Cartesianism [addendum]

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Apparently, it was the Cambridge Platonist Henry More who introduced the term Cartesianism—from the Latin Cartesius—into the English language. The term itself now denotes either the views of René Descartes or the various defenses and developments of these views in the writings of les cartésiens, an eclectic group of seventeenth- and eighteenth-century European intellectuals.

Descartes is perhaps best known in the early twenty-first century both for his epistemological "method of doubt" and for his metaphysical doctrine of mind-body dualism. However, he was known in the early modern period primarily for his attempt to systematically displace explanations of natural phenomena, deriving from the work of Aristotle, that were then predominant in both Catholic and Protestant schools on the Continent. In Principles of Philosophy (1644) Descartes proposed as an alternative for Aristotelian explanations in terms of prime matter, substantial forms, and final causality his own more austere explanations in terms of extension, its modifications, and purely mechanistic laws. There were other critics of the Aristotelianism of the schools, most notably Pierre Gassendi and the Gassendists. Nevertheless, Descartes's followers proved to be more adept than the Gassendists at packaging the new mechanistic science. Even so, it is understandable that Cartesian science is not as prominent today given the decisive refutation of Descartes's particular brand of physics in the work of More's greatest student, Isaac Newton.

Theological issues also dominated discussions of Descartes's system in earlier centuries in a way that they no longer do today. Such issues were of immediate practical concern to Descartes himself, who encountered fierce theological resistance not only in France but also in the United Provinces (now Holland), where he lived for most of his adult life. He failed in his attempt to infiltrate the Catholic universities in France at least partly because Aristotelian traditionalists saw his system as a threat to the Catholic dogma of the miraculous conversion in the Eucharist of the substance of bread and wine into the body and blood of Christ.

Descartes did fare somewhat better in the Calvinist United Provinces, where his writings received an audience in the academy during his residence there. Even in this region, however, orthodox Calvinists urged that his insistence on the real distinction between mind and body conflicts with the Aristotelian position that the soul bears a natural relation to a certain body in virtue of being its substantial form. These critics emphasized the threat that his system posed to Christian doctrines such as the resurrection of the body and the unity of the incarnated Christ. Moreover, before and after Descartes's death critics attempted to gain an advantage over Cartesianism by linking it to heterodox theological views. In the United Provinces the connection was typically to the doctrinally tolerant Dutch Remonstrant Calvinists, who deviated from Reformed Orthodoxy in insisting on one's freedom to accept or reject divine grace. After his death, however, Descartes was linked in France to a different group, the rigoristic French Jansenists, who set themselves in opposition to a Jesuit theology that emphasizes the dependence of one's salvation on the activity of one's undetermined free will. That the Jansenists were linked to Descartes bespeaks the influence of Antoine Arnauld, who was a prominent defender of both Cartesianism and Jansenism.

There was a strong inclination among French Cartesians to counter theological objections by invoking the authority of St. Augustine. There were roughly two general approaches, which were reflected in the distinction of the scholar Henri Gouhier (1978) between "Cartesianism augustinized" and "Augustinianism cartesianized." The augustinized Cartesians, including Claude Clerselier, Descartes's literary executor, and the physician Louis de la Forge, were concerned to bolster Cartesian natural philosophy by stressing the ways in which Descartes's proofs of the existence of God and of the immateriality of mind complement Augustinian spiritualism. The defense of a cartesianized theology was pursued with disastrous consequences by the Benedictine Robert Desgabets, whose development of Descartes's account of the Eucharist provided the impetus for the official censorship of Cartesianism in France two decades after Descartes's death.

The cartesianized Augustinians tended to emphasize not Descartes's infrequent forays into theology, but his more common insistence that theological issues are outside of his jurisdiction insofar as their treatment requires recourse to revelation. This insistence allowed theologians such as Arnauld to appeal to Descartes to safeguard against Jesuit intrusion a "positive" or dogmatic theology devoted to providing a philosophical explication (or, for critics of the Jesuits, misrepresentation) of Augustinian views on matters of faith. Dutch Cartesians also attempted to insulate Cartesian philosophy from theology, though for them the concern was less to promote Augustinian purity in theology than to honor the distinction of the disciplines in the universities. This interest in making Descartes fit for the schools also explains the emphasis in the work of these Cartesians on the similarities between Aristotle and Descartes. It is this "scholasticized" Cartesianism that was exported from the United Provinces to Germany soon after Descartes's death by Dutch-trained Cartesians such as Johannes Clauberg.

The reception of Descartes was conditioned by the work of Nicolas Malebranche, a member of the Oratory in Paris. Malebranche attempted with other French Cartesians to link Descartes to Augustine. In Malebranche's case the result was a synthesis that stressed the dependence of creatures on God's rational activity. His system included the view, anticipated in the work of La Forge and others, that bodies serve as the noncausal occasion for God to distribute motion by means of the most economical laws. Malebranche further extended this sort of view to theology, arguing that God distributes grace in accord with simple general laws.

Malebranche's theological views upset Arnauld, his former ally, who took them to be an illustration of the dangers of philosophical incursions into theology. Nonetheless, the opening salvo in his protracted and increasingly bitter dispute with Malebranche was his critique of Malebranche's philosophical doctrine that "we see all things in God," that is, that one knows the bodies one sees through the idea of extension in God that represents them. Arnauld appealed to Descartes in defense of the alternative position that representative ideas are merely modes of one's soul. The French Cartesian Pierre-Sylvain Régis, who had earlier published a popularization of Cartesianism in his System of Philosophy (1690), defended Arnauld's account of ideas in a polemical exchange with Malebranche during the mid-1690s. Unlike Arnauld, however, but like Desgabets, whom he admired, Régis challenged Malebranche's claim that eternal essences that serve as the ground for eternal truths are identical to uncreated ideas in the divine reason. As Malebranche himself recognized, such a claim undermines Descartes's doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths. Régis and Desgabets were both concerned to defend this doctrine by claiming that eternal truths concerning creatures derive not from uncreated ideas in God, but from features of the world that God created with complete indifference.

Clauberg, Johannes; Descartes, René; Desgabets, Robert; Régis, Pierre-Sylvain; Regius (Henri De Roy); Rohault, Jacques.

Armogathe, Jean-Robert. Theologia cartesiana: l'explication physique de l'Eucharistie chez Descartes et dom Desgabets. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1977.

Clarke, Desmond M. Occult Powers and Hypotheses: Cartesian Natural Philosophy under Louis XIV. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1989.

Des Chene, Dennis. Physiologia: Natural Philosophy in Late Aristotelian and Cartesian Thought. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1996.

Gaukroger, Stephen. Descartes: An Intellectual Biography. Oxford, U.K.: Clarendon Press, 1995.

Gouhier, Henri. Cartésianisme et augustinisme au XVIIe siècle. Paris: J. Vrin, 1978.

Lennon, Thomas M. The Battle of the Gods and Giants: The Legacies of Descartes and Gassendi, 1655–1715. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993.

Marion, Jean-Luc. Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes: Analogie, création des vérités éternelles, et fondement. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1981.

Schmaltz, Tad M. Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002.

Verbeek, Theo. Descartes and the Dutch: Early Reactions to Cartesian Philosophy, 1637–1650. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1992.

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