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Natural Theology and the Concept of Perfection in Descartes, Spinoza and Leibniz

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 October 2008

Mark O. Webb
Mark O. Webb
Affiliation:
Syracuse University, New York, U.S.A.
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Extract

One of the hallmarks of the early modern rationalists was their confidence that a great deal of metaphysics could be done by purely a priori reasoning. They thought so at least partly because they inherited via Descartes Anselm's confidence that the existence of God could be established by purely a priori reasoning in an ontological argument. They also inherited a Thomistic and scholastic confidence that the concept of God as supremely perfect being, if subjected to serious and deep analysis, would yield sound doctrine. Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz all three took it that they had in their stock of ideas an idea of God sufficiently clear and detailed that a little analytic work could produce real metaphysical results, not only about God himself, but also about the universe in which they found themselves (for Spinoza, these turned out to be the same thing). Though they start with what purport to be ideas of the same God, they get radically different results in their analyses.

Type
Articles
Information
Religious Studies , Volume 25 , Issue 4 , December 1989 , pp. 459 - 475
Copyright
Copyright © Cambridge University Press 1989

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References

page 459 note 1 AT 7.65–6. Descartes, René, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, ed. Cottingham, John et al. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1985).Google Scholar(References to Descartes are either to Adam and Tannery (AT) page numbers, or, in works that permit it, to Descartes' own part and section numbers.)

page 460 note 1 AT 7.116

page 460 note 2 At 7.99, 7.323, 7.325. The same thinking is behind the whole tradition of criticisms of the ontological argument on the grounds that ‘existent’ is not a predicate that we find in Hume and Kant, though I do not believe anyone has pointed to an ambiguity in a premise as the ultimate source of the trouble.

page 460 note 3 1p11, 1P7. Spinoza, Baruch, The Ethics and Selected Letters, Shirley, Samuel, trans. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1982).Google Scholar All references are to the Ethics, and are given by part, proposition, scholium, etc., according to Spinoza's own divisions, and the convention established by Bennett in his A Study of Spinoza's Ethics (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1984).

page 461 note 1 Notice that in Spinoza's formulation he needs only to show that God is a substance to make his argument work; God's consisting of infinite attributes makes absolutely no contribution to the argument. But with the first premise interpreted as a conditional claim, that part of premise one now has some logical work to do.

page 461 note 2 1p7.

page 461 note 3 1P7d.

page 461 note 4 This is argued persuasively by Bennett, , op. cit., pp. 29–30Google Scholar

page 461 note 5 id3.

page 462 note 1 Bennett, , op. cit., p. 81.Google Scholar

page 462 note 2 Descartes, , Principles of Philosophy. 1: 51.Google Scholar

page 462 note 3 op. cit., p. 75

page 462 note 4 Spinoza can avoid this problem by claiming that a substance must have as many attributes as it can – otherwise there is no reason for the substance's lacking whichever attribute it lacks – and so a substance which is extended but not thinking isn't really possible.

page 462 note 5 From ‘Two Notations for Discussion with Spinoza’ and ‘Discourse on Metaphysics’ § 23, in Leibniz, Gottfried, Philosophical Papers and Letters, ed. Loemker, Leroy, (Boston: Reidel Publishing, 1969), pp. 167, 318.Google Scholar

page 463 note 1 Plantinga, Alvin C., God, Freedom and Evil, (Grand Rapids: Eerdman's 1974)Google Scholar; Hartshorne, Charles, The Logic of Perfection. (La Salle: Open Court, 1962).Google Scholar

page 463 note 2 AT 7.109.

page 463 note 3 Loemker, , op. cit., p. 486.Google Scholar

page 464 note 1 AT 6.35.

page 464 note 2 AT 6.35 and Principles of Philosophy, 1: 22–3.Google Scholar

page 464 note 3 AT 6.35. John Locke uses a similar criterion to explain which ideas go into our complex idea of God in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Book II, chapter 23, section 33.

page 464 note 4 Principles of Philosophy. 1: 22.Google Scholar

page 464 note 5 AT 7.432.

page 464 note 6 AT 7.431.

page 464 note 7 Letter to Mersenne, 6 May 1630, in Philosophical Letters, Kenny, Anthony, trans., (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1970).Google Scholar

page 464 note 8 AT 7.432.

page 465 note 1 But perhaps this is not such a disaster. George Schlesinger takes a similar line in ‘On the Compatibility of the Divine Attributes’, Religious Studies XXIII, 239–542.

page 466 note 1 Note that for Spinoza, whether something is logically absurd is not in God's control.

page 466 note 2 Appendix to part I.

page 466 note 3 1pI7c2s.

page 467 note 1 1p2od.

page 467 note 2 There is reason to think that Spinoza is committed to the view that there is no real contingency in the universe ( Bennett, , op. cit., pp. 114–19Google Scholar); however, Spinoza thinks there are modes and affections which are not attributes, and therefore not essences, which does seem to commit him to some kind of contingency.

page 468 note 1 Bennett, , op. cit. p. 205.Google Scholar

page 469 note 1 Loemker, , op. cit. p. 283.Google Scholar

page 469 note 2 Loemker, , op. cit. p. 303.Google Scholar

page 469 note 3 Ibid.

page 469 note 4 Loemker, , op. cit. p. 304.Google Scholar

page 470 note 1 Ibid.

page 470 note 2 Loemker, , op. cit. p. 306.Google Scholar

page 470 note 3 Loemker, , op. cit. p. 639.Google Scholar

page 470 note 4 Letter to Christine of Sweden, 20 November 1647, in Kenny, , op. cit.Google Scholar

page 470 note 5 That God might be good by complying with his own decrees is not Descartes' answer to the Euthyphro problem; it is, however, a logically possible – and sufficient – answer.

page 471 note 1 Loemker, , op. cit. p. 177.Google Scholar

page 471 note 2 Loemker, , op. cit. p. 167–8.Google Scholar Leibniz apparently did not always endorse this argument, though he never explicitly repudiates it. In the New Essays on Human Understanding §§ 437–8, he makes the same point about the incompleteness of Descartes' ontological proof, but instead of supplying a proof for the miming premise that all perfections are compossible, he simply says, ‘We are entitled to assume the possibility of any being, and above all God, until someone proves the contrary…’ On this understanding, Descartes' proof yields the result that we ought to believe that God exists until someone can show that the idea of God is incoherent. New Essays. Remnant, and Bennett, , trans. (London: Cambridge University Press, 1981).Google Scholar

page 472 note 1 Loemker, , op. cit. p. 303.Google Scholar

page 473 note 1 Spinoza does not argue from the notion of perfection, but from the notion of infinity, and he argues that the one substance could – in fact, must – have infinite attributes. He would also agree that some of the properties popularly considered to be perfections are in fact self-contradictory. For these reasons, since Spinoza is rather distant from the Judeo-Christian conception of God, I will ignore him and focus henceforth on the disagreement between Descartes and Leibniz.

page 473 note 2 Letter to Mersenne, 6 May 1630, in Kenny, , op. cit.Google Scholar

page 474 note 1 Leibniz, Gottfried, Theodicy, ed. Farrer, Austin, (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952).Google Scholar

page 474 note 2 Wilson, Margaret Dauler, Descartes (Boston: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978), pp. 123–8.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

page 474 note 3 Cf. passages cited by Wilson, , op. cit. pp. 123–5.Google Scholar

page 475 note 1 I am grateful to Jonathan Bennett, Daniel Snyder, and an anonymous referee for Religious Studies for helpful comments during the preparation of various drafts of this paper.