Reforming the Art of Living by Rico Vitz

Author:Rico Vitz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Springer International Publishing, Cham

6.1 Negative Direct Doxastic Voluntarism

The evidence alleged to show that Descartes endorses negative DDV might seem ambiguous at first glance. In the opening paragraphs of the Meditations, immediately after saying, “Reason now leads me to think that I should hold back my assent from opinions which are not completely certain” (CSM 2.12; AT 7.18, emphasis mine), the meditator suggests not that he or she needs to find compelling evidence against his opinion, as one might expect if Descartes were committing himself to IDV in this passage. Instead, the meditator contends merely that he or she needs to find “some reason for doubt.” Similar statements occur elsewhere in Descartes’s mature, published works. For instance, in the Principles, he claims that in many cases—specifically, in doubtful matters—people have the power to withhold their assent from a proposition (CSM 1.194, 205-6; AT 8A.6, 19-20), and in both the Discourse and the Fourth Meditation, he counsels people to withhold judgment when a proposition is doubtful (CSM 1.120, 2.41-3; AT 6.18, 7.59-62). These passages clearly indicate that if, upon considering the evidence for a proposition, people do not have overwhelming evidence that the proposition is true, then they can suspend judgment regarding it. What might seem unclear, however, is exactly how people suspend judgment in such cases. Is Descartes actually suggesting that they do so directly? More specifically, we might put the question this way: Does finding “some reason for doubt” entail suspension of judgment—in which case these passages from Descartes’s mature, published works would seem to evince his commitment to IDV—or does it indicate a necessary and effective precondition for suspension of judgment3—in which case these passages would seem to evince his commitment to DDV?

Descartes’s Comments on a Certain Broadsheet provides a piece of compelling prima facie evidence that he endorses some version(s) of DDV. Recognizing that “we are often free to withhold our assent,” Descartes “assign[s] the act of judging itself … to the determination of the will rather than to the perception of the intellect” (CSM 1.307; AT 8B.363, emphasis mine). He could have maintained the traditional Scholastic position that judgment and, more specifically, assent is an act of the intellect that is merely, in some broad sense, under the control of the will. That is, he could have affirmed that although certain acts of the will such as attending to evidence ultimately affect our judgments, our judgments themselves are not acts of the will. So doing would evince a commitment to IDV, but it is not the position that he adopts. Instead, he chooses to identify assent as an elicited act of the will itself and, hence, seems to evince a commitment to some version(s) of DDV.

Nonetheless, one might argue that in the relevant passages from the Meditations, the Principles, and the Discourse, Descartes merely suggests that people can control the elicited act of the will in judgment indirectly and, thus, endorses a version of IDV (see, e.g., Cottingham 1988, 247–8 and 2002, 352–5). Evidence from his correspondence might seem to support such an argument.

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