The seventeenth century is customarily hailed the age wherein theorizing about knowledge (epistemology) supplants theorizing about being (metaphysics), scientific methodology supersedes speculation. There is truth here, but it ought not to be taken as a derogation of efforts past. The ancient and mediaeval thinkers were not inclined to proceed in their arguments haphazardly. They took a position they held to be clear and self-evident (or definitively given by divine revelation) and proceeded to logically extract what they could from that position. We may question Plato as to the clarity and self-evident nature of innate ideas, but we cannot and may not question his earnestness in either his assessment of this situation or the theories he hangs upon it. His hypothesis is either accepted or not, his conclusions are judged either logical or not. Aristotle, Augustine, and their compotators at the well of wisdom likewise deserve to be treated as methodical and sincere draftsmen of systems based upon grounds they considered evident and certain. Finally, philosophy is essentially dimeric; metaphysics and epistemology inform and balance each other, neither is comprehensible or complete without the other. We cannot talk about what it means “to be” without discussing what we are doing when we thusly talk—we are thinking. The statement may seem to reveal an inherent dimorph, but we are not, we are a unit, thinking-being. There are shifts in the ancient paradigm regarding the presentation and enunciation of argumentation, but the analysis is still made to clarify the two principle stanchions of our existence: being and thought.[i] Turning to the example of architecture, we note with the Renaissance a return to Greco-Roman styles. The seventeenth century does not abandon these, it merely embellishes them. Antique columns and pediments remain but become festooned and bedizened, giving us the baroque. Later this geometry of the baroque will be stretched upon another geometry, and heterodyned into that aureate entrechat, the rococo. The patterns of sixteenth century academia are not surrendered, merely given the caparison of new first focus, a geometry, which is itself an antique, Protagoras’ graphing of man as the measure of all things.
Hence, when Descartes sets out to define what and how we are, he claims we must begin with ideas that are clearly and distinctly known, and proceed deductively, logically, from there. Truth resides in the clarity of the idea. Here, the world outside the mind is exsected from the equation. Indeed, the equation is made superfluous. Truth is not a correlation between my idea and a thing beyond it, a thing “idealized”, truth is an internal clarity. Descartes finds only two items carry the requisite distinctive clarity: thought and extension. I cannot not be thinking, and I cannot not think without some notion of extension. In brief, the two things no one can doubt is the existence of one’s thoughts and one’s body. We might be tempted to summarily pronounce man is a body with thoughts, however, that would not be true to the Cartesian vision: man is a freely thought-ful entity, and man has extension, a body, a materiality which is not free, but as are all material things, determined, mechanical. We are no longer in a world where soul, mind or spirit is the form, the animation of the body, the material. Mind and matter stand side by side, but alone.
As in Plato, mind and matter do not really connect. Here, however, the material world is not a web woven out of evil or non-being; it is the Newtonian cosmos, a deterministic mechanism, a machine imbued with motion that can be transferred, redirected, but never destroyed. The immateriality, the freedom and activity of “thinking stuff” (god and soul) do not touch this machine. God creates both, and if and how they are inter-relatable, that is beyond our logic—possibly. Descartes could not be content making man an automaton, a soul within a machine. But how could mind, soul, the non-corporeal control body without exerting force or motion, properties of physicality? How could the material and immaterial interconnect? He postulated the pineal gland, located between the hemispheres of the brain, is the point through which all sensory impulses pass, and there the mind influences their flow. An influence or direction that could be applied to the material without itself being a motion or force satisfied no one. Rejecting Descartes’ solution, Malebranche proposed an equally untenable idea: occasionalism. The occasion of coordination twixt the material and immaterial is God acting as the cause of both systems. Unfortunately, deus ex machina is an excuse, not an explanation.
Descartes’ argument for the existence of God is not much stronger. My thoughts are limited. I cannot think everything, I cannot always think clearly, I cannot sometimes doubt. My thoughts reveal a limited and imperfect being, and falling back on Plato and Anselm, Descartes claims this reveals the necessity of a being who is unlimited and perfect, God, the source of all, the guarantor of truth and internal clarity. As with Plato, man attains his happiness, goodness, and virtue through the mind, through a rational and controlled life that fosters tranquillity and rests certain in the superiority of the non-material over the material. Hardly revolutionary stuff, but it once again opened all the old argumentations and objections. Pascal thought the Cartesian “spirit of geometry” was simply a mechanical tool incapable of revealing the omnipotent God. Pascal looked to man’s “spirit for finesse”, for intuition, for knowing with the heart; only such, faced with the vastness, the simplicity and the complexity we find both within and without, opens the mind to the magnificence of being, and so leads us to God, a loving God who fills and transforms the knowing heart. This is not a God scientifically proven; this is, by grace, God creatively discerned.
Descartes, like Plato before him, could not establish the relationships between the material and non-material, between infinite and finite. Spinoza, with precise, geometrically inspired propositions and axioms, abolished the difference twixt finite and infinite by resorting to neo-Platonic visions of emanation. There is but one reality (God), and all extension and thought are merely attributes of it. All in the world appears as modifications or modes of these two divine attributes. The dichotomy betwixt thought and extension is resolved by claiming a psycho-physical parallelism resident in the immanent-pantheistic[ii] basis of the attributes and modes. Man, as a derived mode of God in a mechanistic system, cannot be considered free. Yet, man is capable of the moral, the ethical, and the eternal. Man can move from servitude to senses and passion wherein he believes he can effect reality, to a stoic attitude, and ultimately to a type of mysticism, beholding the finite as an expression of the infinite, an intellectual love of God that is at once the love of God for himself and man.
Leibnitz looked upon the difficulties dredged up by Descartes and turned to Aristotle for assistance. Aristotle had divided things up according to the potential and the actual. Leibnitz posits a theory of monads, singularities without extension, pure potencies that by pre-established divine plan actualize.
The ancients had spoken of the fundament of all extension as atoms, items with extension and divisibility. Leibnitz conceives of the fundamental item (the monad) more as a mathematical point, extension-less, but endowed with potential activity, as an un-extended centre of force. Every monad is unique and inexhaustible, an endless potency manifesting itself and driven to ever manifest itself anew. All monads function not by any interconnection or causality but according to a pre-set harmony which ascends to the supreme monad (God). Materiality is not “real” but a phenomenon resultant of monad aggregation and passivity. Man is an aggregate of monads ending in a central monad (soul), a microcosm in a cosmos that is rather akin to the world of quantum mechanics.
Leibnitz rejected all notions of innate ideas. The mind has, however, certain proclivities that are discoverable by reflection. The two fundamental principles upon which we operate rest upon logical necessity: the principle of identity dealing with absolutes (“Two plus two is four”, a statement that works equally true in reverse), and the principle of sufficient reason dealing with contingencies (“Charles is writing”, a statement wherein “is” does not indicate an eternal two-way street, merely a transitory state in the being Charles). We come to the knowledge of the divine by reflection upon the harmony of the universe and the need for a sufficient cause. This God creates the monads and the sets out the order, but is not free to do otherwise, thus, by the principle of sufficient reason, we may say we have not a perfect world, but the best of all possible worlds. Leibnitz held that man (a conglomerate of monads having force and drive) is free and responsible for moral evil, but given the theory of pre-established harmony it is difficult to not conclude evil ultimately rests in the primal divine will.
When nature becomes a machine, all action is determined. When all action is determined, somewhere a deus ex machina must be found to secure free will for man. With the exception of Spinoza, none of the scholars above considered were inclined to deny man free will. None denied to man a summons to a moral and happy life. None were interested in ejecting God from the cosmos, from role of creator and preserver—including Spinoza, who was, I opine, ardently questing for a more rational, less anthropomorphic, understanding. They all were enmeshed in a particular creative thrust within occidental man, an impulse to handle the world in a new way, with new tools, with a new language—scientific deduction and mathematics. These scholars began the movement away from working in the Latin of the mediaevals, and usher in the modern age of thinking and writing, of conducting scholarship, in the vernacular. There was, however, one tongue the above noted scholars all shared. It was mathematics. Descartes gave us analytical geometry, a bridge form algebra to calculus. Leibnitz gave us calculus. Pascal, gifted with a mind for physics, gave us, among much else, an elementary computer, advances in infinitesimal calculus, and probability theory. They all were, in varied degree, competent in some scientific field. Mathematics was their lingua franca, their mode of envision-ment. They veer toward Plato because he is mathematical, abstracting, ideal-istic. By disallowing some real connectivity twixt mechanically operational matter and the un-extended spirit, the world is for them epistemologically blind-sided. The irony is that the material machine-like cosmos, not God, is here the mystery. They know it works, have the methodology to decipher how it works, but how it relates to freely deciphering man, and man to and within it—that is a mystery. The Idea of God is saved, revealed, revered, but made the deus ex machina of matter, moral compass of spirit, and epistemological validation of mind. The Creator God completes his work with the making of the cosmos-machine, and Deism is born.[iii]
The mediaeval scholars were concerned with creation, the logical inference of the primal and final causes of creation, with the freedom of God and man. The rationalists were focused on nature, the logical deduction of efficient causes, with mind within machine. In the mediaeval world philosophy and science were not two disjoined entities; physics, metaphysics, cosmology, astronomy, psychology, epistemology were all part of one search for truth. Galileo and Newton listed their work “experimental philosophy”. The rationalists are doing their work at the dawn of something new, the birth of independent disciplines of investigation, the emergence of a diversity out of the ancient unity. Galileo claimed the universe was God’s philosophy writ out, to understand it one needed to know the language: mathematics. However, this language operates in abstract and universal propositions, not existential propositions, it does not yield factual information about the world, merely the theoretical. Efficient causality does not uncover the teleological, merely the functional. Deductive reasoning makes explicit the implicit, it cannot alone provide a metaphysics, cannot imbue existence with a feel, a sapience, for purpose and meaning. Somewhere within, in the quiet of the heart, Pascal knew science may dazzle with logically decocted treasures, but some richer light will always be man’s wanting.
[i] The separation of being and thinking as two distinctive verb, two actions, is a matter of logical dissection; in man, in our reality, there is no existential distinction. To be is to think and to think is to be. Descartes may have had his eureka moment, his Cogito, ergo sum [I think, therefore, I am], but he was so fascinated with his cognizing that he never managed to see the “sum”. A great deal of modern philosophy will follow him, and, like Thales, fall into a dark well. It is possible to be so caught up gazing upon the wonder that is the mind, that one fails to grasp mind has its meaning only as embodied mind, as worldly reflection. A mind not animating a body, a soul without a world, is either divine or dead. This is a sentinel philosophy, theology, religion, and spirituality all need kept before them.
[ii]Some claim Spinoza’s system is not pantheistic, contending his God is the vital and vivifying ground of all that is, not the sum of all that is. Spinoza did leave a door open for such argument in noting the two attributes of thought and extension are the only divine attributes we are capable of conceptualizing, but he suffered excommunication and shunning without conjuring something more, some eternally receding platform as in Eckhart, some cyclical revelation of being as in Erigena. Thus, we must admit, by propositional omission or commission, here is, devotedly and sincerely, pantheism.
[iii] Deism believes in a God who having created cosmos, steps back, and in his immutable omnipotence disinterestedly allows it to unfold according to its inherent dynamic. Relatively few deists could find room within such vision to confirm some form of divine providence, some continuous oversight and care. Deism extirpated the authority of scripture, tradition, and religion in general, necessitating the founding of morals on the basis of reason alone, inspiring, at times, the evocation of a natural religion. Thus it was influential in the thought of the French Enlightenment, in Voltaire, Rousseau, the Encyclopaedists, and in Comte, in the empirically minded Locke and Hume, and their colonial theoretical compatriots, the founding fathers of the American republic, in the German transcendental idealists, Kant and Lessing chief among them, and in the theologies and religious movements they inspire.