Introduction

The Question of Descartes’ Rationalism

It is generally held that ‘rationalism’ is characterized by a commitment to a

priori metaphysics: Rationalists seek to determine the fundamental natures of things

through the use of pure reason, that is, independent of experience and the testimony

of the senses. Rationalism earns its name because it presupposes a particular view

of reason, its power, function and applicability. Descartes is often taken to offer the

paradigm of this view. The Meditations coax us away from reliance on the senses,

directing us, instead, to trust in the faculty of clear and distinct perception.

Descartes endows this faculty with the power to reveal the existence of God, the

essences of substances and, thereby, the foundations of natural science.

Although this familiar story has won near universal acceptance, fundamental

questions about Descartes’ rationalism remain unanswered. The first concerns

Descartes’ understanding of the power and scope of reason. According to a

traditional interpretation Descartes treats reason as revealing the fundamental

natures of things, a window, as it were, into mind-independent reality. More recent

work, however, has argued that Descartes conceives of reason in somewhat weaker

terms. Frankfurt, for instance, argues that the Meditations show only the

consistency or coherence of our beliefs. 1 According to this view, determining

whether our clear and distinct perceptions correspond to things in reality lies beyond

1
Frankfurt 1970, especially the last chapter.

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the capabilities of reason. The “psychologistic interpretation” also argues that the

Meditations attain less than “absolute” truth. 2 The psychologistic interpretation

argues that the Meditations aim to achieve a set of stable or unshakeable beliefs. It

follows that Descartes’ claim to have achieved “truth” must be read in terms of such

doxastic objectives.

A second question concerns the nature of Descartes’ commitment to reason.

According to one line of interpretation, Descartes began the construction of his

philosophical system from the a priori assumption that reason reveals the nature of

things. 3 The contrasting view argues that Descartes requires a justification of reason

itself. These opposing views play out in debates concerning the Cartesian circle.

One strategy for answering the circle is to concede that Descartes exempts a certain

kind of clear and distinct perception from skeptical doubt. 4 This view assumes that

Cartesian philosophy begins from the assumption that reason provides us with the

2
This line is argued by Loeb 1990, 1992, Larmore 1984, Etchemendy 1981,
Lipson 1989, Rubin 1977, and Williams 1978.
3
This reading was especially popular among Descartes’ disciples. For
instance, Malebranche’s version of Cartesian philosophy took as its starting point
the ontological argument, which Malebranche regarded as offering sufficient
grounds for refuting skepticism. In doing so, Malebranche presupposes that those
things clearly and distinctly perceived—in this case, that God exists—must be true.
He did not take seriously the possibility that reason itself may require defense. See
DMR 3-18. This point will also be discussed in Chapter 5.
4
See Kenny 1968, Van Cleve 1979, Rickless (forthcoming).

2
truth. This is opposed by a second strategy, to argue that Descartes defends all clear

and distinct perceptions from skeptical attack, thereby justifying reason itself. 5

In order to address these questions, I advance an interpretive line that reads

Descartes as upholding what I call ‘naturalistic rationalism.’ In order to understand

this term and its significance, let us first consider the relevant contrast case,

‘theocentric rationalism.’ Theocentric rationalism is best explained in terms of the

Christian metaphysical distinction between the divine—God, an infinite, perfect

substance—and nature—a collection of imperfect, finite substances. 6 On this

picture, humans are understood as occupying a curious middle ground. Although

humans are part of the natural world, they are also made in God’s image.

Theocentric rationalism explains the divine aspect of humans as their capacity for

reason. Along these lines, it is supposed that human reason corresponds to or

resembles divine reason. This view serves as an implicit justification for the

rationalist project: we are entitled to analyze the world through reason, because God

created the world according to reason, in other words, because God created a

rational world. This is best exemplified by Leibniz’s project to analyze and explain

the natural world as the best possible world, designed according to rational

standards.

Conceiving of human reason as analogous to divine reason leads theocentric

rationalism to the view that knowledge should be analyzed and evaluated according

5
The most explicit on this point are Newman and Nelson 1999, DeRose 1992.
6
Much weight is given to this distinction in Craig 1987.

3
to the standards of cognition achievable by God. According to this view, God’s

intellect, because it is not encumbered by the limitations of the human intellect, sees

things as they truly are. It is important to note that it does not follow that our

knowledge meets the standards of divine knowledge. Nevertheless, this view holds

that the adequacy of human knowledge is measured by its approximation to God’s.

Most rationalists accept this view in some form or other. It is epitomized by

Malebranche’s doctrine that the intellect sees the truth in God. More generally, this

view is expressed in the notion that the divine understanding consists of divine ideas

or eternal truths, against which human ideas are measured—a doctrine that unites

Leibniz, Malebranche and Spinoza.

Descartes follows a different path, arguing that human reason does not

resemble divine reason. This view is evident in Descartes’ theological voluntarism,

which denies that God created the world in accordance with reason. Rather,

Descartes conceives of reason as a natural power, to be understood in the same

terms with which we understand the rest of the natural world. This view of reason

has far-reaching implications for Descartes’ rationalism. First, it leads Descartes to

the view that human knowledge is subject to the constraints and limitations imposed

by our natural faculties. Descartes accepts that we cannot answer certain questions

because of the shortcomings of our faculties. Moreover, he denies that reason is

capable of understanding the world as God understands it. Second, understanding

reason in this way leads Descartes to reject the notion that an infinite intellect serves

4
as the standard for measuring human knowledge. Descartes accepts reason’s

importance for understanding the world as a brute fact of nature; reason is our only

faculty for determining the truth of things. He does not require that human reason

match up with divine reason. Thus naturalistic rationalism is expressed by the

following two claims: (1) human knowledge is subject to the limitations and

constraints imposed by our natural faculties (2) human knowledge should be

analyzed and evaluated according to the standards of cognition achievable by

humans, given these natural limitations.

This interpretation stands in opposition to the common view that Descartes

is concerned with the problem of whether our ideas of the world correspond to the

world as it really is, where ‘as it really is’ means, ‘as God understands it.’

Skepticism, on this picture, is an exacting, hyperbolic doubt that calls into question

whether reason’s standards can be determined as true from a God’s-eye perspective.

On this basis, Descartes is accused of setting the standards for knowledge

unreasonably high, so high that they cannot be met without the introduction of a

literal deus ex machina—God, who guarantees that our clear and distinct

perceptions are true, in this absolute sense. This is criticized as giving rise to an

epistemological problem according to which only the contents of our minds qualify

as certain knowledge. Along these lines, Descartes is saddled with generating the

“pseudo-problem” of the external world. 7 According to my interpretation,

7
Elements of this picture are found in a variety of sources. Especially
relevant here is Reid’s criticism of Descartes (1970, 252-74), Kant’s criticism of
rationalists as transcendental realists (as described by Allison 1983, 14-24), and

5
Descartes accepts from the start that this sort of hyperbolic doubt is absurd and

confused. He is only concerned with the more modest question of whether reason,

given the reliability of rational standards, can prove that clear and distinct

perceptions systematically reveal the truth. He is not, on this view, concerned with

proving a correspondence between the way we understand the world through reason

and the way the world is “in itself.”

This is not to say that Descartes is not interested in a justificatory project. 8

On the contrary, because Descartes conceives of reason as a natural power, as

opposed to occupying a God’s-eye perspective, he is acutely aware of the

importance of justifying human knowledge. However, Descartes’ justificatory

project is of a different kind than often thought. It centers on the question of the

reliability of our natural faculties, in other words, on the question of whether our

way of understanding the world through our natural faculties can be regarded as

certain knowledge. In pursuing this question, Descartes does not seek an “external”

guarantee of knowledge, justifying knowledge by appealing to an independent

standard, such as that set by divine reason. Of course, God still plays a central role

in Descartes’ proof. For God’s existence provides the basis for our inferring the

Rorty 1979 (especially Chapter 3). A closely argued attack of Descartes along these
lines is found in Watson 1987. Through the course of presenting my work to others
it has become clear to me how common it is to regard Descartes’ project this way,
even among historians of philosophy.
8
By ‘justificatory project,’ I mean the justificatory project of the Meditations.
Shortly, I will suggest that the late Regulae also undertakes a kind of justificatory
project. Once this has been introduced, I will be more careful to distinguish the two.

6
reliability of our natural faculties. In this respect, knowing the existence of God is

necessary for us to have certain knowledge. Rather, Descartes seeks an “internal”

guarantee, justifying knowledge according to the standards of human reason, in

other words, justifying reason according to its own internal standards. This project

inevitably involves a certain degree of circularity. For it means relying upon the

natural function of reason in order to prove the reliability of the natural function of

reason. However, it is not necessarily any more viciously circular than the efforts of

philosophers today to justify our knowledge by recourse to reasoned arguments.

My case for this interpretation takes the form of a narrative tracing the

development of Descartes’ views on reason. This work is not intended to be

exhaustive. A number of important issues will not be dealt with, most notably, the

development of Descartes’ views from the Meditations to the Principles. Rather I

will focus on a constellation of topics clustered around a central theme: the intimate

connection between reason and nature. The topic of nature in the seventeenth-

century was, much like today, highly contested and beset with problems. Although

all seventeenth-century philosophers accepted the notion that ‘nature’ means God’s

creation, there was widespread disagreement as to how the natural world should be

understood. Scholastic Aristotelians, atomists and mechanists of various stripes

offered competing visions of the natural world and the appropriate scientific tools

for describing it. Descartes’ position in these debates is well known: he argues that

the natural world is comprised of machines—bodies explainable purely in terms of

extension—which behave in accord with laws of nature, ordained by God. I focus

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on the relationship between this story and Descartes’ theory of reason. Reason is,

after all, part of nature, created by God. I am concerned to trace the nature of this

commitment and its epistemological implications. In this respect, I am interested in

the joint between Descartes’ natural philosophy and his epistemology.

The story I will tell, in broad outline, proceeds as follows: Descartes’ theory

of reason emerged early in his career, from his first systematic project, the method,

which he elaborated and developed in several texts over the period of approximately

fifteen years. This work was predicated on a starkly non-mechanistic, almost

Aristotelian conception of reason—reason is a spiritual, non-corporeal power, which

is, nevertheless, part of nature. Reason, on this view, has a proper function, which

reveals to us the truth. This view of reason was expressed in the doctrine of

intuition, derived largely from Descartes’ work on mathematics. It holds that reason

is a kind of intellectual vision, by means of which we “see” the truth. In this

respect, Descartes’ early work was committed to a theory of reason that has a great

deal in common with ancient philosophy, for instance, the Stoic theory of cognitive

impressions.

The mature philosophy, despite its significant evolution, remains more or

less committed to this same conception of reason. This is surprising because

Descartes’ early view on reason would not seem to sit well with the subsequent

development of Descartes’ understanding of nature. Although reason is clearly part

of God’s creation, it is not material and, therefore, does not admit the sort of

mechanistic explanation Descartes came to prefer. One might expect that Descartes

8
would abandon this theory, by (a) recasting reason in mechanistic terms, (b)

introducing a theological story that places reason outside of nature, or (c)

abandoning his early theory of reason altogether, focusing instead on the

metaphysical foundations of his natural philosophy. Yet, Descartes rejects each of

these paths. The mature work he conceives of reason as a non-corporeal, natural

faculty. It even locates reason and its perceptions, like bodies, within the

metaphysical framework of substance and attribute, as a mental substance.

Moreover, the doctrine of intuition reappears, identical to the early view in all but its

name—clear and distinct perception.

This commitment shaped the mature philosophy in two fundamental ways.

First, it defined the space for the justificatory project of the Meditations. If

Descartes does not hold that our reason maps onto divine reason, then he is not

entitled to assume that our capacity for reason is adequate to understand the world.

Unlike Leibniz or Malebranche, Descartes cannot assume that the world has been

erected according to the same rational principles revealed to us by our faculty for

reason. Consequently, Descartes must justify the notion that our understanding of

the world through clear and distinct perception is true. Much of Descartes’

audience, for instance Mersenne and Malebranche, was happy to accept the truth of

clear and distinct perceptions without the sort of justification offered by the

Meditations. They were familiar with this sort of view from ancient philosophers,

as it had been appropriated by Christians, most notably, in the doctrine of the natural

light. Descartes, however, resisted dogmatically postulating the truth of clear and

9
distinct perception as a theological presupposition. Rather, he aimed to defend it on

rational grounds. In doing so, Descartes could not appeal to the standard ancient

justification, the sort Stoics used to defend cognitive impressions from skeptics.

They, like Descartes’ early work on method, suggested that there is a natural basis

for the reliability of cognitive impressions—it is the nature of our cognitive faculties

to reveal the truth when they are used properly. The specific terms of this

justification are closed off from the mature Descartes because it presupposes a

metaphysical picture that he denied. Rather, Descartes must defend the reliability of

our natural faculties given the resources afforded by his metaphysics, most notably,

the existence and nature of God.

Second, because Descartes understood reason as part of nature, he conceived

of its power and scope as subject to natural constraints. This follows

straightforwardly from Descartes’ general understanding of nature as God’s

creation. He held that our understanding is limited by the fact that we are finite,

created beings, a point emphasized in both his earliest epistemological work—the

Regulae—and the most systematic presentation of the mature work—the Principles.

For instance, our ability to understand God, his nature and will, is inhibited by our

finite, limited faculties. These views commit Descartes to a kind of perspectivalism:

we are constrained such that we only understand things from the perspective of

human reason. It should be mentioned, however, that it is potentially misleading to

think of this view as imposing a constraint. The notion of a constraint suggests that

our knowledge does not exhaust the possibility of knowledge, in other words, that

10
there are things to know or other ways of knowing that are kept from us because of

the natural limits of reason. This is not the right picture. Descartes’ view is that the

bounds of the possibility of knowledge are themselves set by the limits of reason. In

other words, ‘knowledge’ just means ‘whatever can be proven to reason.’ On this

view, it doesn’t make sense to refer to something that lies beyond the possibility of

our knowing as “knowledge.”

I trace the development of this view, in part, to Descartes’ relationship with

Mersenne. Although it is generally recognized that Mersenne exercised a powerful

influence over Descartes, Mersenne’s philosophical views are rarely examined in

this context. This is unfortunate because Mersenne’s views are highly relevant to

Descartes’ philosophy. In many ways, Mersenne’s theory of reason resembles

Descartes’. Mersenne too held that reason consists in an intellectual vision, the

natural light. Moreover, he too accounted for the certainty of mathematics by

recourse to this theory. Yet Mersenne, like subsequent rationalists, had a strongly

theocentric conception of reason. He argued that the natural light reveals to us

eternal truths, which he explained as ideas in the divine intellect. Descartes

consistently opposed this tendency. This is evident in Descartes’ earliest

epistemological work, the final stages of the Regulae, written during his years in

Paris, at the beginning of their relationship. Here Descartes rejects the notion that

intuition reveals divine ideas, instead proposing a theory of simple natures, divorced

from theological commitments. In their later correspondence on the subject of the

eternal truths, Descartes rejected the move to treat rational standards as holding for

11
God. In the Replies to Mersenne, appended to the Meditations, Descartes again

asserted that he is not interested in truth or falsity from the perspective of God.

What emerges from these episodes is a narrative about the development of

Descartes’ view of reason in opposition to Mersenne’s theocentric view of reason.

A more detailed breakdown of the development story I am describing

proceeds as follows:

Stage 1 (Descartes’ work prior to 1626 including the early Regulae): This work

affirms Descartes’ commitment to the principle that the proper function of reason

reveals the truth. This work concentrates on the practical question of how to use

reason properly, without considering any justification for this principle. Here

Descartes conceives of this project as a “universal science.”

Stage 2 (the late Regulae, 1626-8): During Descartes’ time in Paris, he first

considered the epistemic problems raised by skepticism and, consequently, the

possibility that reason might not be adequate to establish the universal science. At

this time Descartes considered only a weak skeptical position, the sort held by

Mersenne. Mersenne’s skepticism assumes that the natural light provides certain

knowledge, but charges that the natural light is too narrow in scope to provide us

with certain knowledge in all scientific domains. It holds that all knowledge other

than mathematics is merely probable. Descartes’ response affirms for the first time

his commitment to naturalistic rationalism. He argues that the natural limitations of

12
reason do not preclude us from having the most certain knowledge, because human

knowledge should be measured, not against the standards of cognition achievable by

God, but rather by human standards.

Stage 3 (the mature metaphysics, including the Meditations and Principles): The

justificatory project of the Meditations considers for the first time full-blown

skepticism, the possibility that knowledge is not possible, even through intuition or

clear and distinct perception. In undertaking this project, Descartes takes seriously,

also for the first time, the rational basis for the central assumption of his early work,

that the natural function of reason reveals the truth. The results of this inquiry

reaffirm Descartes’ commitment to naturalistic rationalism.

Chapter 1 and 2 will cover the first stage. Chapter 3 will deal with the second. The

final stage will be dealt with in the final two chapters.

Lastly, before embarking on my interpretation, it is helpful to say something

about my methodology. In general, the foregoing line of interpretation has been

obscured by two opposite tendencies in the literature. The first, particularly evident

among English-language scholars, is to focus narrowly on the text of the

Meditations. This is problematic because Descartes’ views on reason are set forth in

a wide variety of texts, written over the course of his entire career. Indeed,

Descartes began to develop his theory of reason very early in his philosophical

career—as early as 1620. This theory is most developed in his work on method—a

13
series of directives for ensuring that we employ reason properly. The importance of

this work for understanding Descartes’ rationalism has been obscured by a second

and more recent tendency. Following Garber, it has been increasingly popular to

argue that Descartes abandoned the method as a failure. 9 This view has the

unfortunate, and likely unintended, consequence of justifying a compartmentalized

treatment of the method and Descartes’ later work. I will save my objections to this

view for later. For the moment, suffice it to say, the investigation I am proposing

assumes a prima facie obligation to consider all of Descartes’ work on reason,

including his early work on the method.

This discussion points the direction for the present work. I proceed on the

basis of the following assumptions:

(1) Descartes is a systematic philosopher. This means that his natural philosophy,

metaphysics, epistemology, method and so forth stand together as parts of a larger

9
This way of thinking is pioneered by Schuster (1977 and 1980) who
provides a detailed historical reconstruction of Descartes’ intellectual development.
Versions of this account have been taken up by the best scholars of the English
speaking world. It is specifically advanced in Garber 1992, Chapter 2, Menn 1998,
Chapter 5 and Gaukroger, 1995 181-6. There are strong philosophical grounds for
asserting this. Garber and Schuster argue that the method fails to provide an accurate
description of Descartes’ actual scientific practice. Furthermore, a wide array of
commentators have argued that the Regulae fails in its project to ground
mathematics in an account of cognition, specifically the imagination. These include
Sepper 1996 and Palmer 1997. For instance, Descartes explains observations as
two-dimensional impressions; his theory is incapable of explaining color three-
dimensional images. Similarly, his account models all mathematics on simple
geometry. Although this allows Descartes to assert that mathematical knowledge is
derived from reasoning based on simple two-dimensional impressions, this

14
philosophical system. Consequently, these subjects cannot be divided into neat

compartments. Rather, they must be considered with an eye toward their

consistency, thematic unity, and the over-arching architecture of the system. This is

particularly important in the case of reason, a subject that lies at the intersection of

different disciplines. Descartes deals with the subject of reason, not only in the

context of the epistemological project of the Meditations, but also in his work on

natural philosophy, particularly in his theories of cognition, psychology and

perception, as well as in his theories of scientific practice and method—his guide for

the use of reason.

(2) Descartes’ views evolved over time. Despite his brilliance, Descartes was

merely a man and, consequently, subject to intellectual growth and the occasional

reversal. This means that we must regard as an open question whether, for instance,

Descartes’ views as of 1642 remained consistent with his view as of 1619.

Moreover, when there is a change, we must consider the motivation and reasoning

that led Descartes to change his views over time.

(3) Descartes was responsive to issues that were important to his own times. This

final point is particularly problematic because Descartes resisted framing his work

as responding to his contemporaries. In fact, Descartes gave little indication of the

views that earned his sympathy or ire or, even, of what he read. He was most vocal

explanation falls apart in the case of higher order algebra. These particular

15
about opposing scholastic Aristotelianism, though even this is veiled in much of his

published work. It would be a mistake to infer on this basis that Descartes is

working in the abstract philosophical space of arguments, independently of the

intellectual life around him; indeed, this inference has been the source of a great

deal of bad scholarship. This puts us in the unenviable position of reconstructing

the intellectual context of Descartes’ work and theorizing, on the basis of scant

historical evidence, about Descartes’ concerns. In doing so, we must be sensitive to

the distinction between plausible hypothesis and proven historical fact.

problems concern the mathesis universalis and are discussed in Schuster 1980.

16