Descartes: A Biography

P: PHU
c CUNYB/Clarke     December, :

Death in Sweden 

decided about future events, and we can do absolutely nothing to modify

the effects of divine Providence. This amounted to substituting a kind of

Christian fatalism for the mysterious determinism of fortune.

Descartes had endorsed this general principle in response to one of his

correspondents who was a soldier and who had asked his opinion about

the wisdom of remaining in the army. He had little respect for the life of a

soldier, so that the merits of such a career could not decide the question.

‘Idleness and licentiousness are the two primary motives which attract

most men to that career now.’He considered instead the relative danger

associated with army life, and speculated that the life of a soldier was no

more dangerous than that of a civilian because all human lives are equally

exposed to unpredictable deaths.

Weshould be prepared to accept death without regret, whenever it comes, because

it can come at any moment....if we eat a morsel of bread, it may be poisoned; if we

walk along the street, a tile may fall from some roof which would flatten us, and so on

forother eventualities. That is why, since we live among so many inevitable dangers,

it seems to me that wisdom does not prevent us from exposing ourselves also to the

danger of war, when a good and just cause obliges us to take part in it. (v.–)

Given our inability to control natural events and the apparent predetermi-

nation of divine Providence, Descartes argued that the only thing within

our control is what depends on our own will.Our decisions, therefore,

must be made within the limited space made available by our knowledge

and our desires, and these are the only things for which we can be held

morally responsible. That is the conclusion to which he was drawn in the

Passions:‘wecan be praised or blamed justifiably only for those actions

that depend on free will’ (xi.).

This Cartesian analysis locates each person within a divinely con-

trolled, naturally determined, but unpredictable universe. The scope of

our control is limited to estimating the relative probability of differ-

ent events based on previous experience, and then adjusting our own

desires to coincide as much as possible with what we believe will ben-

efit us. To illustrate this point, Descartes uses the example that was

uppermost in his mind at the time, that of taking a potentially hazardous

journey.

Forexample, assume that we have some business to conduct in a place to which we

could travel by two different routes, one of which is usually much safer than the other.

Although the decree of Providence may be such that, if we take the safer route, we