Was Clarke a Voluntarist?

1.1. Will & the last judgment of the understanding

The principal distinction of Clarke’s philosophy is that between activity and passivity. This distinction forms the foundation of most of his philosophy and theology. We will encounter it at every stage of Clarke’s account of freedom. The first place we will encounter it is in his distinction between the will and what Clarke calls ‘the last judgment of the understanding’. The faculty of the understanding deliberates and decides on a best course of action, which is its ‘last judgment’, but its workings are completely passive and necessitated. Therefore, a completely different faculty is necessary to act on this judgment, namely the faculty of will. This distinction is important to Clarke, as he believed that many other people (most notably, Hobbes) incorrectly identified the will with the last judgment of the understanding. Clarke was at pains to avoid this conflation: ‘All error in this matter’, Clarke writes, ‘has arisen from men’s using the word, Will, in a confused sense, to express, (indistinctly) partly what is passive, and partly with is active’ (W IV, 714).

Thus, the root of the free will problem lies in a conflation between the active and passive aspects of an immaterial substance. Clarke aims to avoid this error by means of the following definition of freedom and necessity: ‘so far as any thing is passive, so far it is subject to necessity; so far as it is an agent, it is free: For action and freedom are, I think, perfectly identical ideas’ (W IV, 714). To be an agent means to be a true cause. But to be a cause means one cannot be an effect. If A causes B, and B ‘causes’⁸ C, then only A is the true cause of C. In other words: The notion of a necessitated agent is a contradiction in terms. This leads to the well-known idea of libertarian or contra-causal free will: actions have as their sole cause the agent’s active powers. Since the intellect (and the last act of judgment) is passive and necessitated, it cannot be the source of action. It is the will, and the will alone, which accounts for this power of action.

Consequently, it follows from Clarke’s definitions that the will cannot be necessitated:

If the two things now-mentioned [will and last judgment] were connected by a true physical necessity, there would remain no difference between action and passion […]. Nay, indeed, there would be no such thing as an agent or action in the universe. […] there would be in the universe, all patient and no agent, all effect, and no cause: Which is a manifest and most express contradiction. (W IV, 716)

We can understand Clarke’s argument here as a special application of the cosmological argument for the existence of God. If everything happens by physical necessity, then everything is the effect of something else. This would mean that the world is an effect without a cause. But you cannot have an effect without a cause. Thus, there must at the very least be one true cause, which has set everything else in motion, and this true cause cannot be necessitated. Therefore, there must be at least one truly free agent in the universe. This proof of the existence of a first cause comes up a number of times in Clarke’s Demonstration. Proposition II shows that there must be some self-existent being as the cause and ground of all dependent beings. This is later extended, in Proposition IX, to show that there must also be an original cause for all activity in the world:

[S]ince everything must indeed have a cause of its being […] ’tis impossible but there must be in the universe some being, whose existence is founded in the necessity of its own nature; and which, being acted upon by nothing beyond itself, must of necessity have in itself a principle of acting, or a power of beginning motion, which is the idea of liberty. (W II, 553)

It is clear that this argument has a very limited scope; it only establishes the existence of a single original real cause of motion in the universe. For Clarke’s present purposes, however, this is all he needs to show: At least one being in this universe must have true agency (and hence true free will). In the course of his Demonstration he connects this to the existence of a single, all-powerful and omnipresent God. And so it is proven that God must be a free agent.

It is on these grounds that Clarke writes that the will is not determined by the last act of judgment through an efficient cause. Rather, the last act of judgment functions merely as an occasion for the will to cause its action. This leads to an important distinction between physical and moral determination, which Clarke spells out very clearly in the case of human freedom:

The act of volition, or rather the beginning of action, consequent upon the last judgment of the understanding, is not determined or caused by that last judgment, as by the physical efficient, but only as the moral motive. For the true, proper, immediate, physical efficient cause of action, is the power of self-motion in men, which exerts itself freely in consequence of the last act of judgment of the understanding. But the last act of judgment of the understanding, is not itself a physical efficient, but merely a moral motive, upon which the power of acting begins to act. The necessity therefore, by which the power of acting follows the judgment of the understanding, is only a moral necessity. (W II, 565)

This analysis works equally for the case of God, as long as we understand the power of action to be efficient causation in general (generation, annihilation, modification). The point is that, while the last act of judgment does play an important role in determining the will, its role is not as a physical efficient. Rather, it functions as an occasion or motive for the will to determine itself. This distinction is important to Clarke:

Here therefore seems at last really to lie the fundamental errour, both of those who argue against the liberty of the will, and those who but too confusedly defend it: They do not make a clear distinction between moral motives, and causes physically efficient; which two things have no similitude at all. (W II, 565)

Further clarification of this point is given in his 1717 response to Anthony Collins:

Nothing that is passive, can possibly be the cause of any thing that is active. An occasion indeed, it may be; and action may be consequent (though without any physical connexion,) upon perception or judgment; nay, it may easily (if you please) be supposed to be ALWAYS consequent upon it, and yet at the same time there be no manner of physical or necessary connexion between them. […] Occasions indeed they may be, and are, upon which that substance in man, wherein the self-moving principle resides, freely exerts its active power. But it is the self-moving principle, and not at all the reason or motive, which is the physical or efficient CAUSE of action. (W IV, 723)

Given Clarke’s strict demand for contra-causal agency, the challenge is clear: He must account for the interaction between will and intellect, without establishing any ‘necessary connection’ between the two. The faculty of judgment cannot be the cause of action, because it is merely passive. Nor can reasons and motives be the cause of action, because those are only abstract notions. In other words, neither of these two can be allowed to cause anything to happen. Clarke echoes the language of occasional causation as a way to bridge this causal gap, suggesting that the intellect only functions as the occasion for the activity of the will.⁹ Nevertheless, as we will see later on, Clarke is willing to grant that a perfectly rational agent (such as God) always determines itself in accordance with what is best and most reasonable to do. Thus, the point is not that God ever acts contrary to his best judgment, but only that there cannot be a causal or necessary connection between will and judgment.

1.2. Freedom and choice

At first sight, however, it may appear as if Clarke does believe that the will can act contrary to its best judgment. In an important passage of the Demonstration, Clarke appears to establish a relation between freedom and liberty of indifference:

The essence of liberty […] consists in his being an agent, that is, in having a continual power of choosing, whether he shall act, or whether he shall forbear acting. (W II, 565–66)

Furthermore:

[God] must of necessity, every moment, either choose to act, or choose to forbear acting; because two contradictories cannot possibly be true at once. But which of these two he shall choose, in this he is at perfect liberty: And to suppose him not to be so, is contradictorily supposing him not to be the first cause, but to be acted by some superior power, so as to be himself no agent at all. (W II, 566)

These passages appear to argue for the freedom of God’s will to determine itself independently from his intellect or judgments. The challenge here is to understand the modal status of God’s possibility of choice. To interpret this passage, we need to keep in mind one of Clarke’s principal concerns: What does it take to be a true efficient cause? As I showed in section 1.1, all that is required for freedom is the absence of a physical necessity. As a point of principle, if only one state is physically possible, this state is said to be physically necessary (because its non-occurrence is impossible). To be a true agent, therefore, multiple states of affairs must be physically possible. And this is achieved by making the obtainment of this state of affairs instead of that state of affairs contingent upon God’s will.¹⁰

This contingency does not mean, however, that God needs a freedom to actually choose contrary to what is best. In the following sections, I will show that Clarke believed that God’s choices unfalteringly correspond to his best judgment. According to Clarke, it would be no more possible for God to choose anything but the best and wisest to be done, as it would be for God not to exist. It is only on the level of physical necessity, that the option of doing evil should be left open, so as to avoid necessitarianism.¹¹

1.3. The Leibniz-Clarke correspondence: Choice among equals

So far I have dealt with cases where God’s intellect provides him with a clear preference for one choice over another. But one of the primary reasons for scholars to consider Clarke a voluntarist comes from his correspondence with Leibniz, in which Clarke and Leibniz appear to be polar opposites when it comes to God’s freedom. This opposition is brought out most clearly in their debate on the topic of choice among equals. Ultimately, their disagreement comes down to the question whether God needs sufficient reasons for his actions, or whether he can act without a determining reason. When Leibniz brings up his PSR to reject choice among equals, Clarke responds as follows:

Undoubtedly nothing is, without a sufficient reason why it is, rather than not; and why it is thus, rather than otherwise. But in things in their own nature indifferent; mere will, without any thing external to influence it, is alone that sufficient reason. (Cl 3.2, W IV, 606)

Taken out of context, this can be read to say that the will has primacy over the intellect. If we are not careful it can even be thought to state that the will is completely independent from the intellect. However, a different interpretation arises once we combine it with the rest of Clarke’s theory of divine freedom: Clarke is not arguing against intellectualism, but only against Leibniz’s version of it, which he thought would lead to necessitarianism. This becomes clear in the following passage, in which Clarke criticizes Leibniz’s Principle of Sufficient Reason:

This notion [Leibniz’s PSR] leads to universal necessity and fate, by supposing that motives have the same relation to the will of an intelligent agent, as weights have to a balance; so that of two things absolutely indifferent, an intelligent agent can no more choose either, than a balance can move itself when the weights on both sides are equal. But the difference lies here. A balance is no agent, but is merely passive and acted upon by the weights; so that, when the weights are equal, there is nothing to move it. But intelligent beings are agents; not passive, in being moved by motives, as a balance is by weights; but they have active powers; and do move themselves, sometimes upon the view of strong motives, sometimes upon weak ones, and sometimes where things are absolutely indifferent. In which latter case, there may be very good reason to act, though two or more ways of acting may be absolutely indifferent. (Cl 4.1, W IV, 620–21)

Once again, Clarke reminds us to be careful to distinguish between activity and passivity. A balance is passive, and depends on unequal weights as its source of motion. The situation is different for will and judgment. Here, the will is the sole source of motion; its active powers do not depend on reason. To compare God to a balance is to make God a passive being, which would destroy God’s freedom. Another passage which shows this point very well comes from the third letter to Leibniz:

when two ways of acting are equally and alike good, (as in the instances before-mentioned;) to affirm in such case, that God cannot act at all, or that ’tis no perfection in him to be able to act, because he can have no external reason to move him to act one way rather than the other, seems to be a denying God to have in himself any original principle or power of beginning to act, but that he must needs (as it were mechanically) be always determined by things extrinsick. (Cl 3.7, W IV, 609)

The key claim here is that God’s activity does not causally depend on anything extrinsic to him (such as reason would be), but is instead wholly intrinsic. To say otherwise would deny God the power of self-motion. And, finally, it is also discussed extensively in the opening to his fifth letter:

To suppose that an equal apparent goodness in different ways of acting, takes away from the mind all power of acting at all, as an equality of weights keeps a balance necessarily at rest; is denying the mind to have in itself a principle of action; and is confounding the power of acting, with the impression made upon the mind by the motive, wherein the mind is purely passive. The motive, or thing considered as in view, is something extrinsick to the mind: the impression made upon the mind by that motive, is the perceptive quality, in which the mind is passive: the doing of any thing, upon and after, or in consequence of, that perception; this is the power of self-motion, or action. […] The not carefully distinguishing these things, but confounding the motive with the principle of action, and denying the mind to have any principle of action besides the motive, (when indeed in receiving the impression of the motive, the mind is purely passive;) This, I say, is the ground of the whole error; and leads men to think that the mind is no more active, than a balance would be with the addition of a power of perception: Which is wholly taking away the very notion of liberty. (Cl 5.1–20, W IV, 671)

This is an important passage, because so much has been made of Clarke’s choice among equals. However, once we analyse this point of the correspondence from the vantage point of Clarke’s active-passive distinction, it soon becomes evident that choice among equals is not employed in order to reject intellectualism, but merely to avoid necessitarianism. Leibniz rejected choice among equals because it violated his PSR: Everything needs a reason why it is thus and not otherwise, and therefore even God would not be able to make a choice among equals.¹⁶ Clarke vehemently opposed this line of thinking: If God’s will lacks an intrinsic and self-sufficient power of self-determination, then the distinction between will and judgment vanishes, and one falls into necessitarianism—God becomes nothing more than a balance being moved by its weights.

To put this more precisely: Clarke’s worry was that Leibniz conflated ‘sufficient reason’ and ‘sufficient cause’.¹⁷ Clarke points out this problem near the end of the fifth letter, where he tells us that Leibniz’s PSR ‘is of an equivocal signification; and may be either so understood, as to mean necessity only, or so as to include likewise will and choice’ (Cl 5.124–30, W IV, 700). What I take Clarke to mean with this, is that abstract reasons may be sufficient to explain truths of necessity (such as 2 + 2 = 4), which do not require any activity for their obtainment, but they are not sufficient to ground actions.¹⁸ For actions, a different kind of PSR needs to be employed, which we may call the causal PSR. This causal PSR states that the only sufficient reason for an action is the will of an agent. Thus, only the will itself provides the sufficient cause for action. We find evidence for this way of phrasing the issue in Clarke’s fifth letter:

the true and only question in philosophy concerning liberty, is, whether the immediate physical cause or principle of action be indeed in him whom we call the agent; or whether it be some other reason sufficient, which is the real cause of the action, by operating upon the agent, and making him to be, not indeed an agent, but a mere patient. (Cl 5.1–20, W IV, 673–74)

Notice how ‘some other reason sufficient’ is immediately connected to being ‘the real cause of the action’: If God’s actions are grounded in his judgment, and his judgment is necessitated by goodness and rationality (as Clarke indeed believes), then God’s actions are ultimately caused by antecedent relations of goodness and rationality.

Clarke was worried that Leibniz vacillated too easily between a logical PSR and a causal PSR.¹⁹ This was dangerous, because if you conflate the two, the division between will and judgment vanishes, and God no longer has any true agency. Thus, to maintain the distinction between activity and passivity, the PSR needs to be bifurcated, ‘so as to include likewise will and choice’ (Cl 5.124–30, W IV, 700), because reasons are only passive and cannot be the cause of anything. Therefore, the sufficient reason (or, more accurately, sufficient ground) of God’s actions cannot be mere reason, but has to be his mere will. To argue otherwise would lead to necessitarianism.

Thus, Clarke’s defense of choice among equals does not constitute an attack on intellectualism per se. Clarke readily accepts that God’s will always determines itself in accordance with what is best (which is the hallmark of intellectualism). Only in cases where there are multiple best options, God’s mere will provides the tiebreaker, since the alternative would be to reject God’s power of self-determination. Choice among equals here functions as a litmus test for a correct understanding of free agency: A true contra-causal agent must have the freedom to determine its own motion, without requiring external influences for its determination.

2.1. The goodness account

While Henry has put forward a number of ways to define voluntarism over the years, his most consistently employed definition revolves around the notion of eternal uncreated truths of goodness. According to Henry:

one of the traditional ways of characterizing the differences … is to say that the intellectualist believes that God does what is good, but the voluntarist says that what God does is good. The first implies that the good is an absolute concept independent of God, the latter carries no such implication. (Henry 2009: 81)

In a similar vein, he writes that voluntarists rejected the idea that God’s will was constrained ‘to choose a particular kind of creation by pre-existing absolute conceptions of what was good, or what was possible according to some philosophical position’ (Henry 2009: 86). He repeats this distinction in his 2018 article, in which he defines voluntarism as the view that ‘there could not have been any co-eternal moral or physical principles to which God had to conform in the creation. He had complete freedom of operation and his omnipotence was not compromised by already existing moral, logical, or physical restraints’ (Henry and McGuire 2018: 10). This is contrasted with the intellectualist position, which ‘assumed that God’s creation and providence were necessarily guided, and indeed constrained, by supposed co-eternal principles of good and evil, right and wrong, and so forth’ (Henry and McGuire 2018: 10).

Applying this notion to the Leibniz-Clarke correspondence, Henry concludes that their conflict ‘reveals, above all else, a clash between the differing worldviews of the voluntarist and the intellectualist’ (Henry 2009: 89). This is because, according to Henry, Clarke argued that God’s mere will is the sufficient reason for his choices, in contrast to Leibniz according to whom the reasons for God’s actions are independent from his will. Hence, according to Henry, Leibniz takes ‘a classic intellectualist position, opposed by the voluntarist claim that God can create arbitrarily, unconstrained by any supposedly eternal uncreated truths’ (Henry 2009: 98–99).

Henry’s argument rests on the assumption that Clarke allowed for a God unconstrained by eternal uncreated truths. As I have shown with my reconstruction, this is not a position Clarke accepted. It is abundantly clear that Clarke does believe morality, rationality, and mathematical truths are antecedent to God’s will, and that these principles really do constrain God’s will. Clarke explicitly argues that God ‘must act always according to the strictest rules of infinite Goodness, Justice, and Truth’, and that these rules are unchangeable, eternal, and (crucially) ‘antecedent to will and to all positive appointment’ (W II, 572). From these statements, it is clear that there is no way in which goodness depends on God’s will, or that God can act contrary to what is best. To remove any lingering doubt about this, however, let me emphasize a passage from Clarke’s sermon ‘Of the Omnipotence of God’:

[It] is too often so understood, as if the power and will of God made that to be right, which is so; and as if it might as easily have made the contrary to become right. […] but even with regard to God himself also it is plainly a mistake: For, not power or will, but the reason of things only, is the foundation of right: and tho’ ’tis indeed certainly true, that whatever God does, we are sure ’tis right, because he does it; yet the meaning of this, is not, that God’s doing or willing a thing, makes it to be right; but that his wisdom and goodness is such, that we may depend on it, even without understanding it, that whatever he wills, was in itself right, antecedent to his willing it; and that he therefore willed it, because it was right. (W I, 55) ²²

In other words: God cannot decide what is right and wrong, because right and wrong are grounded in the necessity of things, and therefore do not depend on the will or choice of God. Moreover, Clarke is very explicit that it would be as impossible for God to act against these laws, as it would be for a necessary agent to be free. Thus, while I agree with Henry that the goodness account may perhaps be one of the most consistent means we have for distinguishing between voluntarism and intellectualism, it places Clarke squarely in the intellectualist camp.

2.2. The free determination account

Another way to carve up the voluntarism-intellectualism distinction is through the contingency of creation. Henry points out, for instance, that one reason to suppose Newton to have been a voluntarist is that he believed that ‘the world might have been otherwise then it is (because there may be worlds otherwise framed then this) Twas therefore noe necessary but a voluntary & free determination that it should bee thus’ (Henry 2009: 88). While Henry unfortunately does not provide us with further details why exactly such language ought to be an indication of voluntarism, it is very much in line with what I will call the free determination account. The general gist of this argument is that a voluntarist believes that God could have made the world in a very important sense otherwise than it presently is, whereas an intellectualist would say God could not have made the world otherwise. This argument has been made in various forms, and for ease of argument I will make a further distinction between a strong and weak version of the free determination account. The strong account states that according to voluntarists God had the freedom to choose different physical or metaphysical constructions of the universe, free from moral, physical, or possibly even metaphysical restrictions. The weak account states that while God’s choices were significantly constrained by eternal truths, these constraints did not determine his choices, and therefore were still free determinations.