QuestionsAre we free?The infinite will: what makes us like God
Are we free?Free will

The infinite will: what makes us like God

Descartes's infinite will (Cartesian free will)

René Descartes 1596 · 1650Doubt everything to find what survives doubt.
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What it claims

My will is really free: this is one of our most evident notions, and God's power is no reason to deny it. This freedom makes me like God, my errors come from my use of the will and not from God, and the highest freedom is not indifference.

Why

Only my will has no limit I can conceive, and my clearest inner experience shows me that I act without constraint.

The same idea through history
René Descartes1641In the fourth Meditation, looking for the source of our errors, Descartes finds that the will is the only faculty he cannot conceive as greater, and that it is what makes him like God.
René Descartes1644In the Principles, Descartes adds that this freedom is known without proof: even while doubting everything, we felt we could withhold our assent.
In short

"The infinite will: what makes us like God" is an argument by René Descartes (Meditation IV, 1641; Principles I, 35 to 41, 1644, 1641) on the question "Are we free?" (answer: free will). Its claim: My will is really free: this is one of our most evident notions, and God's power is no reason to deny it. This freedom makes me like God, my errors come from my use of the will and not from God, and the highest freedom is not indifference. According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P6). AskPhilosophy presents 4 objections, 3 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Meditation IV, 1641; Principles I, 35 to 41, 1644
Valid with an implicit premise

Descartes looks for the source of our errors and makes a discovery about freedom. Of all our faculties, only one has no limit we can conceive: the will. For him, to be free is to be able to do or not to do something without feeling any outside constraint. This freedom is what makes us like God, and it also explains our errors: God gave us a perfect will, and we stretch it too far. Descartes adds a surprising idea: being able to choose on the toss of a coin (indifference) is the lowest degree of freedom. We are the freer the more clearly we see what is true and good.

P1Among all my faculties, understanding, memory and imagination are limited, and I conceive their infinite form in God. Only the will, or free choice, do I experience as so great that I cannot conceive the idea of a greater one. It is chiefly the will that makes me bear the image and likeness of God.
P2This freedom consists only in this: faced with what the understanding proposes to me, I affirm or deny, pursue or avoid, without feeling that any outside force compels me.
P3Being free does not require being indifferent between two options. The more I lean towards the true and the good that I see clearly, the more freely I choose. Indifference, when nothing pushes me either way, is only the lowest degree of freedom: it shows a lack of knowledge.
P4The will reaches further than the understanding: I can give my assent to things I do not understand. My errors arise from this alone. They therefore come neither from my will, which is perfect in its kind, nor from my understanding, but from the use I make of them. God is not their cause.
P5Even when we doubted everything, and supposed a creator deceiving us in all things, we perceived in ourselves a freedom great enough to keep us from believing what was not yet perfectly certain. What we perceived distinctly, and could not doubt during so general a doubt, is as certain as anything we can ever know.
P6 · implicit premiseWhen the clearest inner experience shows me that I act without constraint, that is really how it is: what is perceived clearly and distinctly is not false, and a mere feeling of freedom cannot be an illusion on this point.
P7If I cannot understand how my freedom fits with the omnipotence of God, who willed and foresaw everything from all eternity, that is no reason to deny it. My mind is finite, God's power is infinite, and it would be absurd to doubt what I experience within myself because I do not understand something else that I know to be incomprehensible.
Therefore my will is really free: this is one of our most evident notions, and God's power is no reason to deny it. This freedom makes me like God, my errors come from my use of the will and not from God, and the highest freedom is not indifference.

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P6, one can accept everything else and still say: we do experience a freedom, but that feeling may come from our ignorance of the causes. That is exactly Spinoza's position.
The argument is valid. P2, P5 and P6 give real freedom: we experience it clearly (P5), it consists in feeling no constraint (P2), and what we experience this way is true (P6). P7 sets aside the theological objection. P1 and P4 give the likeness to God and God's innocence in error, P3 the rank of indifference. The most disputed point is P6, the hidden premise: is inner experience enough? That is where Spinoza attacks. The other is P2, which defines freedom by a feeling (feeling no constraint).
Analogy. Our image, not Descartes's. Nobody asks for proof to know they are in pain: pain is felt, and feeling it is enough. Descartes says the same of freedom: as long as I see that I can give or withhold my assent, and feel no force pulling me, I need no other proof. The debate is about this point: is freedom "felt" like pain?

Objections

4

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Pierre Gassendi 1641 · attacks premise 1

Why does Descartes set limits to the understanding and none to the will? The two faculties seem equally extensive, or at least the understanding seems as extensive as the will: the will cannot go towards anything that the understanding has not first seen.

Descartes replies
Descartes 1641
He answers in one sentence: the will extends beyond the limits of the understanding to all the things in which we go wrong.
The debate goes on (our summary) This answer is short and its meaning is debated. In the same text Gassendi thinks that the fault comes less from a will that is too wide than from an understanding that conceives the thing badly. Spinoza will take up the idea in 1677: for him, the will is no wider than perceptions (see his own argument on freedom).
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The authors of the Sixth Objections (theologians and philosophers gathered by Mersenne) 1641 · attacks premise 3

If indifference is an imperfection, then God is not free, for he is indifferent when he creates this world rather than another. We must believe that God was indifferent to creating one world, several, or none. Indifference must therefore be part of freedom, ours as well as God's.

Descartes replies
Descartes 1641
God's freedom and ours are of different kinds: in God no idea of the good precedes his will, so his indifference is perfect. Man finds the good and the true already fixed by God. For him, indifference is not of the essence of freedom: we are also free, and above all, when the clear knowledge of a thing draws us to it.
The debate goes on (our summary) Descartes separates God's freedom from human freedom. His answer amounts to saying that freedom is measured not by the power to choose otherwise but by the absence of outside constraint. His opponents see this as weakening free will: if the truth pushes us, what is left of the possibility of doing otherwise? (our summary of the debate)
Thomas Hobbes 1641 · attacks premise 5

Hobbes notes that freedom of choice is assumed without being proved, and that this assumption is contrary to the opinion of the Calvinists.

Descartes replies
Descartes 1641
He has assumed nothing more than what we feel in ourselves every day, and what is very well known by the natural light.
Descartes 1641
Many people, thinking of God's preordination, cannot understand how our freedom can stand with it. But nobody, looking at himself, fails to feel that the voluntary and the free are one and the same thing.
The debate goes on (our summary) Descartes answers with the experience each person has of himself, not with a proof: this is exactly the point Spinoza will attack. In this reply he leaves the question of predestination open; he returns to it in 1644 (Principles I, 40-41), saying our mind is too finite to understand it. Hobbes, for his part, will hold that freedom is only the absence of obstacles and that everything is necessary (see his own argument on freedom).
Baruch Spinoza 1677 · attacks premise 5

Spinoza denies that we have a free power of suspending our judgement. When we say that someone suspends his judgement, we merely mean that he sees he does not perceive the thing adequately. Suspension of judgement is therefore really a perception, and not free will.

no reply
No reply possible: objection raised in 1677, after the author's death (1650).
The debate goes on (our summary) Descartes died in 1650, before the Ethics: he could not reply. A Cartesian would say that the experience of freedom is surer than any theory (Principles I, 41). A Spinozist would answer that this experience is explained by ignorance of the causes. The debate continues in Spinoza's own argument on freedom.
What today's voices say
Criticize it
Sabine HossenfelderShe dismisses a non-physical free will: it explains nothing in the physical world, so why invent it.