are not entirely conclusive. Dan Garber and, more recently, Jorge Secada (in the article cited in note 49) also conclude that we have reached a stalemate on this particular issue. For an excellent summary of the arguments see Garber, Metaphysical Physics, 266–73.


In short, while the immediate goal of this paper is to show that the concurrentist reading is a viable reading that is consistent with Descartes’s metaphysics—in par-ticular, his claims about the preservation of substances—it has two further goals: to provide additional evidence for my own variant of concurrentism, and to bring to the fore some considerations relevant to the ongoing debate on the ultimate nature of the duration of Cartesian substances in time. My approach will not be to examine Descartes’s references to causation and work my way up to their meta-physical grounding, but rather to work my way down from the claims Descartes and his contemporaries make about the action of the divine first cause. eventually these two lines of investigation should connect in the middle and provide some long overdue answers.

the passage that best sums up the latent conflict that we have been discussing is found in the Principia Philosophiae, II, 36–37. Here Descartes draws the standard Scholastic distinction between the “universal and primary cause” (God) and “sec-ondary and particular causes” (created causes). He identifies God as “the general cause of all the motions found in the world”23 and “certain rules or laws of nature” as “the secondary and particular causes of diverse motions we observe in individual bodies.”24 Descartes goes on to state that in the beginning God, as the first cause, created matter at the same time as motion and rest “and now, through his ordinary concurrence alone, he preserves as much motion and rest in the whole as he then placed in it” (my emphasis).25 the interpretation of this passage hinges on what is meant by God’s “ordinary concurrence.” If God’s ordinary concurrence is nothing but God’s conservation of matter together with all its states of motion and rest, and if this is identical to God’s act of creation, then it seems that the “secondary and particular causes” are just another way of speaking of God’s causality—one that focuses on the particular effects of his law-like action. On the other hand, if there is a distinction between God’s conservation of a substance’s being, and the ordinary concurrence by which he cooperates with the production of particular natural effects, then there is room for distinct secondary and particular causes of motion. before examining this instance of Descartes’s use of the Scholastic concept of divine concurrence in light of other crucial passages from Descartes’s corpus and Scholastic texts he consulted, let me first go through the historical background that guides my selection of Scholastic texts.

2 . h i s t o r i c a l b a c k g r o u n d

In September 1640, Descartes writes Marin Mersenne, requesting that he supply him with the names of authors of textbooks in philosophy, so that he can prepare himself for the objections to the Meditations he is expecting from the Jesuits. In particular, he wants to know which textbooks are currently much used as he re-members only the ones by Francisco toletus, antonio Ruvius, and the Coimbran commentators, all of which were first published in the late sixteenth and early sev-enteenth centuries. Descartes is referring to the Jesuit commentaries on aristotle’s

23 at VIII, 61. 24 at VIII, 6225 at VIII, 61


works that his teachers would have relied on during his formative years at the Jesuit college of la Flèche.26 but Descartes says he wants to save himself the trouble of reading “their huge tomes” and instead solicits Mersenne’s help in finding a cur-rent abstract of all Scholastic philosophy. Descartes tells Mersenne he recalls one by a Carthusian or Feuillant, but that he cannot remember his name.27

Presumably, Mersenne recommended to him the Summa Philosophiae Quadripar-tita (1609) by the Cistercian monk, eustachius à Sancto Paulo, because Descartes replies that he has purchased the book and that he considers it “the best book of its kind ever made.”28 He then announces his plan to write a complete textbook of his own philosophy in the form of a series of theses. In the same volume he plans to include a textbook of traditional philosophy, such as eustachius’s, and add his own notes at the end of each proposition, as well as a comparison between his and the traditional philosophy at the very end.29 He repeats this idea in another letter to Mersenne written in December 1640, this time indicating that if eustachius is still alive, he will request his permission to print his book.30 Unfortunately, eusta-chius passed away that very month, and so Descartes abandoned his plan in favor of the Principia Philosophiae as it exists today.

at the same time that Descartes is consulting eustachius’ work, Mersenne also recommends to him another textbook, the Tertia Pars Philosophiae (1617) by Charles François d’abra de Raconis. Descartes rejects this work, saying that it is less suited to his purposes than eustachius’, probably because it is too long.31 Whether or not Descartes actually bothered to read all of de Raconis’s textbook, or whether he just skimmed it and read pertinent chapters, is unclear, but it is not crucial for my purpose. It is clear that he took an interest in eustachius’s text. as it turns out, both eustachius and de Raconis studied philosophy at the University of Paris at around the same time, and their texts display a great degree of uniformity in doctrine.32 Roger ariew has argued convincingly that eustachius, de Raconis, and

26 all references will be to the following commentaries: [Manuel de Gois], Commentarii Collegii Conimbricensis Societatis Iesu In Octo Libros Physicorum Aristotelis Stagiritae [Commentarii Collegii Conimbricen-sis], 1593 (Reprint, Hildesheim: Georg Olms Verlag, 1984); antonio Rubio, Commentarii in octo libros Aristotelis de Physico auditu unà cum dubiis & quaestionibus hac tempestate agitari solitis [Commentarii in Octo libros] (lyon: Johannes Pillehotte, 1611); Francisco toledo, Commentaria una cum quaestionibus, in octo libros Aristotelis de Physica Auscultatione (Cologne: In Officina birckmannica Sumptibus, 1585).

27 to Mersenne, September 30, 1640, in The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. III. [CSMK], trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and anthony Kenny (Cambridge: Cam-bridge University Press, 1991), 153–54; at III, 185.

28 to Mersenne, november 11, 1640, in CSMK, 156; at III, 232. eustachius à Sancto Paulo (as-seline) had indeed been a Feuillant (a Cistercian order) since 1605. See Roger ariew, Descartes and the Last Scholastics [Last Scholastics] (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1999), 27.

29 to Mersenne, november 11, 1640, in CSMK, 156–57; at III, 233.30 CSMK, 161; at III, 259.31 to Mersenne, December 3, 1640; at III, 251. after Mersenne recommends de Raconis’ text-

book to him, Descartes replies on november 11, 1640 (at III, 234) that he will look at it, and that if it is shorter than eustachius’s, he will prefer it to the latter.

32 eustachius then joined a Cistercian order in Paris in 1605, and de Raconis went on to teach philosophy at a couple of colleges in Paris from 1611–16, eventually holding a chair in theology in Paris at the College de navarre. His Tertia Pars Philosophiae, originally published in 1617, probably consisted in the lectures he had given as a professor of philosophy, as it was common practice at this time to publish one’s lecture notes once one retired from teaching. See ariew, Last Scholastics, 27.


other Paris professors followed Scotus on basic issues.33 not only are eustachius and de Raconis in agreement on key issues, their texts often follow the exact same order. the major difference between the two textbooks is that eustachius’s is much more abbreviated. He presents his own position and opposing views in summary form, usually omitting all references and further argumentation. De Raconis, by contrast, identifies the proponents of various views and supplies the major arguments for each position. thus, whereas Descartes preferred eustachius’s text for publication purposes, because of its conciseness, he may well have turned to de Raconis’s text to familiarize himself with the arguments supporting the Scholastic theses. Similarly, it is instructive for us to consult de Raconis’s text in order to discover some of the details of the Scholastic views Descartes intended to compare to his own.

We know for a fact that, by the end of 1640, Descartes was reacquainting himself with the Scholastic aristotelian philosophy that he claimed to have abandoned years earlier in favor of a new method and metaphysics. but at this point, it seems that he turned not to the Jesuit texts he remembered from his early education, but to those of eustachius and possibly de Raconis. as Paris-educated Scotists, their brand of Scholastic aristotelianism differs rather markedly from the above-mentioned Jesuit commentators, who were supposed to follow St thomas aquinas on all non-controversial points. admittedly this allegiance to St thomas is more obvious in earlier Jesuit commentaries, such as toletus’s, whereas younger Jesuits, most notably Francisco Suarez, do not hesitate to disagree with thomas even on fundamental issues. nevertheless, there seems to have been a doctrinal rivalry between the Jesuits and Paris professors such as de Raconis, which sometimes expresses itself in terms of the opposition between broadly-speaking thomist and Scotist theses. In fact, de Raconis repeatedly singles out, and argues against, positions he attributes to thomists, Suarez, and the Coimbrans.34

Descartes is certainly aware of the distinctive program of the Jesuits; he indi-cates in a later letter to Mersenne that, had the Jesuits written more concisely, he would have preferred to use the writings of the Coimbrans than the text of eustachius. In addition, Descartes refers to Suarez twice in his replies to objectors to the Meditations (once in response to Caterus and once to arnauld).35 In fact,

33 ariew (Last Scholastics, 2–3) writes:

Contra Gilson, an analysis of eustachius’s works quickly shows that every doctrine one would call Scotist was held by him: the univocity of being; matter having being apart from form; space as radically relational; time as independent of motion; the plurality of forms; the theory of distinctions, including the formal distinction; individuation as haecceity, that is, a form; being in general as the proper object of the human intellect; and so forth. It is clear that eustachius was propounding common Parisian doctrines (with others, such as Charles Francois d’abra de Raconis and Scipion Dupleix), that these opinions became dominant (even with later Jesuits such as Pierre Gaultruche), and that they were often is-sued self-consciously as anti-thomist—thus, it is also evident that the categories ‘thomist’ and ‘Scotist’ were actors’ categories for seventeenth century Scholastics.

34 Roger ariew has suggested to me that this is perhaps an instance of the political rivalry between the University of Paris and the Jesuit Collège de Clermont, which was situated right across the street from the University and engaged in tough competition with it to attract students.

35 In response to Caterus, Descartes (The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, vol. II [CSM II] trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984],


the only specific reference to a Scholastic text in the entire Objections and Replies is to Suarez’s Metaphysical Disputations. Given this one exact textual reference found in the Fourth Set of Replies to arnauld, it is reasonable for us to assume that Des-cartes had access to a copy of the Metaphysical Disputations at this time. thus, he may well have consulted it on points where eustachius and de Raconis disagreed with the Jesuits, or at the very least, had some of Suarez’s views fresh in his mind from his recent replies to Objections.

at this point, a cautionary note is in order, lest I give the impression that Des-cartes is likely to have immersed himself in the subtle differences between Jesuit views and other Scholastic camps at this time. While we do not know exactly how he was using these texts, the only explicit reason he gives for preferring the Je-suits as he gets ready to write the Principia appears to be political, not doctrinal; as he explains to Mersenne, “I would have much preferred to have dealings with the great society than with an individual.”36 Descartes assumes that to use a Jesuit text, such as the commentaries of the Coimbrans, would automatically arouse the attention of, and engage him in debate with, the whole Jesuit order. His motiva-tion appears to be primarily political because, in an earlier letter to Mersenne, Descartes expressed the view that doctrinal differences between Scholastics did not really matter as follows: “It is easy to overturn the foundations on which they all agree, and once that has been done, all their disagreements over detail will seem foolish.”37 If we are to take this statement seriously, rather than as an instance of his usual anti-Scholastic rhetoric, then Descartes’s use of Scholastic concepts and terminology in the Principia may not be traceable to any particular Scholastic position, but may simply be understood by him in a general sense he takes to be common to all Scholastics. nevertheless, it would still be useful to identify any common ground among Suarez, eustachius, and de Raconis in order to determine how Descartes appropriates the Scholastic doctrine of concurrence.

I will now turn to other relevant passages in Descartes’s corpus and attempt to get clearer on how he might have understood this Scholastic concept in light of relevant background from Suarez’s Metaphysical Disputations, de Raconis’s Tertia Pars Philosophiae, and eustachius’s Summa Philosophiae Quadripartita.

3 . t h e c r u c i a l p a s s a g e s a n d t h e c a s e f o r o c c a s i o n a l i s m

around the time he is writing the Principia, Descartes’s most common use of the terms ‘concurrence’ and ‘ordinary concurrence’ is in reference to the action by which God conserves or preserves the being of substances. there are three oc-

69; at VII, 95) writes: “I am sure I have heard somewhere that Suarez argued as follows: ‘every limita-tion proceeds from some cause; therefore if something is limited and finite this is because its cause was either unable or unwilling to endow it with more greatness or perfection: and hence if something derives its existence from itself, and not from some cause, it is indeed unlimited and infinite.’” Descartes (CSM II, 164; at VII, 235) refers to Metaphysical Disputations, Part IX, Section 2, number 4 to show that Suarez’s use of the term ‘materially’ conforms to Descartes’s use in ‘materially false.’

36 Descartes to Mersenne, December 3, 1640; at III, 251, english translation is mine; november 11, 1640; CSMK 156; at III 232.

37 Ibid.


currences in Part I, articles 51–52 of the Principia, a couple in contemporaneous letters, and one in the Synopsis of the Meditations. they are as follows:

by substance we can understand nothing other than a thing which exists so that it requires no other thing to exist. and indeed only one substance can be understood to entirely require no other thing, namely, God. In fact, [with] all others, we perceive that they cannot exist except with the help of God’s concurrence.38

the French edition adds:

but because among created things, some are of such a nature that they cannot exist without some others, we distinguish them from those which need nothing but the ordinary concurrence of God by calling the latter ‘substances’ and the former ‘quali-ties’ or ‘attributes’ of these substances.39

However, created substance, both corporeal and mental, or thinking substance, can be understood to fall under this common concept: that they are things that need only the concurrence of God to exist.40

this I say: first that the light of the sun is not conserved in the bologna spar, but a new light is kindled in it by the sun’s rays, which can afterwards be seen in shadow. and second it would thereupon not be correctly inferred that anything whatsoever can be conserved without the influx [influxu] of God, because it is often permitted to illustrate true things through false examples, and it is much more certain that nothing can exist without the concurrence of God than that there can be no sun-light without the sun. there is no doubt that if God ceased from his concurrence, everything which he created would immediately depart into nothingness because before they were created and he lent them his concurrence they were nothing. nor ought they therefore be any less called substances, because when we say about a cre-ated substance that it subsists through itself, we do not thereby exclude the divine concurrence which it needs to subsist but we only mean that it is the kind of thing that can exist without any other created thing; the same cannot be said about the modes of things, like shape and number. nor would God show that his power was immense if he made the kinds of things which could afterwards exist without him. to the contrary, he would prove to be finite in this—that his power was finite, since things once created would no longer depend on him. When I say that it could not happen that God destroys something other than by ceasing from his concurrence, I do not fall back into a pitfall contrived by me, because otherwise he would take part in non-being through a positive action. For there is a great difference between those things that come to be by the positive action of God, all of which cannot be but exceedingly good, and those which happen on account of the cessation of posi-tive action, such as evils and sins and the destruction of some being, if any existing thing is ever destroyed.41

38 Descartes, Principia Philosophiae [PP], vol. I, 51; at VIII, 24. all translations of this text are mine unless otherwise indicated.

39 at IX, 47.40 the original latin reads: Possunt autem substantia corporea & mens, sive substantia cogitans, creata,

sub hoc communi conceptu intelligi, quòd sint res, quae solo Dei concursu egent ad existendum (PP, I 52; at VIII, 24–25). I take ‘creata’ to modify ‘substantia,’ not merely ‘substantia corporea.’ the French translation takes this reading as well: Et la notion que nous avons ainsi de la substance creée, se raporte en mesme façon à toutes, c’est à dire à celles qui sont immaterielles comme à celles qui sont materielles ou corporelles; car il faut seulement, pour entendre que ce sont des substances, que nous appercevions qu’elles peuvent exister sans l’ayde d’aucune chose creée (at IX, 47).

41 letter to Hyperaspistes, august 1641; at III, 429–30.


First since it is known that absolutely all substances, or things which must be created by God in order to exist, are by their nature incorruptible and cannot ever cease to exist unless they are reduced to nothing by God’s denying his concurrence to them and next, since it is indeed observed that body taken in general is a substance, therefore, it also never perishes. but the human body, in so far as it differs from other bodies, is certainly not constituted unless from a configuration of members and other accidents of this kind; however the human mind is not thus constituted from any accidents, but is pure substance.42

I did not in any place say that God does not concur immediately in all things and I explicitly affirmed the contrary in my reply to the theologian. [to Mersenne, april 21, 1641, referring to his reply to Caterus in which he discusses the preservation of being as a kind of efficient causation.]43

all of these passages agree that created substances are distinct from other cre-ated entities, such as modes, in that they require only the concurrence of God to exist, and that all substances would be annihilated if God withdrew his concurrence. So far, this is completely consistent with the standard Scholastic position on God’s conservation of being; Descartes even employs the analogy to the dependence of light on the sun commonly found in Scholastic accounts. However, there are some important differences between Scholastic aristotelian metaphysics and Cartesian metaphysics that affect the translation of this concept into a Cartesian context.

First, Descartes is clearly at odds with the Scholastic aristotelian view of sub-stance and, as seen in the above mentioned second proof in Meditation 3, this seems to have implications regarding the duration of substances. the crucial step of the argument that supports the doctrine of continuous recreation is summarized as follows in the Principia:

and nothing can obscure the clearness of this demonstration provided that we pay attention to the nature of time or the duration of things, which is such that its parts do not depend on each other, nor do they ever exist together. and therefore from the fact that we now are, it does not follow that we will also be in the time closely following unless some cause, without doubt the same one that produced us, continu-ously reproduces us, as it were, that is, conserves us.44

Garber sums up what I take to be the strongest reasons against reading this passage as implying the cinematographic view:

[On the cinematographic view], there is no particular reason why quantity of motion should be conserved, as opposed to any other quantitative aspect of body, or why size times speed should be chosen as a measure of question. but particularly puzzling on this view is why an immutable God should create motion at all. If God is immutable and acts immutably, then why should he sustain (create) bodies in different places at different moments of time? and if motion is nothing but God’s sustaining bodies in different places at different times, then, it would seem, a world sustained by an immutable God should be a world without divine motion.45

42 Synopsis Sex Sequentium Meditationum, Meditationes de Prima Philosophiae; at VII, 13–14.43 at III, 360; see CSM II, 78–79 for the response to Caterus.44 PP, I, 21; at VIII, 13. note that the usual mistranslation of ‘continuo veluti reproducat’ as ‘con-

tinually reproduces,’ instead of ‘continuously reproduces, as it were,’ already slants the reader towards the occasionalist interpretation.

45 Garber, Metaphysical Physics, 282.


Instead, Garber proposes what he calls the ‘divine impulse view,’ according to which God creates matter and then constantly applies the same amount of force to it, thus keeping it in motion by something we can only understand by analogy to the way we can move our bodies merely by exercising our wills (i.e., by some kind of divine shove).46 While it may appear that this leaves room for secondary causation on the part of bodies, the fact that Cartesian matter—consisting in passive extension—lacks substantial forms prevents it from exercising any such causality according to Garber. thus, whether one holds the cinematographic view or not, Descartes’s rejection of substantial forms in matter is normally thought to remove the possibility of divine concurrence with bodies.

Frankfurt captures the role of that substantial forms play in an aristotelian metaphysics very well:

the substantial form of an object determines what characteristics the object has during the successive stages of its continuing existence. thus the object’s various successive states manifest a natural order; the natural sequence of these states has an inner coherence, which consists in the progressive expression of a substantial form. On this account, natural change has an inherent direction, meaning, or goal. the various temporal segments of a thing’s history are in these respects not at all inde-pendent. as in a process of growth, the character of each segment depends at least in part on the character of the preceding. this dependency is not purely formal; it is a substantive relationship. the specific characteristics manifested by each temporal segment are pertinent, in ways that are determined by the thing’s substantial form, to the characteristics that will be manifested in the next.47

Descartes abandons this organic view of material substance when he redefines matter as pure extension, and so one would likewise expect this to disrupt the tight connection between the different phases of a physical being. However, Frankfurt claims that other interpreters are mistaken to take Descartes’s rejection of substan-tial forms as the reason for this doctrine of continuous creation. He is absolutely correct in this, since Descartes does characterize minds as the substantial forms of bodies, and what is being preserved at this stage of the Meditations is the meditator qua thinking thing, not his body, which is not yet known to exist. So while continu-ous recreation applies to bodies, given that it must apply to any created substance, Descartes first formulates the doctrine with respect to his own existence as a mind, i.e., a substantial form. Furthermore, as I will later show, most Scholastics at this time would regard substantial forms as radically dependent on God’s power for their continued existence and activity to the same degree that Descartes’s res extensa is dependent on God. Frankfurt thus concludes that Descartes’s must derive the doctrine of continuous creation not from any temporal and substantial discontinu-ity but from the causal doctrine that everything that is not self-caused must have a cause of its existence, and hence also of its continued existence.48

Secada follows Frankfurt with the difference that, while Frankfurt leaves room for secondary causation by claiming that the mutual independence of moments

46 Garber, Metaphysical Physics, 278–80.47 Harry Frankfurt, “Continuous Creation, Ontological Inertia, and the Discontinuity of time”

[“Continuous Creation”], in Necessity, Volition and Love (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 67.

48 Frankfurt “Continuous Creation,” 68.


of time is a purely formal/logical independence rather than a substantive/causal one, Secada, without further argumentation, asserts that Cartesian time segments are causally independent from one another.49 Secada then attributes to Descartes the view that all per se and non-accidental causes are simultaneous to their effects. the clearest support for this is found in the following passage.

Moreover the natural light does not repeatedly state that the defining nature [ratio-nem] of the efficient [cause] requires it to be prior to its effect. For to the contrary something does not have the nature of a cause, in the strict sense, except while it produces the effect, nor is it accordingly prior to it [the effect].50

but note that all Descartes commits himself to in this passage is that, in the strict sense, a cause is a cause only while it is actively producing the effect. this does not preclude him from considering something that produced an effect to be a cause per se (albeit in a less strict sense) in the moments leading up to the actual production of the effect. Secada, however, takes simultaneity to the effect to be a requirement for per se causes, and concludes that God is the only true cause for Descartes. 51

Gorham offers a slightly different argument for attributing body/body occasion-alism to Descartes. Unlike Frankfurt and Secada, he takes Descartes’s argument for continuous creation to follow from his premise about the nature of duration and time. Gorham claims that regardless of whether Descartes understands the independent parts of time to be instants or limits, their independence from each other implies that the cause of a substance’s existence at each moment must be simultaneous to the effect. In making this argument, Gorham, like Secada, as-sumes that the independence of the parts of time is a causal, rather than a logical, independence, and that all genuine causes (whether of a substance’s being or its modes) must be simultaneous to their effects. If this is so, then prior physical and mental causes—such as the states of my body and mind in the previous moment of time—are ruled out as causes of my existence (or anything else, for that matter). It then follows that God is the only genuine cause of my continued existence.52 Since Descartes likens God’s act of preservation to his act of creation, Gorham takes Descartes’s statement in the third Meditation—that “the distinction between preservation and creation is only a conceptual one”—as further evidence that God’s preservation of a substance consists in the moment-by-moment re-creation ex nihilo of the substance.53

From here it is only a short step to occasionalism. as numerous commenta-tors have pointed out, Descartes holds that there is only a conceptual distinction between a substance and its duration, and between a substance and its principal attribute (i.e., thought and extension are not really distinct from substance). So

49 Frankfurt, “Continuous Creation,” 66–67; Jorge Secada, “Descartes on time and Causality” [“time and Causality”], The Philosophical Review 99 (1990), 47. the passage that Secada cites reads as follows in the original latin: Tempus praesens & proxime praecedenti non pendet . . . (at VII, 165). Secada (“time and Causality,” 62) translates it as follows: “the present time has no causal dependence at all on that which has immediately preceded it.”

50 at VII, 108; Cf. Secada, “time and Causality,” 68–70.51 Secada, “time and Causality,” 70–71. 52 Geoffrey Gorham “Cartesian Causation,” 394–402.53 Gorham, “Cartesian Causation,” 392.


if, in conserving substances in being, God successively recreates them in indepen-dent moments of time (whether those moments are instants or limits), then he also, by the very same action, recreates their natures as thinking and extended substances independently of the prior moments. add to this the fact that there is only a modal distinction between the particular modes and the principal at-tribute of a substance, and it is logical to conclude that God’s act of recreating a substance along with its principal attribute also completely determines all the particular modes it has at that time, independent of prior moments. but if that is the case, then there is neither need nor room for secondary causes, and any additional causal influence would be a case of causal over-determination, which is the kind of causal role Gorham attributes to the human will.

the close connection between the nature of a substance and its modes is made clear in Descartes’s letter to Mesland of February 9,1645:

by this word ‘surface’ I do not mean a certain substance or real nature which could be destroyed by the omnipotence of God, but only a mode or manner of being, which cannot be changed without a change in that in which or through which it exists; just as it implies a contradiction for the square shape of a piece of wax to be taken away from it but nevertheless without any of the parts of the wax changing their place.54

the dependence of non-substantial being on God is also evident from the fol-lowing passage:

In attending to the immensity of God, it is manifest that there can be nothing whatso-ever which does not depend on him: not only nothing subsisting, but also no order, no law, and no reason for the true or good.55

every single mode, then, is literally the direct result of a series of creations ex nihilo of the substance in which it inheres.56

last but not least, matter is passive for Descartes, and so it seems to follow that, if there are any other causes besides God, then these secondary causes must be minds. Descartes’s commitment to the passivity of matter is clear from several claims he makes, including the following: “thus extension in length, breadth and depth constitutes the nature of corporeal substance”;57 and, “For, I judged that to have the power of moving itself, in like manner as [the power] of sensing or of thinking in no way belonged to the nature of body.”58 now that I have shown how, if one starts from the Meditations, one can easily be led, by a series of logical steps, to an occasionalist reading, I will sum up the major premises supporting this chain of reasoning so as to critically examine them.

based on the passages cited above, we can attribute to Descartes five meta-physical commitments, summarized below as (1) to (5). together, these claims are often taken as sufficient to conclude that Descartes is an occasionalist about body/body causation. However, an additional assumption is required to draw this conclusion in a valid manner. I will show that this assumption is unwarranted,

54 at IV, 163–64.55 Replies to Sixth Objections; at VII, 435.56 CSM II, 33. 57 at VIII, 25.58 Second Meditation; at VII, 26.


because Descartes’s claims can more plausibly (and more charitably) be read as a commitment to the fundamental elements of the prevailing Scholastic doctrine of concurrence. the relevant metaphysical commitments that Descartes explicitly upholds can be summed up as follows:

(1) God immediately concurs with all things. (2) God concurs with substances by preserving their being and attributes. (3) a mode cannot change without a change in the substance in which it

inheres.(4) Material substance is passive and requires an external cause in order to

undergo any change.(5) God’s conservation consists in his continuously recreating the substance.

those who favor an occasionalist reading conclude from these claims that, according to Descartes, God’s concurrence is not just necessary for all physical effects to take place, but also, given the direct dependence of modes on sub-stances and their attributes, it is sufficient. but as Gorham correctly realizes, for this conclusion to follow, another metaphysical commitment must be attributed to Descartes, namely:

(6) God’s concurrence is nothing but God’s conservation (which following 5 is just a continued recreation) of a substance.

the problem is that, unlike (1)–(5), Descartes never actually states (6). I will show that there is no reason to attribute (6) to Descartes. On purely logical grounds (1)–(5) do not imply a commitment to (6); there are alternative ways to make sense of these claims. Furthermore, textual evidence will reveal that Descartes did not restrict concurrence to “conservation.”

4 . i n d e f e n s e o f d e s c a r t e s : t h e c a s e f o r a c o n c u r r e n t i s t r e a d i n g

Central to arguments that have been made in favor of reading Descartes as an oc-casionalist is the fact that (3) and (4) run counter to Scholastic metaphysics. (4) contradicts the Scholastic attribution of active powers to bodies. However, this alone does not prove that Descartes was an occasionalist. I have argued elsewhere that Descartes can deny intrinsic forces to body and still count as a concurrentist to his contemporaries, and that he in fact adopts something like the Jesuit concurrentist so-lution by substituting the laws of nature for aristotelian secondary causes (individual substances and their forms).59 the laws effectively function like a universal form of res extensa. as mentioned above, such a move would not undermine Descartes’s com-mitment to real natural causes because the usual criteria at this time for considering something to be a genuine secondary efficient cause did not include that it possessed an independent agency. therefore, contrary to popular belief, (4) is not incompat-ible with Scholastic concurrentist doctrines, making it more plausible that Descartes situated himself squarely in the concurrentist camp. I now turn my attention to (3) to see whether it invalidates a concurrentist reading of Descartes.

59 See Hattab, “Secondary Causation.”


Descartes’s claim that modes cannot change without a change in the substance goes directly against the Scholastic view that there are non-essential properties (like those present in the eucharist) that can be preserved or destroyed without a change in the substances in which they inhere.60 Conversely, for Scholastic ar-istotelians, the preservation of a substance and its essential properties does not necessarily ensure the conservation of all its accidents. Hence, it seems plausible to assume that this is the primary reason why most Scholastics hold that a separate act of concurrence by God is required to ensure the existence and persistence of a particular action by the substance at a certain time. Descartes, by contrast, denies that any mode can persist without the substance in which it inheres. Furthermore, each particular mode (e.g., a body’s particular size, shape, and position) is just a modification or way of its being extended, and so modes do not appear to be distinct from the essential properties of the substance they modify to the same degree that accidental properties are from the substantial form of the substance in which they inhere. Given the above assumption about the reason behind the Scholastic commitment to concurrentism, it is often concluded that the Cartesian substance/mode ontology, by contrast, renders redundant any divine concurring act over and above God’s conservation of Cartesian substances. Since Descartes firmly rejects the Scholastic substance/accident distinction, it appears as though all Cartesian modes would have to be conserved automatically along with the substance in which they inhere. therefore, there is no need for Descartes to posit any further action on God’s part. However, this reasoning rests on a mistaken understanding of the Scholastic doctrines of conservation and concurrence.

the Scholastic texts to which Descartes refers all agree that God’s conservation of a substance’s esse is not sufficient to account for a substance’s actions. Hence, they posit a distinct act of concurrence by God to ensure that a substance acts. but this act of concurrence is not limited to accidents of the substance. God’s concurrence is required even for the substance to exercise the powers that spring naturally and necessarily (barring divine intervention) from its substantial form (e.g. God must concur with fire for it to produce heat). So, the fact that Descartes’s modes are more tightly connected to a substance’s essence than are Scholastic accidents has no bearing on the question whether concurrence just amounts to

60 as alfred Freddoso explains in his Introduction (On Creation, Conservation and Concurrence: Meta-physical Disputations 20–22 [MD], trans alfred J. Freddoso, [South bend, Indiana: St augustine’s Press, 2002], civ–cv), the doctrine that God concurs with the actions of substances in addition to conserving their being, makes it possible to account not only for the eucharist (in which case God preserves the accidental properties of the wine and the bread while replacing their substance with that of Christ), but also to account for other miracles such as that of the fiery furnace. In the latter case, the three men locked in the furnace escaped being burned to a crisp because God withheld his concurrence from the natural power of fire to burn flesh. On this account of the miracle, the substance of the fire is conserved, but its natural power to burn is not actualized, for that requires an act of divine concurrence, distinct from divine conservation. by requiring God’s concurrence with natural causes for them to produce their natural effects, Scholastics avoided the problematic alternative, which would be to posit a destructive act on the part of God to account for miraculous effects (e.g. God destroys the natural power of fire while the men are in the furnace and then restores it later on). If one explains this in terms of God withholding his ordinary concurrence, then God is not actively willing the destruction of anything; rather, he is simply refraining from a positive act. this is much more consistent with God’s goodness as it does not attribute to him the active will to destroy. that Descartes is also committed to this view of God’s action is seen in his letter to Hyperaspistes, cited above.


conservation for him. For just as the Scholastics posit a distinct act of divine con-currence to account for those actions that flow directly from a created substance’s essence, Descartes could likewise hold that a distinct act of divine concurrence is required to account for those modes that follow from the principal attribute of a substance. In conclusion, we must separate the Scholastic distinction between divine conservation and concurrence from the distinction between essential and accidental properties. Once we do so, it is clear that Descartes’s commitment to (3) likewise does not rule out concurrentism in favor of an occasionalist interpre-tation. Whether we are talking about substantial forms and their active powers or res extensa and its modes, all are radically dependent on God for their continued existence and activation.

Descartes’s commitment to (3) only implies occasionalism if we assume a certain interpretation of (5). So let me now turn to that point on the list, which reads “God’s conservation consists in his continuously recreating the substance.” If this continuous recreation is assumed to consist in a series of separate acts of creation, whereby the substance is created ex nihilo from moment to moment, then God’s conservation cannot simply consist in the continuous granting of esse to an already created substance. Rather, the substance, along with its principal attribute and modes, must be created from scratch by God at every instant. If that were the case, then an additional act of concurrence to preserve the attribute and its modes would be redundant, for every aspect of the substance would already be caused by the one creative act. On the basis of contemporaneous texts, I will argue that interpreting ‘continuous recreation’ as meaning a successive series of atomistic acts of creation whereby the substance is created again from scratch at every moment does not fit the way these terms were used at the time. If Descartes is indeed following the usual sense of this phrase, then it is unlikely that he views time as discrete and conservation as correspondingly cinematographic.

4.1 Conservation as a Continuous Creation

Suarez attributes the view that conservation is a continuous creation to St thomas aquinas. It is striking how close the formulation Suarez attributes to aquinas is to the formulation Descartes uses. Suarez writes: “St thomas often claims that conservation is, as it were, a continuous creation.”61 Descartes writes:

and therefore from the fact that we now are, it does not follow that we will also be in the time closely following unless some cause, without doubt the same one that produced us, continually reproduces us as it were: that is, conserves us.62

Suarez offers several arguments to show that God’s conservation and creation are one and the same action and concludes, like Descartes, that there is only a concep-tual distinction between the two. He argues that there cannot be a real distinction between God’s creation and conservation of being on the basis that:

an action has its unity from its terminus63 and its principle—or from its patient as well, if it is an action on a patient. but the production and the conservation have exactly

61 MD, 21, sec. 2, 122. 62 PP, I, 20; at VIII, 13.63 Des Chene (Physiologia, 23) explains the role that this key concept plays in Scholastic aristotelian

physics: “in any natural change suitably described, there will be a subject, the mobile, a point of incep-


the same terminus [namely the being of the thing]; therefore, if the principle is the same [which it is, in this case, since both actions are from the same agent] then the action we are discussing will be the same, since creation has no subject [i.e. there is no patient].64

In other words, failing any distinction on the basis that there are distinct agents or distinct patients of the action, there can be a real distinction only if the actions have distinct termini, which is not the case with God’s creation and conservation. therefore, as Suarez explains, a merely conceptual distinction is drawn on the following grounds:

the distinction is none other than the one mentioned above, namely, that ‘creation’ connotes a denial of previously possessed esse, whereas ‘conservation’ to the contrary, connotes the possession of the same esse that was previously had. now the claim that this is only a conceptual difference seems evident per se and is made readily obvious by an analogy derived from the terminus itself. For the created effect itself qua existing at the first moment can only be conceptually distinguished from itself qua existing in the whole of the subsequent time; therefore, the same is true in the case of the indivisible action and, accordingly, the different names are imposed to signify the action under these two different qualifications or connotations.65

Much has been made of the implied temporal atomism in the second proof Des-cartes gives for the existence of God in the third Meditation (see Principles I, 21; at VIII, 200; quoted above). I have explained why I will not, in this paper, attempt to determine whether Descartes ultimately held that time, and hence the duration of a created substance, is continuous or discrete. I will merely point out here that, on either reading, a conceptual distinction can be made between God’s creation and conservation in the manner Suarez suggests. For, whether we assume that God is preserving substances across continuous or non-continuous time slices, God is still causing something that already existed in the prior moment to continue to exist. the term ‘creation,’ then, only properly applies to God’s creative act when there is no prior moment when the substance existed. therefore, from the fact that he claims there is only a conceptual distinction between God’s creation and conservation of substances, nothing can be concluded about whether or not Descartes was committed to temporal atomism. Furthermore, one can easily account for Descartes’s use of the expression ‘continuously reproduces’ in the same way that Suarez accounts for the common Scholastic description of conservation as a “continuous coming-to-be”:

when a permanent entity is said to be in a sort of coming-to-be, this way of speaking is ambiguous. For ‘to be always coming to be’ signifies, strictly speaking, to be in a sort of continuous transition and succession. and on this reading the proposition

tion, the terminus a quo, and a point of (natural) cessation, the the terminus ad quem.” While Descartes denies that created things have intrinsic natural ends in the sense of a natural resting place that they strive for by their own natures, he does not deny that God has a purpose for all things and ensures that they move in accordance with his will towards their ends. However, he does deny that physics can give us knowledge of God’s final ends. Still, given knowledge of the laws of nature, rules of collision, and enough information about surrounding bodies, Descartes would say a physicist could calculate at which point the particular motion of a particular body would be transferred to another and hence cease to be a mode of that particular body. In this weaker sense, Descartes would accept that there is a terminus ad quem to every particular motion.

64 MD, 21, sec. 2, 122.65 MD, 21, sec. 2, 125.


is false . . . On the other hand, there is another possible reading, namely, that the creature, for as long as it exists, has an actual dependence on the First Cause, from whom it is always receiving esse through the same actual influence by which it was created. and on this reading the proposition is true—though it is improper, since, strictly speaking, ‘coming-to-be’ connotes a sort of newness of being.66

eustachius never addresses the issue of the nature of God’s conservation and its relation to his creation in his textbook, which is perhaps why Descartes never bothers to clarify it in the Principia. However, de Raconis does address it, by directly opposing Suarez’s position and key arguments in its favor. In fact, de Raconis upholds the view Suarez refutes, which is attributed to Henry of Ghent and Gregory of Rimini. On their view, creation—defined as the action by which God first produced things ex nihilo—is a distinct action from conservation “from the nature of the thing” (ex natura rei). this means that there is more than a conceptual distinction between the two actions. One of the arguments Suarez discusses as an argument in support of this position is that,

if an entity were conserved by the same action by which it comes to be, then for as long as it existed, it would always be in a sort of continuous coming-to-be, since its initial coming-to-be would continuously endure. but this consequent seems utterly absurd, namely, that a substantival and permanent entity should be in continuous flux.67

Whether or not Descartes consciously took the Jesuit side in this debate, at the very least he seems to share their interpretation of the phrase ‘continuous com-ing-into-being,’ since he does not take God’s continuous recreation of substances to make them any less permanent or substantival. Despite its radical dependence on God, the Cartesian universe is never presented as a universe in flux.

Clearly, when it comes to the dependence of substances on God, Descartes uses ‘concurrence’ or ‘ordinary concurrence’ to designate God’s conservation of existing extended and thinking substances. We can make sense of Descartes’s reference to God’s “continuously reproducing” substances without committing him to an atomistic recreation of the universe from scratch at every moment (the cinematographic view which Descartes’s contemporaries regarded as a universe in flux). but either way, the action by which God conserves substances is only conceptually distinct from his creation of them. However, the question remains whether concurrence just consists in the conservation of substances for Descartes. this would imply that other entities, such as modes, require God’s concurrence only in the indirect sense of depending on God’s conservation of the substance in which they inhere as the necessary condition for their existence. but recall Descartes’s claim (in his letter to Mersenne) that he always upheld the view that God concurred immediately in all things. If we read ‘things’ (choses) here in the broad sense to include non-substantial entities, then Descartes requires more than divine conservation to account for this. Scholastic texts of this period agree that God’s conservation of substances is only a mediated and remote form of divine concurrence with respect to the production of other natural effects. If Descartes meant by his statement to Mersenne that non-substances and substances alike

66 MD, 21, sec. 2, 129. 67 MD, 21 sec. 2, 120.


require God’s immediate concurrence, then according to common usage at the time, the mediated concurrence provided by God’s conservation of substances and their natures cannot be what Descartes had in mind.

I have shown that metaphysical commitment (5) need not be read in a way that reduces all divine concurrence to a series of atomistic creations ex nihilo, and is more naturally read along the lines that Suarez proposes. let me now turn to the remaining problematic metaphysical commitments on my list to determine whether they can plausibly be read to allow for a form of divine concurrence over and above the kind of concurrence known as God’s conservation. Once another form of concurrence is admitted, then the case can be made for genuine secondary causes with which God concurs. I will now address the following points that proponents of the occasionalist reading take as evidence for occasionalism: (1) and (2).

4.2 Concurrence As Distinct From Conservation

there is ample evidence—both internal to Descartes’s texts and external to them—to suggest that we should not restrict Descartes’s use of ‘concurrence’ to God’s conservation. the literal translation of the latin verb ‘concurrere’ is ‘to run together.’ the way the term is used in Scholastic textbooks of this period reflects the root meaning since ‘concurrence’ is not just applied to God’s causing sub-stances to exist, but to any two causes that come together to produce an effect. not only is it incorrect to assume that the term is restricted to God’s conserving action, it is incorrect to assume that it restricted to divine action at all, since it is regularly used to describe the action whereby one created cause aids another in the production of an effect. God’s conservation is thus merely a subspecies of this broader notion of concurrence that is applied to any cause that cooperates with another cause to produce an effect. De Raconis makes this amply clear by the way he organizes his discussion of this topic. the title of this part of his textbook is simply ‘On the Concurrence of God,’ and it is further subdivided into a section entitled ‘On Conservation’ and a section on the concurrence of God with second-ary causes. Whereas the former deals with God’s concurrence with regard to the being of things, the latter focuses on God’s concurrence with their actions. For Suarez, the distinction between God’s conservation and God’s concurrence with the actions of his creatures is simply the distinction between God’s mediate action and his immediate action:

one must necessarily claim that God has an immediate influence in one way as well as a mediate influence in another way. For he acts mediately to the extent that he gives the power of acting to the proximately acting secondary cause and conserves that power; and in this sense it is true that he acts through the secondary cause and that he has created it in order to share with it the role of acting. On the other hand, he acts immediately, since it is also the case that the First Cause himself influences such an action or effect per se and by his own power.68

Descartes also recognizes that God concurs not only by conserving substances and their natures, but also by cooperating with the actions of things in existence. For example, in the fourth Meditation, he writes:

68 MD, 22, sec. 1, 158.


nor ought I in the end also complain that God concurs with me to elicit those acts of will or those judgments in which I am mistaken. For those acts are entirely true and good insofar as they depend on God, and, in a certain way, there is a greater perfec-tion in me because I am able to elicit them, than if I were not able [to do so]. the privation, however, in which alone the formal account of falsity and error consists, in no way needs the concurrence of God, since it is not a thing, nor is privation related to it as a cause, but it ought only be called a negation.69

In May 1641, Descartes writes to Regius:

What Voetius marks down here of you in no way opposes you since theologians in-deed say that no created substance is the immediate principle of its operation. they understand this as follows: that no creature can operate without the concurrence of God; not, however, that it ought to have a certain created faculty, distinct from itself, through which to operate. For it would be absurd to say that such a created faculty could be the immediate principle of a certain operation, but the substance itself could not.70

In the Meditations, Descartes also uses the term ‘to concur’ to describe the coop-eration of created causes:

nor can it be conceived that per chance several partial causes concurred to effect me, or that I received the idea of one among the perfections which I attribute to God from one [cause] and the idea of another from another.71

next, approaching closer towards myself and investigating of what type my errors are (which alone prove some imperfection in me), I notice that they depend on two causes concurring at the same time, namely on the faculty of knowing which is within me, and on the faculty of choosing or freedom of the will; that is, they depend on the intellect and simultaneously on the will. 72

In all these contexts, the created causes, faculties or acts to which God lends his concurrence, or which concur with each other, appear to be, or belong to think-ing substances. However, there are hints elsewhere that God’s concurrence is not restricted to the effects of minds but extends to all natural effects. Consider the following passage from the Discourse on the Method:

In order to obscure all these things a bit and be able to say more freely what I thought about it, without being obliged to follow or refute the received opinions of learned men, I even resolved to leave this whole world here to their disputes and to speak only of what would happen in a new [world], if God now created, somewhere in the Imaginary Spaces, enough matter to compose it; and that he agitated the different parts of this matter differently and without order in such a way that he made it into a Chaos, as confused as the Poets could feign, and that afterwards, he did nothing else but lend his ordinary concurrence to nature, and let her act following the laws that he has established.73

In this passage, God’s “ordinary concurrence” could be read either as God’s con-servation of nature (leaving nature to then act on its own) or as his immediate cooperation with nature’s actions according to the laws. Written after Descartes

69 at VII, 60–61.70 at III, 372.71 at VII, 50.72 at VII, 56.73 Discours de la Méthode et Essais; at VI, 42.


has reacquainted himself with Scholastic philosophy, the Principia Philosophiae is clearer. So with this background in mind, let us now return to the passage in Part II, article 36 with which I began.

With the nature of motion having been noted in this way, it is necessary to consider its cause and this is twofold: namely, first the universal and primary cause, which is the general cause of all the motions which are in the world; and then the particular [cause] from which it occurs that individual parts of matter acquire motions which they did not have before. and as for what pertains to the general [cause], it seems clear to me that this is no other than God himself, who in the beginning created matter, at the same time as motion and rest; and now, through his ordinary concurrence alone, conserves as much motion and rest in the whole as he then placed [there].74

First, it is clear that Descartes makes a distinction here between the universal cause of motion, which conserves the total quantity of motion (God), and the particular cause of new particular motions. However, at first, the same ambiguity arises when it comes to determining how exactly God lends his concurrence to these so-called particular causes. Since Descartes’s use of the term ‘ordinary concurrence’ in this passage refers to God’s conservation of the total amount of motion and rest, and not to an immediate concurrence with particular motions of individual bodies, Descartes could simply be referring to God’s mediated concurrence with the modes of motion and rest by way of his conservation of material substance. Hence, those who favor an occasionalist reading can plausibly reinterpret Descartes’s reference to particular causes in this passage as a metaphorical way of speaking of the mere occasions for God to exercise his one unchanging creative/conserving action. However, as soon as we read on, we see that things are more complex.

Descartes does not write as though the way in which God conserves the total quantity of motion is identical to the way in which he conserves the matter and modes he created in the beginning. Instead he makes a separate argument that, in addition to it seeming manifest to him (manifestum mihi videtur) that God conserves the matter, motion, and rest that he created in the beginning, we should suppose (putemus) that God conserves the total quantity of motion in such a way that, when one part of matter moves faster, another part of matter must move more slowly by the corresponding quantity. Descartes gives the following justification for suppos-ing that this is the way in which God conserves the total quantity of motion:

For although that motion is nothing other in the moved matter than its mode, nevertheless it has a certain and determinate quantity, which we easily understand can be the same in the whole universe of things although it changes in its individual parts. namely thus: for example, we suppose when one part of matter is moved twice as fast as another, and this other is twice as big as the previous, that there is as much motion in the smaller one as in the bigger one, and the slower the motion of one part is, the faster the motion of a certain other equal to it becomes. We also understand that perfection is in God not only because he is immutable in himself, but also because he operates in the most constant and immutable manner, so that, therefore, with the exception of those motions which are rendered certain by evident experience or divine revelation and those which we perceive or believe to come to be without any change in the creator, we ought to suppose no others in his operations lest thereupon inconstancy is shown in him. From this alone [i.e.] that God moved

74 at VIII, 61.


the parts of matter when he first created them, and now he conserves that whole matter in the same way and by the same reason by which he previously created it, it follows that it is most in accordance [consentaneum] with reason that we suppose that he also always conserves just as much motion in it.75

note the delicate balancing act that Descartes must play here. Without making any other suppositions, nothing else would follow from God’s immutability but his conservation of material substance and its modes as found in the initial state of creation. but if God simply conserved all bodies, exactly as they were when he first created them, then logically, given his immutability, only two possibilities would follow with respect to the natural world in which we live. the first possibility would be that we live in a Parmenidean world where, in reality, nothing ever changes and all change is an illusion due to the deceptiveness of our senses. as a natural philosopher devoted to the ideal that science uncovers true natural causes, this would never do for Descartes (not to mention the fact that it raises the spectre of the evil deceiver). the second logical possibility is that the changes we observe are real, so we are not deceived all the time, but since God is immutable, these changes must then be solely due to natural causes acting independently by means of the powers that God granted them at the time of creation. this is consistent with the natural philosopher’s ideal of science, but from a theological point of view, deism could not be defended at this time without incurring serious charges of impiety.76 So what is a natural philosopher in Descartes’s position to do? He must somehow fill the logical gap between God’s immutable act of conservation and the ever-changing natural world. the addition of a distinct act of concurrence by God forms the bridge, but this step is neither self-evident nor straightforward, as is clear from the tentative language Descartes uses. His choice of words indicates that it is reasonable for us to suppose that God’s concurrence conserves the same total quantity of motion and rest by adding and subtracting equivalent amounts to and from different parts of matter, but it is not a strictly logical and clear deri-vation from God’s perfection of immutability. While it may be a supposition that is “most in accordance with reason,” it is not “manifest” since we cannot logically rule out the Parmenidean and Deist possibilities.

If the ordinary concurrence by which God preserved the same total amount of motion consisted in nothing more than his conservation of substances, and if the mere conservation of extended substances sufficed to account for all their par-ticular modes at any given time, then it would not merely be “most in accordance with reason” to “suppose” that God preserves the same quantity of motion; it would be a logically necessary and manifest conclusion. For how could the modes taken together ever vary if all modes taken individually are completely determined by God’s immutable act of conserving substances? the fact that Descartes presents the way that God lends his ordinary concurrence to the motions of bodies as a most reasonable supposition, rather than as self-evident truth, indicates that the act by which God lends his concurrence to preserve a non-substantial entity (namely, the total amount of motion in the universe)—while reasonably thought

75 PP, II, 36; at VIII, 61–62.76 Descartes would have certainly been aware of this since his friend, Marin Mersenne, published

his L’Impieté des Deistes in June 1624, shortly after Descartes’s sojourn in Paris in the 1620s.


to mirror it—is not completely indistinguishable from God’s conservation of the total amount of extended substance.

this is consistent with Scholastic criteria for distinguishing between the dif-ferent kinds of divine concurrence. Recall that two actions with the same agent and patient (or no patient at all), such as God’s creation and conservation, were thought not to be really distinct (i.e., only conceptually distinct) by Suarez because they had the same terminus: in this case, the being of the substance. Conversely, had there been diverse termini, this would have implied that there were distinct actions on the part of the same agent. but this is precisely the case with God’s conservation and what the Scholastics refer to as his immediate concurrence. Whereas the terminus of God’s conservation is the being of a substance and the preservation of its nature, the terminus of God’s immediate concurrence is the particular action and/or the resulting particular effect of the substance’s action. For Suarez, attributing a distinct concurring action to God, goes hand in hand with the action having a distinct terminus. De Raconis appears to accept this as-sumption, but, against Suarez, he argues that God’s act of creation has a distinct terminus from his act of conservation, since the former aims at the thing in becom-ing, whereas the latter aims at the preservation of the thing already made.77 Given that we have a consensus among the Scholastic texts here, it is plausible that in appropriating the Scholastic doctrine of concurrence, Descartes would likewise base any distinctions he wished to draw within God’s concurrence on the termini of his actions. the advantage of reading Descartes this way is that it allows us to distinguish between different levels of concurrence, which can then be related to, and help us make sense of, the different layers of causation Descartes appeals to in his natural philosophy.78

Relying on the Scholastic assumption that otherwise identical actions are dif-ferentiated by their termini, we can first make a distinction between two levels of divine concurrence in Descartes’s texts. It is clear that God’s act of conserving the total quantity of motion and rest has a distinct terminus from God’s conservation of the substance itself, in the sense that matter as extended substance is at least mod-ally distinct from all its modes of motion and rest taken as a whole. therefore, the ordinary concurrence by which God preserves these modes is, from our point of view, a distinct action from his act of conserving substances. the main difference from the Scholastic distinction between two kinds of divine concurrence is that Descartes’s substance/mode ontology does not allow for co-action between God and the strictly passive modes of material substances. Hence for Descartes, God’s immediate concurrence with non-substances must be reinterpreted as another

77 Charles François d’abra de Raconis, Tertia Pars Philosophiae seu Physica [Tertia Pars Philosophiae] (lyons: Irenaei barlet, 1651), 145.

78 Garber and I are in agreement insofar as we both take Descartes to distinguish between God’s conservation and concurrence. Where we part ways is that Garber does not distinguish God’s conserva-tion of the total quantity of motion from the causal role he plays in the production of particular motions. Garber (Metaphysical Physics, 277) writes: “Conceived as such, there would appear to be a distinction between God as sustainer of the world, a substantial cause, keeping things in existence, and God as a cause in motion, a modal cause, causing bodies to have the particular motion they have, determining, at least in part, their modes.” I propose a further distinction between God’s conservation of the total quantity of motion and his concurrence with the causes of particular motions.


form of conservation—only now, the terminus of the action is the preservation of the total quantity of certain modes, rather than simply the esse (being) of the substances these modes inhere in.

So far, we still do not have any concurrence in the sense of God’s action coming together with created causes. but if we persist in this way of reading Descartes, we can identify yet a third level of concurrence. at this level, a coming together of God, created substances, and modes does become crucial. Specifically, the laws that follow from God’s immutable action, together with the states of matter that exist at any given time, must concur to produce the particular motions we observe. While Descartes thinks the laws of nature can be derived from God’s immutability (on the assumption that God always preserves the same quantity of motion), and while these laws can account for the most general properties of motion, it is clear from the following passage in Le Monde why concurrence with another cause is needed to account for the ever-changing distribution of motion among the parts of matter:

For from the mere fact that he continues to conserve it [matter and its qualities] in this way, it follows necessarily that there must be several changes in its parts which, since they cannot, it seems to me, be properly attributed to the action of God, because it does not ever change, I attribute to nature. the rules according to which these changes take place I call the ‘laws of nature.’79

In the Principia, Descartes attributes changes in particular motions—such as di-vergence from the rectilinear path of motion, or the transfer of motion from one part of matter to another—to the operation of the three laws of nature on matter. but whether he emphasizes the causal role of nature or its laws, in both Le Monde and the Principia, Descartes identifies a terminus that is distinct from extended substance and the sum total of motion, namely, change. In other words, we have reached a third level of concurrence and this time, given that God’s action is immutable, Descartes must appeal to something besides God’s action to account for the mutable terminus. Whereas the other two termini are constant and can be accounted for by God’s conservation alone, at this level, in order to account for the observed effects, Descartes must appeal to the concurrence of the immutable laws of nature with the mutable material condition. It is this level of concurrence that Descartes has in mind when he appeals to secondary and particular causes in his physics, as change can only be accomplished when God—as the universal, unchanging cause—cooperates with particular, changing causes.

De Raconis, like Descartes, holds that God cannot be the cause of any diversity in the effect, for he does all things uniformly.80 He explains that

the first cause from itself is indifferent to all acts of whatever species, to acting at whatever time, and the second cause alone is the reason why it produces an act of such a species, and not another, why it acts here and now, in such a way, at such a time and not another . . . 81

79 at XI, 37.80 De Raconis, Tertia Pars Philosophiae, 160.81 causa prima de se est indifferens ad omnes actus cuiuscumque speciei, ad agendum quolibet tempore, solaque

causa secunda est ratio, cur talis speciei actum producat, & non alterius, cur hic, & nunc agat, tali modo & non alio, tali tempore, & non alio . . . (De Raconis, Tertia Pars Philosophiae,160).


De Raconis is here expressing a common division of labor between the first cause and the second causes. the reason behind it is this: since God’s action is universal and capable of creating any effect in the presence of the cause, God’s participation in the action cannot be responsible for any of the specific features of the action and its effect. For example, according to the Jesuits, God is responsible for the existence of an effect that is one in number, whereas the substantial form of the creature God concurs with causes the effect to come to be here and now and to be of a certain species.82 this explains why humans only give birth to other humans and only at certain times, whereas God could have us producing baby rabbits and alligators at any time. the existing material conditions and particular circumstances further particularize the effect by giving it the features that differentiate it from other members of the same species (e.g., Sue gives birth to Isabella, a blue-eyed, baby girl, not a generic baby). De Raconis has a slightly different division of labor from the Jesuits. He objects to the claim of the Coimbran commentators that the first cause determines the second with respect to singularity and asserts against them that the circumstances, dispositions of matter, and the place determine the singularity of the act.83 In other words, God’s action is not even specific enough to produce an action and effect that is one in number; he simply provides undif-ferentiated existence to every effect that comes into being. the reason, again, is that since God’s concurrence is uniform, it cannot be the cause of any diversity. If God did determine secondary causes towards particular actions, he would be the cause of bad as well as good actions.84

Descartes expressed a very similar concern in Le Monde when he made the follow-ing analogy between the dispositions of the will and the dispositions of matter:

thus following this rule, [the third rule that the parts of a moving body individually always tend to continue moving along a straight line] it must be said that God alone is the author of all the motions that exist in the world in so far as they exist and in so far as they are straight; but it is the diverse dispositions of the matter which render them irregular and curved. likewise, the theologians teach us that God is also the author of all our actions, in so far as they exist and in so far as they have some goodness, but that it is the various dispositions of our wills that can render them depraved.85

While the complex matters of mental causation and freedom of the will are the subject for another paper, it is worth noting that Descartes, in this passage, makes explicit that, as far as their relationship to the first cause goes, physical and mental causes are on a par. both rely on God for their continued existence and funda-mental properties (rectilinear motion and goodness), whereas their dispositions cause them to diverge from these. With respect to the will, Descartes naturally must avoid the result that God is responsible for our sins. but the claim that God is the author of all of our good actions is potentially misleading. Surely Descartes cannot mean that God directly causes every good action we perform, because then there would be only punishment for sins, but no reward for goodness. therefore, he must regard God as the “author of all our actions,” in the sense that the divine will

82 See Rubio, Commentarii in Octo libros, bk. II, tract. 4, q. 8, 297.83 See de Gois, Commentarii Collegii Conimbricensis, bk. II, ch.VII, q. 115, a. 2, 285.84 De Raconis, Tertia Pars Philosophiae, 163–64.85 at XI, 46–47.


and our wills concur with each other to produce good actions. Given that motion is presented as a parallel case here, the same must be true of rectilinear motions. God concurs with the second law of nature to produce rectilinear motion, which is then diversified by the concurrence of the existing material conditions. On my reading, which attributes the Jesuit solution to Descartes, no separate action on the part of the laws or matter is required. When it comes to the different levels of causation, however, Descartes follows de Raconis. God does not produce single instances of existence, but rather continues to keep the entire res extensa in existence and maintains the total quantity of motion and rest in it. the laws of nature and the material conditions then account for the variety of motions that exists.

this still leaves us with the question of the ontological status of the laws of na-ture. While it boggles the mind to think that passive bits of matter could function as efficient causes, it boggles the mind even more to think that laws of nature could do so. briefly, I take Descartes’s claim that the laws of nature are the same for every world God could have created to indicate that they are a different kind of entity than the eternal truths, which God could have easily made other than they are.86 I have argued elsewhere that, while Descartes claims to derive the laws of nature from God’s immutability, the derivation goes through only on the assumption that matter has certain basic features.87 In short, the laws arise from a combination of the basic structure of matter and God’s immutable will. thus God’s concurrence with these laws does not amount to God’s concurrence with his own will. Rather, it is more akin to God concurring with the aristotelian natures or essences, which are themselves instantiations in matter of the exemplars in the divine mind. In both cases, once established and instantiated, we have a distinct entity which requires God’s concurrence to act. It is still an open question whether Descartes could ac-cord some secondary activity to the laws, or whether they function more as filters to channel and diversify the immutable, universal, divine action. Descartes clearly did not wish to be seen as an adherent of the Platonic world soul,88 and yet his appeal to laws of nature as secondary causes is reminiscent of Sebastian basso’s appeal to the world soul/ether that sets the material atoms in motion in accordance with “the proportions of motion.”89 On one occasion, Descartes actually characterizes the laws as “efficacious” but perhaps, in this case, we are just dealing with mere metaphor: an out of place remnant of more exotic Platonic natural philosophies such as basso’s.90

86 “Moreover, I showed which ones were the laws of nature, and without basing my reasons on any principle other than the infinite perfections of God, I attempted to demonstrate all those [laws] about which one could have any doubt, in order to show that they are such that, even if God had created several worlds, there could not have been any where they failed to be observed” (at VI, 43).

87 Hattab, “Conflicting Causalities,” 11–19.88 In his letter to Henry More of august, 1649, Descartes writes: “I was afraid of seeming to favour

the view of those who consider God as a world soul united to matter” (CSMK 381; at V, 404).89 For example, Sebastian basso (Philosophia Naturalis Adversus Aristotelem [Geneva, 1621], 341)

writes: “the logos of the World Soul is placed in it with a force such that, like the hand of the most wise mind it impels each thing to be moved the way it has been created. therefore, that propor-tion of motion pertains both to nature and to the World Soul. Indeed to nature insofar as this motion is owed to the nature of things. to the soul of the world insofar as it effects this motion.” I argue for the parallels between basso’s system of nature and Descartes’s in Origins, ch. 4, 171–227.

90 In Principles III, 48, Descartes writes: “and so in order that we may begin to show the efficacy of the laws of nature in the proposed hypothesis, let us consider that, since all the matter of which


5 . c o n c l u s i o n s

With the benefit of this deeper, more accurate understanding of the Scholastic doctrines that Descartes appropriates, the gap between them and their Cartesian cousins narrows, and it becomes less natural to read Descartes as an occasionalist, and more plausible to attribute to him a form of concurrentism. It may have been a deviant form of concurrentism that quickly gave way to occasionalism under the scrutiny of later Cartesians, but it was concurrentism nonetheless.

now that I have demonstrated the plausibility of the concurrentist reading, let me explain why it is also more charitable than the occasionalist interpretation. First, the common Scholastic uses of the term ‘concurrence’ examined above show that it would be most unfair towards Descartes to dismiss the distinction he draws between the primary, universal cause of motion and the secondary and particular causes either as a feeble attempt to disguise an unorthodox commitment to occa-sionalism, or as a sorry lack of understanding of Scholasticism on his part. We have seen that Descartes was all too familiar with the range of meanings which ‘concur’ can have, as he employed the term and its derivatives in a variety of senses, all of which were consistent with various Scholastic uses he encountered. It is thus safe to assume that he was likewise aware of the common meanings of other standard Scholastic terms like ‘secondary cause.’ So Descartes was certainly knowledgeable, but was he also honest? this brings me to my next conclusion.

the most obvious rationale for accusing Descartes of a deceptive appropriation of Scholastic terminology rests on the assumption that he needed to conceal his commitment to an unpopular and theologically-suspect position (later labeled as ‘occasionalism’), in order to ensure the successful replacement of Scholastic textbooks with his Principia Philosophiae in the standard curriculum of the schools. but since his commitment to occasionalism is at issue, this begs the question. One would need independent reasons to make the case that Descartes could not be using the terminology he borrows from the Scholastics in a manner that stays true to the basic original meanings. as we have seen, the independent reasons normally advanced in favor of an occasionalist reading rest on mistaken assumptions about the differences between Scholastic and Cartesian doctrines of divine conservation and concurrence, and the way they function in a substance/accident ontology and a substance/mode ontology respectively. Once these matters are cleared up, there is no compelling need to read Descartes as a covert occasionalist. this leads me to my third and final conclusion.

If Descartes was neither ignorant, nor engaged in a transparent cover-up of problematic theological premises, then he must have had a legitimate philosophical purpose for using the language of concurrence with all the subtle distinctions it implied to readers well-versed in Scholasticism. In fact, he had a very good reason. the distinction between God’s conserving and concurring action was exactly what Descartes needed in order to make room for the natural causes that were the object of the natural philosopher’s scientia. this is why Descartes was careful to

the world is composed was in the beginning divided into many equal parts, these could not have been spherical” (Descartes, Principles of Philosophy, trans. Valentine Rodger Miller and Reese P. Miller [Dordrecht: D. Reidel Publishing Company, 1983], 108).


preserve this tricky Scholastic distinction. as prior studies have shown, Descartes’s metaphysics was designed to make possible, and support, his natural philosophy, and his natural philosophy was meant to follow (though not always in the most direct and obvious manner) from his metaphysical commitments.91 Despite some surface bumps at the edges, at the most fundamental level, Descartes’s metaphys-ics and his natural philosophy were supposed to, and do, form a seamless whole. Descartes’s application of the Scholastic doctrine of concurrence plays a crucial role in this. For without even the subtlest and most tenuous distinction between God’s conservation and concurrence, secondary causes would be ruled out, and as a result, a scientific program dedicated to reason’s discovery of natural causes would quickly give way to an art based on generalizations from sensory experiences of the occasions upon which God exercises his inscrutable will. It is one of history’s ironies that Descartes’s valiant attempt to preserve this fundamental feature of the old scientia—by hanging it on the slender remains of the Scholastic aristotelian doctrine of divine concurrence with secondary causes—forever shifted the focus of scientific explanation towards those methods and considerations which, since ancient times, had been relegated to the arts.

91 this became clear from Dan Garber’s groundbreaking study, Descartes’s Metaphysical Physics, and from Dennis Des Chene’s Physiologia, a no less groundbreaking study placing Descartes natural philosophy in its full Scholastic context.

Concurrence or Divergence - Hattab

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