CROW, Daniel. Cartesian Freedom

7/29/2019 CROW, Daniel. Cartesian Freedom

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Cartesian Freedom

By Daniel Crow

I. Introduction

Although the Liberty of Indifference and Liberty of Spontaneity accounts of human

freedom are not, as usually formulated, strictly inconsistent, they do carry such fundamentally

different emphases that they are often considered mutually exclusive theories. As in most two-

party systems, one is generally expected to choose one side or the other. Yet Descartes appears to

draw freely from both Liberty of Indifference and Liberty of Spontaneity accounts of freedom

when he develops his own account of human freedom in the Fourth Meditation. Perhaps to

minimize the tension inherent in such a hybrid theory, attempts have been made to strip

Descartes’ account of either its Liberty of Indifference or Liberty of Spontaneity features, so that

it may be reduced to one of these simpler preexisting models.1 In this essay I will argue, first,

why such reductive efforts are bound to fail: Descartes unquestionably relies on both accounts.

This raises the concern, however, that Descartes’ account of human freedom might be disjointed

at best or inconsistent at worst. I will take up this concern by showing how Descartes, in his 1645

Letter to Mesland, indicates how he intends his theory of human freedom to integrate these

opposing accounts.2 Finally, I will defend my interpretation of Descartes’ theory of human

freedom against an important objection that arises if we accept a closely related exegetical point

which Anthony Kenny argues for in his influential essay, “Descartes on the Will.”3

Before turning to the Fourth Meditation it will be useful to clarify our central terms. The

Liberty of Indifference and Liberty of Spontaneity accounts of human freedom may be initially

1 Petrik, James ( Descartes’ Theory of the Will . Durango, CO: Hollowbrook Publishing, 1992), 55. Petrik offers a list of scholars who read Descartes as promoting a Liberty of Indifference account of human

freedom. Petrik himself reads Descartes as promoting a strict Liberty of Spontaneity account (See Ch. 5

where Petrik rejects the popular claim that Descartes is a “partial voluntarist”), and from what I gather so

does Cottingham ( Descartes, 149-151).2 CSMK III, Letter to Mesland, 9 February 1645, 244-246.

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distinguished as follows. According to the Liberty of Indifference account, a person acts freely

when he possesses a “two-way, contra-causal power to X or not X.”4 The account should be

understood as making two related assertions: first the psychological claim that persons do in fact

possess this contra-causal power; second the freedom claim that an action is free in virtue of

being performed by a person who possesses this capacity. While these two claims are commonly

conflated, it will be useful for our purposes to pull them apart. I will thus use the term

“Psychological Indifference” to refer to the purely psychological claim and reserve the term

“Liberty of Indifference” for the claim about what makes actions free.

According to the Liberty of Spontaneity account of human freedom, a person acts freely

when her action “manifests some aspect integral to the individual in question, e.g., desires,

beliefs, and character traits.”5 Unlike the Liberty of Indifference account, the Liberty of

Spontaneity account claims that it is possible that one’s action could be free—i.e., could manifest

the appropriate aspect of the person in question—even if the action is determined. But we should

be careful not to confuse what the Liberty of Spontaneity account does claim—that freedom and

determinism are consistent —with either of the stronger claims a) that freedom and indeterminism

are inconsistent or b) that determinism is true. Avoiding this confusion will open up ways of

interpreting Descartes’ account of human freedom that would otherwise escape notice.

II. Freedom in the Fourth Meditation

Descartes’ remarks about human freedom in the Fourth Meditation center on one kind of

activity: judgment.6 A few preliminary remarks about Descartes’ theory of judgment, as he

explains it in the Fourth Meditation, will help to facilitate the following discussion. In Descartes’

theory of judgment, the person’s intellect perceives the content of an Idea (with varying degrees

3 Kenny, Anthony. “Descartes on the Will.” Descartes. John Cottingham, ed., 132-159.4 Cottingham, John, ed. (Descartes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 15.5 Petrik, 5.6 This is an unusual context for discussing the freedom of the will because most everyone, in Descartes’

day as well as our own, rejects Descartes’ claim that judgment is an activity of the will. In Descartes day judgment was customarily thought an activity of the intellectual faculty (see Kenny, “Descartes on the

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of clarity); the person’s will then judges the Idea, i.e. “affirms” it or “denies” it.7 While

perception and judgment are the operations of discrete faculties of the human mind, they are

closely related insofar as the quality of one’s perception of an Idea determines the kind of

inclinations (which take place in the will) one will have either to affirm or deny that Idea. When

one’s perception of an Idea is obscure, one is, to use Descartes’ term, “indifferent” in respect to

how to judge that Idea. “Indifference,” as Descartes uses the term in the Fourth Meditation, thus

refers to a motivational state of the will , not a psychological capacity (as in Psychological

Indifference) or a freedom claim (as in the Liberty of Indifference).8 “Motivational Indifference,”

as I will call Descartes’ use of the term, is a concept that covers a number of related motivational

states one might possess in respect to a judgment. It covers cases when one’s perception of an

Idea prompts no motivation to either affirm or deny the Idea (what I will call, “Absolute

Motivational Indifference”9) as well as any other case “where the intellect does not have

sufficiently clear knowledge at the time it deliberates” and thus leaves the person less than

completely motivated to affirm that Idea.10 Only Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Ideas,

Descartes suggests, prompts a motivation to affirm the Idea that is so fully “persuasive” that it

leaves the percipient with no Motivational Indifference vis-à-vis that Idea.11

The relationship of

perception, motivation, and judgment is important for understanding Descartes’ conception of

human freedom because, for Descartes, the quality of our perceptions and the strength of our

motivations affect the freedom of our judgments.

Will,” 133-138), not the will; in our own day it is perhaps more fashionable to reject the entire faculty

model of the mind which Descartes’ theory of judgment presupposes.7 CSM II, 39-40. In what follows I will capitalize the term “Ideas” to indicate Descartes’ technical use of

the term.8 Ibid., 40. In the Fourth Meditation Descartes claims that indifference is something that is felt. In his

1945 Letter to Mesland, commenting on the Fourth Meditation, Descartes claims that indifference, as he

uses the term, refers to a “state of the will” (CSMK III, Letter to Mesland, 9 February 1645, 245).9 Ibid, 40. Descartes uses the term “indifference” to cover Absolute Motivational Indifference: “”But the

indifference I feel when there is no reason pushing me in one direction or another …” (italics supplied).10 Ibid., 41.11 Ibid., 41.

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a. Spontaneity

A helpful way of investigating Descartes’ conception of freedom is first to identify what

kinds of judgments Descartes claims are free or most free (a point on which Descartes is fairly

clear), and then secondarily to determine what kind of account of human freedom is necessary to

count such actions as free (on which Descartes is much less clear). In respect to the first point,

Descartes is clear that judgments are free in direct proportion to the strength of one’s inclination

to affirm the Idea being considered: “….the more I incline in one direction…the freer is my

choice.”12 Thus freedom is in inverse proportion to Motivational Indifference:13 “…the

spontaneity and freedom of my belief was all the greater in proportion to my lack of

indifference.”14 From these passages, it appears that Descartes envisions a hierarchy of freedom:

judgments are not simply free or not free but are rather more or less free. At the bottom of the

hierarchy are those judgments performed from an Absolutely Motivationally Indifferent will;

these actions are the least free of all. At the top of the hierarchy are of course our affirmations of

Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Ideas, which are performed with no Motivational Indifference.

To sustain his hierarchical ordering of free acts, it will be necessary for Descartes to rely

on a Liberty of Spontaneity account of freedom. This point is most easily seen by observing why

a Liberty of Indifference account of human freedom could not yield this hierarchy. For one thing,

our affirmations of Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Ideas are certainly not performed with more

Psychological Indifference than our affirmations of Ideas about which we are Motivationally

Indifferent—they are performed either with equal Psychological Indifference or with no

Psychological Indifference at all. Psychological Indifference, unlike Spontaneity, is an all or

nothing phenomenon; a person could either have done otherwise or he could not have—there is

no middle ground. Psychological Indifference, we might say, is an essentially egalitarian

12Ibid., 40.

13 Cottingham, John ( Descartes. Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1986), 150.

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property. If actions are free in virtue of being performed with Psychological Indifference as is

claimed by the Liberty of Indifference account of human freedom, it seems that the resulting

picture of freedom would be egalitarian and not hierarchical as Descartes asserts. To serve as the

basis of Descartes’ hierarchical conception of human freedom, Descartes thus needs to rely on a

Liberty of Spontaneity account.15

Reinforcing this broader consideration are also specific textual details which reveal

Descartes drawing from a Liberty of Spontaneity account of human freedom. Most notably,

Descartes’ first and only use of the term “spontaneity” in the Meditations is in conjunction with

“freedom” to characterize our belief (more likely the act of believing rather than the content of

the belief) of a Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Idea:

“I could not but judge that something which I understood so clearly was true; but this was

not because I was compelled so to judge by any external force, but because a great light

in the intellect was followed by a great inclination in the will, and thus the freedom and spontaneity of my belief was all the greater in proportion to my lack of indifference.”16

Now it is possible that Descartes here intends the term “spontaneity” to describe one quality of a

belief that increases in inverse proportion to Motivational Indifference, and “freedom” to describe

quite another quality that stands in the same inverse relationship; according to such a reading the

term “spontaneity” need not suggest a Liberty of Spontaneity theory of human freedom. But it is

14 Ibid., 41.15 One might object that there is a sense in which a liberty of indifference account of human freedom might

be able to yield a hierarchical ordering of free acts. The proponent of the liberty of indifference model of human freedom might contend that one’s freedom somehow enjoys a greater display when one uses one’s

counter-causal agency to overcome impulses that drive one towards a certain course of action. Something

like this seems to be suggested in Kant’s view of freedom and is recognized in a different way in Descartes’

1945 Letter to Mesland, when he says that freedom might consist “in a greater use of the positive power we

have of following the worse although we see the better.” (CSMK III, Letter to Mesland 9 February 1645,245). There is, however, a great problem in applying this schema to Descartes’ remarks in the Fourth

Meditation. That is, if we attribute to Descartes a theory of human freedom according to which a judgmentis free to the extent one overcomes one’s impulses in performing that judgment, it will follow from this

conception of freedom that our affirmations of Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Ideas, where the impulse to

believe is the strongest, will be the least free, while our denials of Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Ideas

would be the most free acts. But this is just the opposite of the hierarchy Descartes sets out to establish.

Clearly, Descartes’ hierarchical conception of freedom cannot be derived from a liberty of indifferenceaccount.16 CSM II, 41 (italics supplied).

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more likely that Descartes does use the term “spontaneity” to indicate a Liberty of Spontaneity

theory of human freedom, especially in light of what we have already shown: namely, that

without a Liberty of Spontaneity theory Descartes will be unable to sustain his claim he makes

here regarding the inverse relationship of (Motivational) “indifference” and “freedom.” The fact

that Descartes enters the term “spontaneity” alongside “freedom” to characterize a belief that

lacks Motivational Indifference is not happenstance. “Spontaneity” is not describing one quality

of the belief and “freedom” quite another, rather “spontaneity” is describing the kind of

“freedom” the judgment possesses, that is, the Liberty of Spontaneity. Alluding to this passage in

his 1645 letter to Mesland, Descartes states even more clearly that once a person begins to act,

“freedom, spontaneity, and voluntariness are the same thing.”17

b. Indifference

From what has been argued so far, it might seem that Descartes’ hierarchical conception

of freedom can be reduced simply to a Liberty of Spontaneity account. In fact this is just half the

story. While by now it is hopefully clear that Descartes relies on a Liberty of Spontaneity

account to uphold his claim that our affirmations of Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Ideas are

more free than our affirmations of Obscurely Perceived Ideas, it is equally clear that Descartes

relies on a Liberty of Indifference account to explain why our affirmations of Obscurely

Perceived Ideas are a possibility implied by the “perfection” of our “freedom of choice.”18

Descartes claims this about our judgments of Obscurely Perceived Ideas in order to uphold the

central project of the Fourth Meditation, which is to solve an epistemological variant of the

traditional “Problem of Evil.”

Descartes has run into what I will call the “Problem of Epistemological Evil” as a result

of the epistemological advance he makes in the Third Meditation when he demonstrates the

existence of God. While the existence of God will eventually play a crucial role in Descartes’

17 CSMK III, Letter to Mesland, 9 February 1645, 246.18 CSM II, 39.

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epistemological project, it poses an immediate threat to its continued success, for it raises the

question of why persons are prone to error if they are indeed the handiwork of an all-powerful,

non-deceiving God. Descartes’ solution to this problem is in many ways a typical free will

defense. According to Descartes, the cause of error is that persons have been endowed with a

finite intellect but a perfectly free will. Persons are thus free to affirm even those Ideas their

limited intellects perceive only obscurely: “…the scope of the will is wider than the intellect; but

instead of restricting it within the same limits, I extend it to matters I do not understand.”19

Implied in Descartes’ theodicy is that the freedom to affirm Obscurely Perceived Ideas is

possibility implied by the perfection of freedom. 20

Descartes’ Liberty of Spontaneity account of human freedom could not explain the

freedom of our affirmations of Obscurely Perceived Ideas for the obvious reason that, according

to his account, our affirmations of some very Obscurely Perceived Ideas are not spontaneous at

all —namely our affirmations of Ideas about which we are Absolutely Motivationally Indifferent.

And our affirmations of other very Obscurely Perceived Ideas, even if we have some slight

inclination to affirm them, would be performed with very little spontaneity. Actions completely

or almost completely lacking in spontaneity are, according to a Liberty of Spontaneity account of

human freedom, completely or almost completely lacking in freedom, respectively. They rank at

the bottom of the hierarchical ordering of free acts. But Descartes claims that human error is a

possibility implied by the perfection of the “freedom of choice,” not by choices that are entirely

or almost entirely lacking in freedom. 21 To uphold this theodicy, our affirmations of very

Obscurely Perceived Ideas must be free in some more robust sense than a Liberty of Spontaneity

account can allow.

In his correspondence with Gassendi, Descartes unambiguously commits to a Liberty of

Indifference account while explaining the freedom of our affirmations of Obscurely Perceived

19Ibid., 40.

20 Ibid., 39.

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Ideas. However, we must pay careful attention to the shape of the debate in order to notice the

implied commitment. Gassendi has countered Descartes’ theory of error by advancing a theory

of his own. According to Gassendi, the apprehension of the intellect always determines the will,

and when we fall into error it is because our “intellectual apprehension of the thing does not

correspond with the way the thing really is.”22 Gassendi’s strategy for avoiding error, then, is to

“apply our intellect to develop clearer awareness.” In responding to Gassendi, Descartes claims

that Gassendi’s objection assumes the point in question: that the will can be “determined by

itself.” Since Gassendi already allows the will the power of self-determination to develop clear

awareness, he cannot be too deeply opposed to the claim that the will has the power to determine

itself when a person makes judgments (which is what Descartes’ theory of error claims). When

Descartes suggests that he and Gassendi agree that the will determines itself, it is clear from

context that he means at least that the will is not determined by the intellectual faculty. The only

options for understanding this phrase, then, are (a) that the will is determined by something else

besides the person’s intellectual faculty or (b) that the will is not determined at all by antecedent

causes, i.e. that the will enjoys Psychological Indifference.

The way Descartes introduces this point of the discussion suggests that we should take

the phrase to imply Psychological Indifference. He writes: “You next deny certain propositions

about the indifference of the will.”23 Now what Gassendi has denied is certainly not that persons

are ever Motivationally Indifferent but rather that the will is not determined by the intellect.

Descartes describes Gassendi’s denial of this claim as a denial of “indifference.” Here it is clear

that Descartes uses the term “indifference” in the conventional scholastic fashion to mean at least

Psychological Indifference. That Descartes considers Psychological Indifference relevant to

human freedom is clear from the next two sentences of the same paragraph where Descartes

refers back to this Psychological Indifference to affirm Obscurely Perceived Ideas as the

21Ibid., 39.

22 Ibid., 220.

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“freedom” he knows through experience.24 With this final claim, Descartes implicitly commits to

the core of a Liberty of Indifference account: that Psychological Indifference is freedom.

We cannot reduce Descartes’ conception of human freedom, then, to either a Liberty of

Indifference or a Liberty of Spontaneity account. The hierarchical conception of freedom

Descartes clearly asserts is only explicable given a Liberty of Spontaneity account of human

freedom. But the central project of the Fourth Meditation requires that the judgments that

measure at the very bottom of this hierarchy are free in some robust sense, too. To sustain this

claim Descartes relies on a Liberty of Indifference account. In the second portion of this essay, I

will turn to Descartes’ second most extensive discussion of human freedom, which occurs in his

1645 Letter to Mesland, for clues that indicate how Descartes intends this combination to work.25

III. Freedom in Descartes’ 1645 Letter to Mesland

In the 1645 Letter to Mesland, unlike the Fourth Meditation, Descartes’ explicitly

acknowledges that his own conception of human freedom possesses both Liberty of Indifference

and Liberty of Spontaneity dimensions. In this letter, too, Descartes suggests how his theory of

freedom holds together these two rival views (although, to be sure, he does not resolve all of the

details). So that this may be clearly seen, it will be useful to rehearse how Descartes develops

the argument of this letter.

As the letter begins, Descartes distinguishes his own use of the term “indifference” (i.e.

“Motivational Indifference”) from the way “others” use the term:

“But perhaps others mean by ‘indifference’ a positive faculty of determining oneself to

one or the other of two contraries, that is to say, to pursue or avoid, to affirm or deny.”26

23 Ibid., 259.24

Ibid., 259.25 CSMK III, Letter to Mesland, 9 February 1645, 244-246.26 Ibid., 245.

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Descartes’ description of this positive faculty suggests that he is alluding to the capacity of acting

with Psychological Indifference. Descartes agrees that the human will has this capacity, and even

affirms, with some qualification, that persons possess this capacity in respect to all actions:

“Indeed, I think it has it not only with respect to those actions to which it is not pushed byany evident reasons on one side rather than on the other, but also with respect to all other

actions; so that when a very evident reason moves us in one direction, although morallyspeaking we can hardly move in the contrary direction, absolutely speaking we can. For

it is always open to us to hold back from pursuing a clearly known good, or from

admitting a clearly perceived truth, provided we consider it a good thing to demonstrate

the freedom of our will by so doing.”27

Having drawn the distinction between Motivational Indifference and Psychological

Indifference and clarified his views in respect to the latter, Descartes begins a new line of thought

in which he proposes two ways to consider freedom: “in the acts of the will before they are

elicited, or after they are elicited.”28 Before the will has been elicited, the action is to be judged

according to the Liberty of Indifference model, for “freedom” at this stage “entails indifference in

the second sense but not in the first,” that is, Psychological Indifference but not Motivational

Indifference.29 But in the second stage of the action, after the will has been elicited, the action is

to be judged according to the Liberty of Spontaneity account, for at that point “freedom consists

simply in ease of operation, and at that point freedom, spontaneity and voluntariness are the same

thing.”30 In respect to this kind of freedom, Descartes alludes to the hierarchical ordering of free

acts he established in the Fourth Meditation: “It was in this sense that I wrote that I moved

towards something all the more freely when there were more reasons driving me towards it; for it

is certain that in that case our will moves with greater facility and force.”31 In the 1645 Letter to

Mesland, then, Descartes thus applies the Liberty of Indifference and Liberty of Spontaneity

accounts of freedom to two different temporal stages of an action.

27 Ibid., 245.28 Ibid., 245.29

Ibid., 245.30 Ibid., 245.31 Ibid., 246.

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If freedom “entails” Psychological Indifference before the will is elicited, as Descartes

claims, then Psychological Indifference is a necessary condition for an act to be free. Since

Psychological Indifference is an egalitarian property, all actions which possess this property will

possess it to the same extent and, we may add, will be incapable of possessing it to any greater

extent than they already do. It is in respect to this shared egalitarian core of all free acts that

Descartes implies, in the Fourth Meditation, that our affirmations of very Obscurely Perceived

Ideas are an extension of the perfection of the freedom of choice. Even these irrational judgments

are performed with the same Psychological Indifference as our more informed judgments.

Descartes is clear that Psychological Indifference is a necessary condition for freedom,

but would he also allow that it is a sufficient condition for freedom? For reasons already

suggested above, it is clear that Descartes must maintain this. For unless Psychological

Indifference is sufficient to make actions free, our affirmations of some Obscurely Perceived

Ideas cannot, in Descartes’ conception of human freedom, be counted as free, since they are

entirely lacking in spontaneity. Psychological Indifference must be, for Descartes, a necessary

and a sufficient condition for freedom. But if Psychological Indifference is both a necessary and

sufficient condition for an action’s being free, and all actions are performed with Psychological

Indifference, this raises the question of what work is left for the Liberty of Spontaneity account to

perform within Descartes’ account of human freedom.

The answer suggested in the 1645 Letter to Mesland seems to be that the Liberty of

Spontaneity account comes into effect, once the will has already been elicited, to discriminate

various grades of freedom among antecedently free acts. In other words, the Liberty of

Indifference model of human freedom determines whether any given action is, in the first place,

free; and once this is already established the Liberty of Spontaneity model determines the

hierarchical rank of an action’s freedom. The hierarchical ordering of free acts thus only applies

to acts which already possess robust freedom in virtue of their Psychological Indifference.

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IV. Contra Kenny

There is an objection that is bound to arise to my interpretation of Descartes’ conception

of human freedom, due to a common way of reading Descartes’ claims about our judgments of

Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Ideas. Following Anthony Kenny’s influential essay, “Descartes

on the Will,” it is common to understand Descartes to claim that persons do not possess

Psychological Indifference in respect to their judgments of Clearly and Distinctly Perceived

Ideas: in such cases the perception of the intellect determines the assent of the will.32 If we do not

possess Psychological Indifference in respect to these free judgments, then Psychological

Indifference cannot be a necessary condition for freedom, as I have understood Descartes to

imply in his 1645 Letter to Mesland. As evidence for his interpretation, Kenny notes what

Descartes asserts in both the Fourth and Fifth Meditation: that he “could not but” affirm a Clearly

and Distinctly Perceived Idea.33 Descartes puts this even more strongly in his 1644 letter to

Mesland, where he states that it is “in his view, impossible” to withhold assent from a Clearly and

Distinctly Perceived Idea.34 If our affirmations of Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Ideas were

performed with Psychological Indifference, then it would seem to be true that he could have

withheld his assent. Obviously there is tension between these claims and what Descartes seems to

imply in his 1645 Letter to Mesland. Whether or not we understand Descartes to suggest that our

affirmations of Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Ideas are determined will depend on how we

attempt to resolve this apparent discrepancy. Kenny offers a classic interpretive strategy for

reading the 1645 Letter to Mesland in a way consistent with what Kenny thinks is clearly implied

in both the Meditations and the 1644 Letter: that our assents to Clearly and Distinctly Perceived

Ideas are determined. In what follows I will offer an alternative reading of the same letter which,

surprisingly, allows us to reconcile the apparent textual discrepancy from the opposite direction—

that is, by showing, pace Kenny, how we may understand Descartes to claim that our affirmations

32Kenny, Anthony. “Descartes on the Will.” Descartes. John Cottingham, ed., 132-159.

33 CSM II, 41, 48. In the Fifth Meditation the phrase is put in present tense (“cannot but”).

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of Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Ideas are not determined—that they are rather performed with

what I will call “Indirect Psychological Indifference.” In this way I intend to fend off this

inevitable objection to my interpretation of Descartes’ conception of human freedom.

Kenny reads Descartes’ 1645 Letter to Mesland in light of a qualification Descartes

makes in his 1644 Letter to Mesland. In the earlier letter, Descartes places a qualification on the

extent to which our affirmations of Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Ideas are determined. The

determination applies for as long one is having the Clear and Distinct Perception, but “the nature

of the soul is such that it hardly attends for more than a moment to a single thing.” 35 Once our

attention is distracted and our perception is no longer Clear and Distinct, we may then reconsider

the same Idea under different perceptual conditions and find the power to suspend judgment from

the same Idea that we have Clearly and Distinctly Perceived (and assented to) at any earlier point

of time.36 We may even intentionally dwell on another idea to obscure our original perception.

According to Kenny, then, when Descartes claims in his 1645 letter that we can hold back from

admitting a Clearly Perceived Truth, “he need not mean that we can do this at the very moment of

perceiving the good and the true.”37 Rather, Descartes is referring to a later point in time when

one is no longer Clearly and Distinctly Perceiving the same Idea. During the Clear and Distinct

Perception one’s assent is always determined by the contents of one’s intellect.

While Kenny’s reading of this letter is full of insight, it is also unnatural in certain ways,

and thus should not form the basis of the reconciliation between Descartes’ apparently conflicting

statements about the kind of freedom we enjoy in respect to our judgments of Clearly and

Distinctly Perceived Ideas. The unnaturalness of Kenny’s reading may be seen from the

following considerations. In the 1645 letter, Descartes claims that one is able to “hold

back…from admitting” a Clearly Perceived Truth. According to Kenny’s reading of the letter,

34 CSMK III, To Mesland, 2 May 1644, 235.35

CSMK III, To Mesland, 2 May 1644, 234.36 Ibid., 234.37 Kenny, 157.

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one assents to the Idea (irresistibly) at an earlier point in time and then, at a later point of time,

withholds one’s assent when one reconsiders the same Idea under different perceptual conditions.

The most natural way to understand Descartes’ claim that we have the power to “hold

back…from admitting” the Idea, however, is to imply that one is not compelled to affirm the Idea

initially. We can easily modify Kenny’s reading, however, to avoid this unnaturalness. Let us

preserve Kenny’s claim that we can refuse admitting a Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Idea only

by altering the perceptual conditions of our judgment; this point is well supported by Descartes’

1644 Letter to Mesland. But instead of allowing that a person may alter these perceptions only

after committing his initial assent to the Idea, let us add to this that he might also alter the

perceptual conditions before giving his initial assent. According to this reading, a person who has

a Clear and Distinct Perception can “hold back” from admitting the Idea, by obscuring the

perception, even before he ever assents to that Idea. 38

This slight alteration of Kenny’s interpretation enables a more natural reading of the

letter and has one important consequence: namely, under the modified interpretation a strong

case could be made that judgments of Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Ideas are not determined.

38 One potential theoretical problem I see with my interpretation is that it seems hard to imagineany duration of time passing between one’s Clear and Distinct Perception and one’s assent to the Idea of

that Perception. We would have to imagine, for instance, Clearly and Distinctly Perceiving that 2 plus 2

equals 4 and then allowing a moment to pass before we assent to the Idea “2 plus 2 equals 4.” But thedifficulty of imagining this might be a more fundamental problem with Descartes’ theory of judgment

rather than a problem in interpreting the writings of Descartes in light of his theory of judgment. The

problem with imagining this delay is that assenting to 2 plus 2 equals 4 already seems to be included in the

Idea of Clearly and Distinctly Perceiving that 2 plus 2 equals 4, for it is hard to imagine whatcharacteristics of a perception involving the Idea “2 plus 2 equals 4” could rationally impel one to assent to

that Idea other than the perception that the Idea is true—in which case, it appears, one has already assented

to the Idea. Given Descartes’ theory of judgment, however, according to which there is a genuine

difference between Clearly and Distinctly Perceiving and affirming an Idea, there is no reason why these

two acts of the mind must happen simultaneously.My reading might be defended against this objection in another way. Thinking of the process of

making judgments in terms of discrete, temporally ordered events may not be the best way to understand(and may not be how Descartes understands) what goes on in our intellectual lives. Perhaps somehow there

could be a logical though not chronological ordering according to which the perception is logically

primary, the obscuring is logically secondary, and the judgment is logically tertiary, even though all of

these events happen simultaneously. In a single complex moment one clearly and distinctly perceives an

idea but, “considering it a good thing to demonstrate one’s freedom,” one obscures the idea and withholdsone’s assent. If a non-temporally ordered account of perception and perversion is plausible, then my

reading would be even more defensible against this objection.

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To see how such a case could be made, let us consider a classic question that is supposed to help

us discern whether or not an action is determined: “…if the internal and external conditions

accompanying a person’s choice were recreated exactly, would it have been possible for a

person to choose differently?”39 If we believe that the person was determined to the course of

action he performed, we should answer “no” to this question; if not, we should answer “yes.”

Suppose we pose this question to a person who fits the blue-print made by my modification of

Kenny’s interpretation of Descartes. Let us say that this person has just had a Clear and Distinct

Perception and, a moment later, affirmed the Idea of that perception. Could the person have

chosen differently under the same internal and external conditions? Was his assent determined?

It is not obvious to me how we should answer this question. The person is determined to

affirm the Idea as long as the same perceptual conditions remain, but he could always act to

change the perceptual conditions and, by these means, withhold his assent. The answer to the

question thus seems to be: if the “internal and external conditions of the choice were recreated

exactly,” the person could always act to alter the internal conditions of the choice, and thus—and

only thus—could he have “chosen differently.” Were he to attend his will directly to the task of

withholding his assent from the Idea, he would inevitably fail; he “cannot but” believe. But if he

attends his will to the task of altering the shape of the experience—by obscuring the perception—

he will then, under the new conditions he has freely created, be capable of withholding his assent

from that Idea. These considerations suggest a distinction between two kinds of Psychological

Indifference, which I will call “Direct Psychological Indifference” (DPI) and “Indirect

Psychological Indifference (IPI).” I offer the following definitions stipulatively:

DPI: An agent possesses DPI, in respect to action X, in a set of internal and external

conditions, if he/she could have performed an action other than X, in the same conditions, without

first modifying the internal or external conditions of her choice.

39 Petrik, 4-5.

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IPI: An agent possesses IPI, in respect to action X, in a set of internal and external

conditions, if he/she could have performed an action other than X, in the same conditions, only by

first modifying the internal or external conditions of her choice.

In light of the notion of IPI, we see a different way to reconcile Descartes’ 1645 Letter to

Mesland with his repeated suggestion that our assents to Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Ideas

are determined. When Descartes claims in the Meditations and elsewhere that he could not help

assenting to Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Ideas, we should take him to mean that he could not

resist assenting to these ideas so long as he tried to withhold assent directly, without first

changing the shape of the experience. When in his 1645 letter to Mesland he suggests that our

Psychological Indifference extends to all actions including our judgments of Clearly Perceived

Truths, we should understand him to mean that we possess IPI in respect to our judgments of

Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Ideas. In other words, the person in the grip of a Clear and

Distinct Perception possesses IPI but not DPI. In light of this distinction, we may read what

Descartes’ claims in the Meditations in a manner consistent with what he claims in his 1645 letter

to Mesland, without producing an especially awkward reading of either of these texts.

Kenny interprets Descartes’ theory of human freedom in light of his view that, according

to Descartes, our judgments of Clearly and Distinctly Perceived Ideas are determined. According

to Kenny, “Descartes thinks that free will often does consist in liberty of indifference, but that

sometimes it consists only in liberty of spontaneity, and that is all that is essential to it.”40 In

essence, what I have argued in this essay is that we get a better reading of Descartes if we turn

Kenny’s interpretation on its head: Descartes thinks that free will does consist in Liberty of

Spontaneity, but that sometimes it consists only in Liberty of Indifference, and that is all that is

essential to it.

40 Kenny, 147.

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V. Bibliography of Referenced Works

Cottingham, John; Stoothoff, Robert; and Murdoch, Dugald (trs.) The Philosophical Writings of Descartes,Vol. I. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1985. [CSM I]

Cottingham, John; Stoothoff, Robert; and Murdoch, Dugald (trs.). The Philosophical Writings of

Descartes, Vol. II. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984. [CSM II]

Cottingham, John; Stoothoff, Robert; Murdoch, Dugald; Kenny, Anthony (trs.). The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, Vol. III. [CSMK III]

Cottingham, John. Descartes. Oxford: Basil Blackwell: 1986.

Cottingham, John., ed. Descartes. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998.

Petrik, James. Descartes’ Theory of the Will . Durango, CO: Hollowbrook Publishing,

1992.

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CROW, Daniel. Cartesian Freedom

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