Continuous Creation, Continuous Time: A Refutation of the Alleged Discontinuity of Cartesian Time

Continuous Creation, Continuous Time: A Refutation of the Alleged Discontinuity of Cartesian Time RICHARD T. W. ARTHUR 1. INTRODUCTION ACCORDING to Yvon Belaval, ~ "everyone knows that time is discontinuous" in Descartes' philosophy, and as an assessment of received opinion on the subject , this statement can hardly be faulted. For all commentators on Descartes this century have followed Kemp Smith, Vigier, and Wahl in asserting the discontinuity of Cartesian time,' with the sole exceptions of Laporte and, following him, Beyssade.3 And Laporte's dissenting view has been dealt with I should like to thank several people for their encouragementand for helpful comments on previous drafts: Howard Woodhouse, Victor Nuovo, John Nicholas, William Harper, Tom Lennon , Brian Baigrie, and especially Michael Stack. ' Yvon Belaval, Leibniz: critiquede Descartes,(Paris: Libraire Gallimard, 196o), 149: "sait comment Descartes a li~indissolublemententre d'intuitionelles les trois notionsde v&it~, d'instantet d'intuition.., l'instant mesure rintuition, l'actuel mesure l'instant, c'est/~ dire que le temps est discontinu.... " ' Norman Kemp Smith, Studies in the Cartesian Philosophy (19o2, rpt. New York: Russell & Russell Inc., 1962), 131. Hereafter cited as Studies. Vigier, "Les id&s de temps, de dur~e et d'~ternit~ chez Descartes," Revue Philosophique(192o).Jean Wahl, Du rolede l'id~ede l'instant dam la philosophicdeDescartes(Paris: Libraire F~lixAican, 192o). s Jean Laporte laid out his objections to the standard interpretation promoted by Vigier and Wahl in his/2 Rationalisme de Descartes(Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 195o), especially 158-6o. Jean-Marie Beyssade's work, La Philosophie Premil,re de Descartes (Paris: Flammarion, 1979), is a re-valuationof some traditionalCartesian doctrines premised on the continuityof time in his philosophy. See especially vii, 16-x7, 1~9-42, 346-35o. When this article was in proofs Professor Daniel Garber drew my attention to a recent paper of his in which he arrives at much the same conclusion (although in lessdetail) concerning the continuityof Cartesian time as I do here: 'How God Causes Motion: Descartes, Divine Substance and Occasionalism," Journal of Philosophy(October 1987): 566-80. [349] 35 ~ JOURNAL or THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY 26:3 JULY 1988 at length by Martial Gueroult, who in his Descartes selon l'ordre des raisons4 vigorously defends the standard interpretation of Descartes' time as discontinuous---the "classic thesis," as it is called in the standard edition of Descartes' works.5 Nevertheless, I shall argue here that the classic thesis is incorrect, and that there is no convincing evidence that Descartes denied the continuity of time, and no convincing evidence either for the usual presentation of Descartes' doctrine of continuous creation as asserting a discontinuous succession of discrete acts of divine creation, as opposed to one continuous act. I should immediately clarify these remarks, for I do not mean to suggest that Descartes had any well elaborated theory of what constitutes a continuous duration. He appears to regard time as analyzable into an infinity of neighboring moments, yet he does not attempt to solve what Leibniz refers to as "the problem of the composition of the continuum," the problem of how (in this case) a duration could be composed of an infinity of durationless instants or moments. In fact Descartes does not even believe, I shall argue, that there is a problem here that should or could be solved by a finite mind. Much less does he advocate that, in the case of duration, there is a definite limit to its divisibility , so that an apparently continuous duration is in fact composed of really discrete indivisibles: yet this latter view is precisely the view normally attributed to him, the "classic thesis," which I shall endeavor to refute. But before I begin my argument, let me first try to clarify what would constitute a discontinuist theory of time in the seventeenth-century context, and what would count as evidence for it. These are questions that must be mooted now if we are to avoid considerable confusion later. Let me begin with two caveats. First, we must beware of anachronism: we cannot apply twentieth-century criteria of continuity to decide whether Descartes ' time is continuous. For example, the fact that Descartes talks of "neighboring moments ''6 means, from a modern perspective, that...