Ways of Subordinating God To Human Beings in Early Modern Philosophy A General

Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia
Ways of Subordinating God to Human Beings in Early Modern Philosophy A General

Overview with Special Attention to the Role played by Mathematics in Cartesian
Epistemology
Author(s): VIOREL VIZUREANU
Source: Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, T. 73, Fasc. 2, Filosofia e Experiência de Deus /
Philosophy and Experience of God (2017), pp. 717-750
Published by: Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia
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Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia, 2017, Vol. 73 (2): 717-750.
© 2017 by Revista Portuguesa de Filosofia. All rights reserved.
DOI 10.17990/RPF/2017_73_2_0717
Ways of Subordinating God to Human Beings in

Early Modern Philosophy: A General Overview with
Special Attention to the Role played by Mathematics in
Cartesian Epistemology *
VIOREL VIZUREANU **
Abstract
Our paper focuses, from a philosophical standpoint, on a defining phenomenon of modernity
which we will call the subordination of God to the human being. It concerns a complex
and subtle phenomenon, mainly involuntary, due to the fact that many philosophical
strategies were meant to reinforce a declining presence of God in the general framework
of human knowledge. Subsequently, we chose to exemplify this kind of approaches through
the peculiar place occupied by mathematics in modern philosophy, especially in the 17th
century, by making appeal mainly to the works of Descartes, from a perspective which might
be called of a Heideggerian inspiration. We will see that even in this narrower context, the
aforementioned subordination is not simple or unequivocal, but one that possesses multiple
aspects or ways through which it is confirmed. And, of course, speaking in a strictly scientific
manner (for the sake of rigor), we have to limit for the time being the conclusions of our
interpretation only to the latter (Cartesian) context.
Keywords: constructivism, Descartes, early modern philosophy, God, mathematics.
T
he purpose of our work is twofold. Firstly, we will try to paint a
schematic picture of the background in which we believe was
realized what we could call, from a philosophical standpoint, the
subordination of God to the human being, during the first centuries of
modernity, especially through the development of a new model of scien-
tific knowledge. It is equally important to notice that this ‘philosophical
secularization’ (or secularization through philosophy) took place even in
* The author wishes to thank the anonymous reviewer for her very useful suggestions
and corrections.
** Institute of Philosophy and Psychology “C. Rădulescu-Motru” of the Romanian Academy.
University of Bucharest.
 vizureanu@yahoo.com
717-750
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718 Viorel Vizureanu
those places where philosophical endeavors were undertook especially in

the name of God – or where, at least in intention, it was attempted to
consolidate or at least respect, its reality.
Secondly, we will focus our research by illustrating this process in
a – we hope – coherent manner through the role played by mathematics in
modern philosophy, especially in the 17th century, in particular in Descartes’
work. We will see that even in this narrower context, the aforementioned
subordination is not simple or unequivocal, but one that possesses multiple
aspects or ways through which it is confirmed. It must be stressed that
mathematics offers just one of the epistemological „strategies” of the
self (subject) developed within this complex process. Moreover, we will
briefly show that mathematics goes through an epistemological and also
an ontological modification of its status, being transformed from a mere
expression or approximation of transcendence into one of the preferred
forms of manifestation of the subject. To oversimplify it, mathematics will
represent, from now on, the self, it will be, before everything, a truth of the
subject, a proof of its cognitive powers.
All the above-mentioned things presuppose, on the whole, not only a
systematization of the concerned elements as they were depicted by other
historians of philosophical ideas, but also a bringing to light of some
paths, up until now well-hidden, through which this subordination took
place. This bringing to light doesn’t mean in this context the uncovering
of some new ‘contents’, but the interpretation of some ‘old’ textual facts,
many of them already well-known.
A clarification should be made here, one according to which, besides
some elements which are very often mentioned in an obsessive manner,
there are numerous other components contained within modernity –
understood as a process of secularization –, whose ‘potential for under-
mining’ is not as investigated as it should be. Various central ideas of the
concerned period might seem ‘innocent’, meaning that we appreciate
them as being purely objective or only technical, limited to evolutions only
in the internal sphere of science. Only in this light should the detailed
analysis which we apply to the significance of mathematics be understood
during the aforementioned historical period – and we admit that for some
such an endeavor might seem (very) suspicious. We could go even further
and state that we can not identify what could be called ‘ideas with neutral
value’ in the (re)configuration of the relationship of modern man with
divine reality – unfortunately, due to space constraints, we can not offer a
more detailed justification for this statement.
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Ways of Subordinating God to Human Beings in Early Modern Philosophy 719
For some authors, the first reflex was that of connecting this secu-
larization manifested in the sphere of philosophical thinking with what
could be called a theoretical and methodological de-anthropologization
operated on knowledge by Descartes and other modern philosophers, an
event which marks the abandonment of the ‘empirical and naive’ view
concerning the relation of man with reality (hence with God) and which
also expresses the ideal of scientific modern theory.1
But, it must be stressed that in our view this de-anthropologization
is also accompanied by a re-anthropologization2 of a different kind, which
could be masked by the ideal of objectivity of modern scientific knowledge.
Essentially, the choice itself of the ideal of objectivity and its continuous
transformation represents the expression of the power of human beings
of deciding with regard to their own destiny, which is an expression of
human freedom (in its modern understanding) and – following in Kant’s
footsteps – of man’s emergence from immaturity. ‘The Copernican revo-
lution’ discussed by the same philosopher is the most suggestive image in
this respect. To put it shortly, this de-anthropologization mainly represents
the concrete sign of the modern re-anthropologization of knowledge, a
reaffirmation of what it is to be human on a different, superior level within
an Enlightenment-inspired reading.
The same explicative mechanism could also be invoked for what
could be called the de-anthropologization of the self (otherwise put, we
are not here dealing with the empirical, psychological self, seen from the
perspective of the ‘concrete man’, but from a transcendental-cognitive
one), which was considered consonant with the de-anthropologization of
the ideal of science above-mentioned.3 In other words, we observe here
modern man’s maneuver resulting in seeing and perceiving himself from
a scientific perspective, as a source / basis of scientificity itself, of ‘objec-
tifying’ itself in the form of a knowing subject (and thus the subject of –

1.
We will borrow in the following paragraphs some of the ideas exposed in our article
“Constante ale filosofiei moderne sau filosofia modernă între spiritul raţiunii şi raţiunea
spiritului,” Revista de filosofie LXIII, no. 2 (2016): 201–208.
2.
We use the term in a sense close to the one established by the Heideggerian concept
of anthropologization of modern metaphysics. See the section “Metaphysics and
Anthropomorphism”, as well as the whole chapter to which it belongs, called “European
Nihilism”, in Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Volume IV, trans. by Joan Stambaugh et al.
(San Francisco: Harper, 1991), 85-90 (1-196); GA 6.2 112-117 (23-230).
3.
Alexandru Boboc, Raţiune şi spirit în reconstrucția modernă în filosofie, Vol. I: De la
Descartes la Hegel (Bucharest: Editura Academiei Române, 2015), 17.
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scientific – knowledge becomes the expression of the humane, the privileged

image that man has of himself).
Finally, we believe we can also see here the effect of a return of
man on himself, a reshaping / redefinition of humanity that he himself
produces based on the form of his knowledge which he designates as the
expression of his own cognitive certainties (essentially, the recognized
certainty of the mathematical truth). Which, again, comes back to saying
once again that this de-anthropologization of the self represents, in the
same time, a re-anthropologization of a special kind, a kind of purifi-
cation (scientific or transcendental, in a broad sense) of the self operated
on itself. The above-mentioned consonance represents, then, the double
reciprocal conditioning which is realized by the self alongside modern
science: science finally abandons the demands of capturing the ultimate
truths of the world (of the world-in-itself), while the self is built by itself in
conformity with the demands of reality’s (modern) scientificity. Only this
way could the human being become the basis of knowledge in a twofold
manner: as a precise structure of (in)formation of (science’s) theory of
reality and as an epistemological decision of searching for those founda-
tions in himself.
However, we would like to draw attention, from the very beginning,
to the fact that we do not want to reduce all the endeavors of modern
philosophy to a sole model, be it a complex one. Pascal’s case, for example,
is too well-known for being easily caught in such an explicative scheme.4
All we are trying to illustrate in this study is the existence of a predom-
inant, perhaps even overwhelming movement of reflexive practices in the
frameworks of modern Occidental philosophy – and its existence as such
4.
However, in our opinion, even the (critical) reflections on the modern endeavors of
rationalistic philosophy – in a broad sense – be they “existential” (Pascal, Kierkegaard),
“sentimentalist” (Rousseau, Chateaubriand), “romantic” (the Jena romanticism, partly
Schleiermacher, etc.), share some essential features which brings them near to those
just enumerated. Perhaps, the common key factor that we have to relate to constantly
in all these cases is the one of subjectivity. Heidegger, for example, in the continuation
of a process of historical hermeneutics that has Hegel and Nietzsche as forerunners,
sees in modern philosophy a “philosophy of the subject”, thus talking, for example,
about “the dominance of the subject in the modern age” (title of one of his sections
Nietzsche, Vol. IV, 96-101; GA 6.2 124-129).
Returning to our warning that caused this note, we should mention that in such
historical approaches it is perfectly possible to find in the pre-modern period promoters
of the ideas – typically modern – highlighted here. They can even be seen to have
exercised punctual, palpable influences on modern thinkers. Again, what is decisive
in our analysis is the attempt of finding tendencies / currents and not only exponents /
isolated individuals who circulated those ideas.
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does not prevent us to accept the existence of the least visible, centrifugal
cases, the so-called exceptions. As such, we can not wish to affirm that
all modern philosophers, that all philosophers who activated in what
is called – not unproblematically! – (early) modernity, are exponents or
promoters of such a model.
But, in its essential points, the history of modern philosophy is a
proof for such a consonance. So, as Kirk observes,
In different ways, Descartes, Locke and Kant recognized some
need to postulate the ‘existence’ of God, if their respective epis-
temological and moral theories were going to succeed. However,
such a token belief amounts to little more than an anthropomorphic
projection of God, as a methodological device, to meet certain needs,
whether these are cognitive, emotive, cultural, social or religious. (my
italics)5
1. A short (and somewhat speculative) intermezzo. What is the

place of God in (a) modern philosophy? And, also, what kind of
God is it? A special look at Descartes
Before properly starting our analysis I would like to invoke a certain,

somehow puzzling, attitude experienced by many readers relative to God’s
presence in the frameworks of modern philosophy, which we will exem-
plify by making appeal to Cartesian thinking. But, it must be stressed,
beyond the renown of Cartesian philosophy, this type of reaction could be
linked to the quasi-totality of endeavors of Occidental thinkers belonging
to that epoch, regardless of their religion,6 if one assumes that religion
could be a decisive factor in this matter.
I would like to invoke a longer passage belonging to John Cottingham,
who has the merit of capturing in detail this state of affairs which could be
easily experimented by a new reader of the Cartesian works, in as much as
he will start from the canonical image in the Anglo-Saxon world according
to which Descartes, is above all a secular philosopher. A priori system-
builder, advocate of “Cartesian privacy,” philosopher of mind, epistemol-
ogist, proto-scientist – all these images fit, for the most part, as models or

5.
J. Andrew Kirk, The Future of Reason, Science, and Faith: Following Modernity and
Postmodernity (Aldershot, England / Burlington, USA: Ashgate, 2007), 124.

6.
We should, only in passing, stress the fact that Descartes was a Catholic, Spinoza was
of Jewish origins and Leibniz was a Protestant.
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as targets, within the agendas of the modern Anglophone philosophical

academy. But if readers who are new to Descartes pick up any one of his
great masterpieces, the Discourse, the Meditations, or the Principles, they
will be surprised to find that what has pride of place in the construction
of his philosophical system is something that is almost never found in
today’s typical research agendas – an appeal to God. Within contemporary
philosophy departments there are still, of course, a considerable number
of academics who discuss arguments for God’s existence and other
topics concerned with religious belief; but their work, for the most part,
occurs within the confines of a specialized branch of philosophy called
“philosophy of religion,” and as a general rule it tends not to spill over into
the content of the “mainstream” arguments and debates that preoccupy
those working in the rest of the subject. For Descartes, by contrast, the
nature and existence of the Deity is something that lies at the very heart
of his entire philosophical system – something without which it would be
entirely unrecognizable.7
Several questions, occasioned by reading these passages from
Cottingham, will pop into our mind. What does the presence of God, as
a nominal appearance in the text and as an unavoidable metaphysical
position in the argumentation, express in Cartesian philosophy? Could
this presence / position be hidden, as in the interpretations invoked by
Cottingham (which constitute, in his terms, an ‘eclipse’ of God in the
interpretations of Cartesianism)? Or are these attempts in themselves the
expression of the fact that the profoundness of Cartesian philosophy could
be obtained even by ‘renouncing God’? Why are those philosophers, to
whom Cottingham makes a reference to, inclined to ignore “his arguments
and assertions about God (...) as irrelevant to the central core of modern
mainstream philosophy, or, perhaps, as what they take to be an embar-
rassing hangover from the medieval world view that still conditioned the
way Descartes was brought up”?8
Otherwise put, could we talk about a present, but in the same time, still
absent God? Is it a God whose presence (be it textually nominal or meta-
physically real) in fact induces the feeling (or perception) of an absence?
Or maybe this divine ‘presence’ under the form of some regularities that
guide, in an ubiquitous and immutable manner, the behavior of all things,
7.
John Cottingham, “The Role of God in Descartes’ Philosophy,” in A Companion
to Descartes, ed. by Janet Broughton and John Carriero (Malden, etc.: Blackwell
Publishing, 2008), 289.
8.
Ibid.
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from all times, in all possible spaces, throws into a shadow or even drives
away the presence of a personal, living God – a somehow discretionary
legislator, in the sense in which the ultimate aim of its justice, i.e. of truth
for us, is slipping between our fingers?
After all, isn’t what Cottingham affirms just a reiteration, after many
centuries, of Pascal’s sentiment stirred up by the realization that Descartes’
need for God is – in essence – just an intellectual one? In a famous passage,
he was confessing that “I cannot forgive Descartes. In all his philosophy he
would have been quite willing to dispense with God. But he had to make
Him give a fillip to set the world in motion; beyond this, he has no further
need of God.”9
In a way, all the above-mentioned things could be translated through
the existence of a mechanistic homogeneous universe, from which the
extra-ordinary presence of miracles and wonders is eliminated. Descartes
explicitly affirms that modern man possesses a priori knowledge as a
fundamental manner of expressing himself and as a way of eliminating
any possibility that this essential determination be affected, „we shall (…)
suppose in addition that God will never perform any miracle in the new
world, and that the intelligences, or the rational souls, which we might
later suppose to be there, will not disrupt in any way the ordinary course
of nature.”10
Coming back to the observation which accompanied Pascal’s
quotation, an intellectual need (be it metaphysical, epistemological, moral
or political and so on11) is a need which appears as a consequence of some
internal and inherent constraints of the use of reason which precedes
through its purposes and decision the apparition in the discourse of a
reality (i.e. God) necessary to its own evolution. In a way, our analysis is
also an answer, multiple in its internal unfoldings, offered to these kinds
of perplexities.12
9.
Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W.F. Trotter (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, Inc.,
2003), 23; B 40.
10.
The World or Treatise on Light (Le monde, ou Traité de la lumière), in René Descartes,
The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff,
Dugald Murdoch, Vol. I (Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge University Press, 1985), 97 [AT,
XI, 47-48; CSM I, 97].
11.
It should be noted that even this need for an absolute a priori human knowledge
expressed by Descartes in the above-mentioned quotation could be read exactly within
the framework of an imposition from the inside of the human cognitive endeavor of
perceiving the divine presence.
12.
As Gorham remarked synthetically, “[a]lthough Descartes had little taste for technical
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If we accept the hypothesis that God is expressed – and deformed… –

through human thinking and language, even when it is thought of as a
pure, primary transcendence (hence the possibility of interrogating the
existence of a subordination of God to the human being which we could
call ‘primary’, of an implacable contamination of divinity with the cate-
gories of the humane which tries to reconstruct it in its purity), it would
become doubly subordinated through these supplementary cognitive
hypotheses and mechanisms. And if the first primary subordination would
also seem ‘unconscious’, the second one will be, if not conscious, then
at least ‘subconscious’, i.e. a present thing which we could acknowledge
through a supplementary reflexive effort, but which we would pass by
without grasping its true significance. Which means that maybe, in a para-
doxical way, modern man wishes for himself this manner of forgetting (or
of cognitively secularizing…) God.
The key term which would impose itself in this context is irrelevance.
Talking about the role God plays within the Cartesian theory of knowledge,
Schouls affirms that
[i]n effect, Descartes’ argument entails the non-existence of a deceiving

god (because “divinity” and “deception” cannot coexist in the same being)
as well as the irrelevance of a veracious god (both because the limitation
of omnipotence is a contradiction in terms and because reason cannot
establish its own trustworthiness and that of the senses).13
theology (…) the concept of God permeates his philosophy and is indispensable to
his project. One can hardly imagine a more religious doctrine than the one we have
just examined, that the universe is continuously saved from oblivion by God’s creative
act. Still, I think it is fair to say that Descartes always puts God in the service of some
pressing metaphysical or scientific problem, rather than vice-versa. The doctrine of
continuous creation should be understood in this light, serving as an effective guard
against the re-introduction of scholastic ideas into modern physics. For if God literally
recreates the entire universe at each instant, preserving all the motions in all the
bodies, then there is nothing left for vital forces, substantial forms, and the like, to do.
In this sense Pascal is right that Descartes needed God only «in order to set the world
in motion»”, Geoffrey Gorham, “Cartesian Causation: Continuous, Instantaneous,
Overdetermined,” Journal of the History of Philosophy 42, no. 4 (October 2004): 423.
13.
Peter Schouls, “The Quest for Philosophical Certainty,” in The Enlightenment World,
ed. Martin Fitzpatrick et al. (London and New York: Routledge, 2004), 29. Schouls
takes the Turgot’s quotation from Ronald L. Meek, Turgot on Progress, Sociology and
Economics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1973), 94.
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in order to ask if Turgot was right when “he surmised that Descartes
dared not admit the irrelevance of God even to himself because «he was
frightened by the solitude in which he had put himself».”14
In fact, we could very well understand the intervention of divinity
in Descartes’ philosophical argumentation as a desperate appeal to a
‘last moment’ transcendence (to a transcendence which appears from
immanence). Once again, the problem is not if God appears, but how he
appears in philosophical argumentation. God reveals himself in Descartes’
writings as an epistemological guarantor (of a capacity of seeing the truth
which somehow works ‘by itself’) and, we might be over-speculating, as a
not-present parent (never seen), ‘presumed’ in its continuous presence or
as the expression of an epistemological need of reinventing transcendence
(so not as a presence, as a positivity, as a given).
We will linger a little bit more on the case of the same philosopher and
on the irrelevance of the presence of God within his philosophical frame-
works. As Della Rocca observes, „God is, for Descartes, non-threatening
despite being all-powerful; or rather, non-threatening precisely because
he is all-powerful.”15 When we research the traits or concrete behavior of
finite things, „it is almost as if God doesn’t exist, (…) we can proceed freely
without worrying about bumping into God or stepping on his toes, as it
were.”16
More aspects could be stressed in Della Rocca’s observations. First of
all, this “as if God does not exist” does not mean that we are dealing here
(as in the case of the majority of modern philosophers) with an insincere
attempt concerning divinity. It only concerns the way in which God’s
presence is restricted in its apparition and ‘functioning’ within the frame-
works of a new philosophy, especially within epistemology, which plays a
central, determining role.
Then, it is possible to consider – in Descartes’ works – that the relation
of creatures with God is an overwhelmingly metaphysical one,17 but as long
as it can not be apprehended, hence it can not be cognitively analyzed, it
simply disappears from the horizon of a detailed philosophical investi-
gation. It does not even lead to the development of a complex, speculative,
14.
Ibid.
15.
Michael Della Rocca, “Descartes, the Cartesian Circle, and Epistemology without
God,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research LXX, no. 1 (January 2005): 29.
16.
Ibid.
17.
See the doctrine of continual creation.
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apophatism, problematic in its structure,18 but only to what could be

called a ‘lack of (scientific) interest’.
We could thus say that Descartes opens the way – or, as Della Rocca
maintains, he makes some “crucial steps” – for a secularized epistemology
which will be the defining trait of modernity in its whole and which we
will encounter afterwards at philosophers such as Hume and Kant. In the
words of the same Della Rocca, “Descartes is (…) preparing the way for the
development of accounts of freedom, substance, causation and modality
that proceed without any invocation of God, accounts that proceed inde-
pendently of God.”19 But it is not a question regarding a simple “prepa-
ration” or “suggestion” of a road to follow – „the most surprising part of
all this is, perhaps, that these points also apply to Descartes’ epistemology.
In some way, Descartes is starting to make room for the view that episte-
mology can proceed without concerning itself with God.”20
Further on, it means that this ‘divorce’ between God and epistemology
is not however complete in Descartes’ writings. We could also add that, at
least at a certain stage of modernity,21 this break up won’t be a total one,
even for those philosophers in whose works the presence of God is much
less felt than in Descartes’ oeuvre.
Anyway, the general observation of Della Rocca fixes as the initial
point of reflection the same puzzling attitude mentioned by Cottingham:
“the paradoxical and intriguing aspect of Descartes’ view here is that he
takes these steps in the context of an epistemology that is explicitly theo-
centric in so many ways.”22
We will say more about modern epistemology and, in particular, the
Cartesian one and its role in the modification of the links between human
beings and divinity in the following section.

18.
After all, we could envisage that such a “developed” or “complex” apophatism is
an ontological one, i.e. one that places God as a unique trigger of philosophical /
theological interrogation (as did, for example, Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite). The
first purpose of the philosophical discourse would be given, in the latter case, by the
possibility of speaking with God, not just through the securing of our knowledge, but
within the ideatic frameworks of modernity.
19.
Della Rocca, “Epistemology without God,” 29-30.
20.
Ibid., 30.
21.
Perhaps the tutelary figures of this stage of modernity, which can be called self-
reflective and self-critical, figures who are also the expression of a certain conclusion
of the processes outlined here, are Marx and Nietzsche.

22.
Della Rocca, “Epistemology without God,” 30.
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We mentioned that the subordination of God within the frameworks

of modern philosophy is realized on multiple levels. The amplitude of
the subject constrains us to treat here only what we called the subordi-
nation through epistemology (or epistemological subordination), and
only relative to the contribution of the role played by mathematics, as
it is understood by modern philosophers (especially Descartes). We are
thus forced to leave behind alternative or complementary manners of
subordination, like the ones accomplished through ontology or historical
discourse, as well as other epistemological tracks, like the one given by the
generalization of efficient causality.23
2. The epistemological subordination of God
This section, dedicated to the role played by epistemological elements

in what we called the subordination of God in modernity, constitutes the
central point of our present argumentation. We do not want to imply that
all the other aspects mentioned above are not important, but only that in
our opinion there are much more proofs, from this perspective, for the
process discussed. Maybe, all this multitude can not but illustrate a very
scattered reading of modern philosophy, in which the latter is understood
as essentially sharing an epistemological tint. Modernity presupposes, to
put it shortly, what could be called an epistemologizing ontology.24
To a great extent, as we shall see, this process is due to the role played
by mathematics within the new philosophy’s frameworks. But mathe-
matics played a role in the configuration of philosophical reflection since
Antiquity (it is not probably by accident that the man who is considered to
be the first philosopher, Thales, is also seen as the first one who developed
deductive reasoning in mathematics, the first proper mathematician), so
it would be more adequate to talk about the new role played now by math-
ematics, or about its profound cognitive re-signification which started in
the 17th century.
Evidently, the importance of this phenomenon was also considered
central and stressed by many commentators before. Hence, Heidegger
shows – in What is a Thing? (Die Frage nach dem Ding) – that none of

23.
Which will constitute the object of a further article.

24.
See in this sense the article of Cosmin-Petru Vraciu, “Teoria carteziană a ideilor –
rupturi faţă de teoria tomistă a cunoaşterii,” Revista de filosofie LXIII, no. 6 (2016):
706–724.
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the three big characteristics usually invoked in order to determine the

specificity of modern science (that it is about facts – factual, it is experi-
mental, it employs measuring and calculus) and, implicitly, of the whole
spiritual configuration of modernity, are relevant as such, because the
concerned elements are present even in prior scientific configurations. He
thinks that the fundamental trait of modern science is given by the fact
that it is a mathematised science.25 Heidegger markedly invokes here – by
considering it as not sufficiently well understood in its initial message –
one of Kant’s affirmations in Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science
(Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft), according to which
“I assert, however, that in any special doctrine of nature there can be only
as much proper science as there is mathematics therein.”26
Our contribution in this sense opens the way for a multiple inter-
pretation, by way of emphasizing a direct (which is, somehow, “in light”)
subordination of God and also a series of less visible (somehow hidden)
subordinations at a first sight, which we will call indirect.
3. The direct subordination of God through the development of

the epistemological process
The idea that in modern philosophy in general we can find a subor-

dination of God to the structure, basic premises and aims of the cognitive
approach of human beings is for many historians of philosophy a common
one. Naturally, as we have already mentioned, in this case, Descartes’
gesture could be appreciated as an exemplary one. He conceives the
fundamental act of philosophy as an endeavor which has the certainty
of its own knowledge as a central, primal objective. Otherwise put, we
can find here the founding cognitive decision which leaves deep traces
in the metaphysical scheme of modernity. To put it shortly, this founding
centrality of subjectivity in Descartes opens the possibility of interrogating
the character of the principle of knowledge of God’s existence, as well as
the circularity attributed to its philosophy.
In a certain sense, there is no need to decide, through rigorous argu-
mentation, the aspects contained within the concerned philosophical

25.
See Martin Heidegger, What is a Thing?, trans. W.B. Barton and Vera Deutsch (South
Bend, Indiana: Gateway Editions, Ltd., 1967), especially 66-108; GA 41 65-108.

26.
Immanuel Kant, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, trans. Michael Friedman
(Cambridge, etc.: Cambridge University Press, 2004), 6; AA IV 470.
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dispute, which dates back to Descartes. It is sufficient to keep in mind

the prior observation, according to which such an endeavor opens the
possibility of contesting the place occupied by God in knowledge. Some of
the central elements of this situation are very well stressed by Dougherty,
when he points out the fact that using the term “principle” for God’s exis-
tence opens the way for its equivocal use for at least two reasons. First
of all, because we can doubt its existence as a principle – that it is thus
subject to a methodological principle of systematic doubt. And secondly,
because, Descartes explicitly affirms that it is deduced (deduit) from the
first principle of his philosophy, the one belonging to the cogitative exis-
tence. Hence, “[t]he existence of God may be called a principle insofar as
it serves as a foundation for other arguments to follow in the work, but it
is not unqualifiedly a principle insofar as it requires a demonstration.”27
This epistemological subordination is synthetically captured by J.-M.
Nicolle. In his vision
Descartes is a rationalist and his theory about God is largely based on

his philosophy. His God is the God of philosophers and scientists. His
theology is, in spite of his precautions, a theology which serves his theory
of knowledge. When we read his meditations, it is obvious that God is
only an argument in his philosophy.28
After all, even Cottingham, whom as we have seen decries the in-ex-
istence of of God’s central role in numerous contemporary interpretations
of Cartesianism, recognizes that the image of God painted by Descartes is
a special one (and that it does not resemble the one we find in Pascal or
Kierkegaard): “God is central, but it is a God who is established by reason,
and who underpins the rationality of a system of science and morality that
offers genuine power to human beings to ameliorate their lives.”29
The most significant sign of this profound philosophical change is the
fact that the first and most direct truth of philosophy is / becomes self-con-
sciousness. The first philosophical expression of a truth in the framework
of Cartesian metaphysics consists in recognizing the Cogito’s power of
27.
M.V. Dougherty, “The Importance of Cartesian Triangles: A New Look at Descartes’
Ontological Argument,” International Journal of Philosophical Studies 10, no.1 (2002):
55.
28.
Jean-Marie Nicolle, “The Mathematical Analogy in the Proof of God’s Existence by
Descartes,” in Mathematics and the Divine: A Historical Study, ed. Teun Koetsier and
Luc Bergmans (Amsterdam, etc.: Elsevier, 2005), 402.
29.
Cottingham, “The Role of God,” 299.
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finding / substituting itself as truth. Moreover, the evidence of this first

truth becomes the model for all further truths, i.e. even for the cognitive
relation with the existence of God. It is the reason for which we could say
that this subordination of God is one directed towards self-consciousness
(or towards the Cogito), towards the human mind and its general activity.
It is remarkable, however, that this gesture of epistemological
reversal, of deriving God’s existence from my own (which, for the moderns,
also means a ‘mentalist’ / ‘intellectualist’ journey to God) can not only be
attributed to the legacy of Cartesianism or to a strictly rationalist depen-
dence, because it represents a tendency of philosophical thinking in
general, and therefore of what could be called empirical frames or expres-
sions. For example, differentiating between types of truth that are out of
reach to the human mind, Locke will assert the triple knowledge of exis-
tence: “we have the knowledge of our own existence by intuition; of the
existence of God by demonstration; and of other things by sensation.”30
The decisive turning point here is – in our opinion – linked to how we
interpret the self-consciousness of the moderns. Of course, pre-modern
man was himself conscious about his own existence as a soul or as a soul
developing a somehow incessant activity. But he did not consider this fact
a truth, and even less the first fundamental truth. In fact, for him it is not
at all a truth – because we have to accept from the outset our finitude,
our integration in a vaster context (be it of nature / cosmos or the whole
Creation of God), our metaphysical finitude – it could not be accepted that
the finite “I” is a truth in itself, and even one that is self-asserting as such.
The truth of the self, if we can call it this way, is given only by the partici-
pation of the soul to what is divine, owed to the divine in the human being,
the divine part of the soul.31

30.
John Locke, An Essay Concerning Human Understanding (The Pennsylvania State
University, 1999), 612.

31.
See, for example, Plato, Alcibiade, 133c2-16, where Socrates talks about the region of
the soul (where knowing and understanding take place) that resembles the divine, “[s]
o the way that we can best see and know ourselves is to use the finest mirror available
and look at God and, on the human level, at the virtue of the soul”, Complete Works, ed.
John M. Cooper, trans. D.S. Hutchinson (Indianapolis / Cambridge: Hackett Publishing
Company, 1997), 592. It is less important for us, in the context of our analysis, if this
passage is an authentic platonic one, or if it is the result of the interventions of certain
neo-Platonists. What is at stake is the fact that any self-knowledge is deprived of
directedness, it is mediated by the divine (which is understood in a moral sense in the
above quoted passage).
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Finally, we must observe that the effects of Descartes’ intellectual

moves are felt in their historical dimensions up until today, in the thoughts
of those that shepherd the Catholic Church. Hence, Pope John Paul II
captures in a synthetic manner exactly this transformation of God from
a living (concrete) presence, into a mental content, a rational possibility:
The Cogito ergo sum radically changed the way of doing philosophy.
In the pre-Cartesian period, philosophy, that is to say the Cogito (‘I am
thinking’) or rather Cognosco (‘I acquire knowledge’) was subordinate to
esse [being], which was considered primary. For Descartes, by contrast,
esse appeared secondary, while he viewed the Cogito as primary. This ...
marked the decisive abandonment of what philosophy had been hitherto,
particularly that of St. Thomas Aquinas ... [For Aquinas] God as fully
self-sufficient being (Ens subsistens) was considered as the indispensable
support for every ens non subsistens, for every ens participatum, that is
to say, for every created being, and hence for man. The Cogito ergo sum
carried within it a rupture with this line of thought. The ens cogitans
(thinking being) thus became primary. After Descartes, philosophy
became a science of pure thought: all that is being – the created world,
and even the Creator, is situated within the ambit of the Cogito, as
contents of human consciousness. Philosophy is concerned with beings
as contained in consciousness, and not as existing independently of it.32
But, if our analysis proves to be correct, we could identify more than

one way of subordinating God to the knowledge developed by the human
being for its own sake in the wake of modernity. In fact, beside what might
be called a direct epistemological subordination of God, testified mostly
by the aforementioned Cartesian reversal of the order between the truth
of the self and the truth of God, we find some other ways in which this
subordination is not so explicit or obvious – it only uses the framework
of a further interpretation or, at least, minimal inspection. We have called
them ways of an indirect subordination of God.
32.
John Paul II, Memory and Identity (London: Orion, 2005), 9, apud Cottingham, “The
Role of God,” 291.
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4. The indirect subordination of God through the preeminence

of the mathematical truth. Evidence, certainty and the
mathematical as a norm of truth
The shaping of truth after the mathematical one, especially because

it concerns the essence of truth, brings with it many profound changes in
the metaphysical scheme of modernity. In this regard, the interpretation
offered by Heidegger is especially instructive.
It is no exaggeration if we consider, from his perspective, that
“Descartes’ metaphysics is the decisive beginning of the foundation of
metaphysics in the modern age. It was his task to ground the metaphysical
ground of man’s liberation in the new freedom of self-assured self-legisla-
tion.”33 Mathematics is exactly the original, unique expression of this
auto-legislative power of modern man. Although innate in Descartes’
view – imprinted in the human intellect – these eternal or primal truths
are, in the same time, the concrete proof of man’s cognitive power to cover
them in their entirety which guarantees their truth as such(= certainty),
without the need of God’s presence, other than in a formal manner.
But Heidegger does not see here a total break, but a fundamental
continuity.34 For him “[t]he history of modern mankind (…) was medi-
ately prepared by Christian man, who was oriented toward the certitude
of salvation.”35
Alongside Descartes, Heidegger highlights that modern man’s freedom
(which must be understood as a liberation) presupposes that “in place of
the certitude of salvation, which was the standard for all truth, man posits
the kind of certitude by virtue of which and in which he becomes certain
of himself as the being that thus founds itself on itself.”36 Or, otherwise
put, “[l]iberation from the revealed certitude of the salvation of individual
immortal souls is in itself liberation to a certitude in which man can by
himself be sure of his own definition and task.”37
33.
Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. IV, trans. Joan Stambaugh et al. (San Francisco:
Harper, 1991), 100; GA 6.2 129.
34.
After all predictable, if we take into consideration that we face an author who thought
of the whole history of Western metaphysics as the expression of a unique process
of the forgetting of being, a unitary paradigm which affirms the historical synthesis
between ontology and theology (onto-theology).
35.
Heidegger, Nietzsche, Vol. IV, 100; GA 6.2 129.
36.
Ibid., 97; GA 6.2 126.
37.
Ibid., 99; GA 6.2 128.
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In a schematic presentation, this concerns a replacement of one kind

of certitude with another. The certitude of the mathematical truth takes
the place (in the sense that it occupies the function) of the certitude of the
revealed truth. Which means that, prior to modernity, mathematics wasn’t
thought of (or, at least, not in a decisive manner) from the perspective of
the category of certitude – but from stances like perfection, beauty, immu-
tability etc. In a way, it could be said that pre-modern mathematics was
certain without offering certainty. Certainty is not just a simple quality
of mathematical reasonings, but, especially, an existential-ontological
category (more than a simple epistemological one). Otherwise put, it is
about the securing of existence within the modern frameworks of reality.
Hence, the subordination given by the manifestation of mathe-
matical truth, its understanding as a ‘standard of truth’, as in Spinoza’s
case,38 does not represent solely a cognitive change. Moreover, for Spinoza
it comes to understanding mathematics as giving an entirely different rule
to the truth, uncontaminated by the teleology that had affected other types
of knowledge, including theology, or God’s thinking in general. Heidegger
is therefore right to talk about a move from the certainty of salvation to
the “secularized” certainty of mathematics. But it must be stressed: this
concerns the passage from a certainty offered by God (the existence of tran-
scendence), to one established through its self-evidence (thus immanent).
It is this transition that certifies the appearance of the modern subject.
We might add that Cartesian Platonism is a sui generis one that tries
to capture an inverse endeavor. The transcendence of the mathematical
object occurs after the internal (immanent) epistemological inspection
conducted by a mind which establishes truth. In short, transcendence
“corresponds” to mathematics and not vice versa. We believe that
Cartesian innatism is only a way to reconcile a constructivist epistemo-
logical mentalism with the requirement of ontological independence of
the mathematical object (still being felt as a needed one).39

38.
Benedictus de Spinoza, Ethics, Part I, Appendix, in Spinoza, Complete Works, ed. Michael
L. Morgan, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis / Cambridge: Hackett Publishing
Company, Inc., 2002), 240; G 2, 79.

39.
A (unfortunately) short parenthesis for an important issue: it is a difficult problem to
justly appreciate the Platonic character of the mathematics of modern rationalism
or, even better, of whatever might be Platonic within it. Only briefly put, we should
differentiate, in my opinion, between a Platonism of mathematical objects, which
leads Descartes, for example, to his doctrine of innate ideas (the example of chiliagon
is very instructive here), and the way in which mathematics is intended – by means
of mathematical equations – to express the mechanical character of the universe,
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Another general line is linked to the fact that the truth of God is itself
in a very direct way comparable to that of mathematics. And whether
we understand this endeavor in the horizon of intuition or in that of
deduction, joining these two truths “works” very well. However, the two
cognitive mechanisms mentioned are themselves taken from the pursuit
of mathematical knowledge and afterwards generalized for all knowl-
edge,40 regardless of its subject – i.e. for God too.
Hence, maybe the most known passage in which we find this
connection is found in Descartes’ formulation of the ontological argu-
ment.41 With this occasion, he mentions that
when I looked (...) at the idea I had of a perfect being, I found that this
included existence in the same way as – or even more evidently than –
the idea of a triangle includes the equality of its three angles to two right
angles, or the idea of a sphere includes the equidistance of all the points
on the surface from the centre. Thus I concluded that it is at least as
certain as any geometrical proof that God, who is this perfect being, is
or exists.42
This process may seem today a perfectly legitimate one, even if

invalid (if we are to follow a Kantian line of argumentation). Ultimately,
both concepts – as logical and linguistic entities – can be put together
and analyzed with ease through the same process of the knowing subject.
This transpires clearly from the Replies that Descartes gives to Gassendi’s
Objections, where he states that “[t]o list existence among the properties
which belong to the nature of God is no more ‘begging the question’ than
listing among the properties of a triangle the fact that its angles are equal
to two right angles.”43
In Descartes’s view we are confronted with a fundamental possibility
of the human mind, justified since the first lines of his Rules, through the
claim that in all disciplines of knowledge one has to do with the exercise of
its concrete and regular functioning. Moreover, the Platonism of mathematics is not
ontological, but epistemological. Numbers, geometrical figures, are neither ontological
models per se for the rest of reality, nor steps for apprehending superior metaphysical
realities or essences. The question here has to do with the certainty of the properties (i.e.
a model of functional truth) that could be deduced from (or in) them, one that exceeds
entirely the possibility of emerging through the uses (exercises) of the senses.
40.
See the Cartesian endeavor from Rules for the Direction of the Mind, especially Rule III.
41.
But, as we will see, not only here.
42.
AT VI 36, CSM I 129.
43.
AT VII 383, CSM II 263.
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one reason, i.e. the fact that “the way to truth is one.”44 Then, this route to
mathematical truths, easily highlighted and, in the same time, validated,
must also be the same for other matters, whether metaphysical or theo-
logical.
This is the reason why Descartes will respond to Gassendi, discon-
certed by the possibility of the concerned link, that
you are quite mistaken when you say that the demonstration of God’s
existence is not like the demonstration that the three angles of a triangle
are equal to two right angles. The reasoning is the same in both cases,
except that the demonstration which establishes God’s existence is much
simpler and clearer than the corresponding demonstration about the
triangle.45
I would just like to stress that this alethic approach could be read
in two distinct ways, both particularly significant for our discussion: 1)
as the founding possibility (opening) of our minds which enable them to
put together in a pure and simple manner the two truths side by side,
i.e. to perceive their common cognitive significance, their epistemological
continuity (which also means the homogeneity of the cognitive domain in
general, announced in Rule I); and this is a “psychological” perspective, but
about what gives birth to a decisive metaphysical reading for the destiny
of humanity, in a Heideggerian sense; 2) as the ability to establish and
further provide (translate) a formal mechanism to guarantee the assertion
/ demonstration of the existence of God.
Regarding the first point, in Descartes’ case we can identify countless
other pairings between mathematical truths (ideas) and God. Nicolle’s
observation according to which, during the fourth set of Answers to
Objections, “Descartes maintains the constant Analogy Between theo-
logical Truths and mathematical Truths”46 must be extended to the whole
Cartesian oeuvre.
Maybe the most significant paragraph in this sense is the one from
Meditations, where Descartes noted that
[c]ertainly, the idea of God, or a supremely perfect being, is one which I

find within me just as surely as the idea of any shape or number. And my
understanding that it belongs to his nature that he always exists is no less
44.
Nicolle, “The Mathematical Analogy,” 400.
45.
AT VII 383-384, CSM II 263.
46.
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clear and distinct than is the case than is the case when I prove of any
shape or number that some property belongs to its nature. Hence, even
if it turned out that not everything on which I have meditated in these
past days is true, I ought still to regard the existence of God as having at
least the same level of certainty as I have hitherto attributed to the truths
of mathematics.47
In fact, The Fifth Meditation in its entirety is full of examples and

analogies between God and mathematical entities (form, number, triangle,
right triangle etc.).
It is worth highlighting that, in addition, mathematical truth (its
“behavior”) becomes an epistemological model for us in modernity, and
thus also for our cognitive approach of God,48 independently of the epis-
temological status of mathematical ideas, be they innate, as in Descartes’
case, or acquired, as Locke thought49 – otherwise put, whether we approach
this issue from a realist or nominalist stance.
I would not like to enter a detailed discussion concerning the second
point, the one that could be identified with the formal issue of the onto-
logical argument. What is of interest here is not necessarily the validity
of this reasoning, but the possibility itself of transferring a mathematical
procedure in onto-theology. But, of course, there are numerous such
analysis, like the very detailed one belonging to Dougherty50 who, starting
47.
AT VII 65-66; CSM II 45.
48.
Of course, in a completely different framework of thinking than the ontological one
offered in Antiquity for mathematical entities, like the one in Plato’s Republic.
49.
For Locke “that the three angles of a triangle are quite equal to two right ones is a
truth as certain as anything can be, and I think more evident than many of those
propositions that go for principles; and yet there are millions, however expert in other
things, who know not this at all, because they never set their thoughts on work about
such angles” (Essay, 82). It must be remarked that also in this context of the critique
of Cartesian innetism there is a passage from the certainty of mathematical truth
(non-evident through itself) to that of the existence of God: “And he that certainly
knows this proposition may yet be utterly ignorant of the truth of other propositions,
in mathematics itself, which are as clear and evident as this; because, in his search
of those mathematical truths, he stopped his thoughts short and went not so far. The
same may happen concerning the notions we have of the being of a Deity. For, though
there be no truth which a man may more evidently make out to himself than the
existence of a God, yet he that shall content himself with things as he finds them in
this world, as they minister to his pleasures and passions, and not make inquiry a little
further into their causes, ends, and admirable contrivances, and pursue the thoughts
thereof with diligence and attention, may live long without any notion of such a Being”
(Ibid., 82-83).
50.
“The Importance of Cartesian Triangles.”
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from the distinction between first order and second order attributes, tries
to show the formal identity of the two argumentative mechanisms, i.e.
mathematical and metaphysical. There are many resemblances and differ-
ences that must be questioned when addressing the “technical” possibility
of transferring the mechanism of the relation between essence and its
properties in mathematics to God and its existence in philosophy.
We believe, alongside Nicolle, that this benchmark is the necessary
connection obvious in both cases: “the main similarity between these two
ideas is the necessity of the link between the essence and its properties.
(…) Necessity: this is the real link which is the basis, beyond the apparent
difference, of the analogy between God and a triangle.”51
The same author states, in regard to the “benefits and losses” that we
feel when such a transfer of procedures of argumentation takes place:
The mathematical analogy in the proof of God’s existence is at the same

time strong and feeble. It is strong because it shows very well that the way
to truth is the same for divine truths and for mathematical truths. (...)
On the other hand, the analogy is feeble because it ignores an essential
difference between metaphysics which deals with the question of exis-
tence and mathematics which rules out this question.52
Descartes’s rationalistic example is not an isolated one, the mech-

anism of extreme analogy / rapprochement, in its formal-deductive aspect
between the two types of alethic determinations is also to be found in an
empiricist context in Locke. For this latter,
We are capable of knowing certainly that there is a God. Though
God has given us no innate ideas of himself (...) But, though this be the
most obvious truth that reason discovers, and though its evidence be (if I
mistake not) equal to mathematical certainty: yet it requires thought and
attention; and the mind must apply itself to a regular deduction of it from
some part of our intuitive knowledge, or else we shall be as uncertain
and ignorant of this as of other propositions, which are in themselves
capable of clear demonstration. To show, therefore, that we are capable
of knowing, i.e. being certain that there is a God, and how we may come
by this certainty, I think we need go no further than ourselves, and that
undoubted knowledge we have of our own existence.53
51.
52.
Ibid., 400.
53.
Locke, Essay, 612-613.
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5. The indirect subordination of God through the imposition of an

a priori method of researching truth of mathematical origin
We are also dealing here with a well-known aspect – and again, the
Cartesian model is exemplary in this respect. For Descartes, the concerned
method is analytical, of a mathematical inspiration – i.e. inspired by the
only sciences that offer absolutely certain truths. Both theology, and
metaphysics are left behind in the process of selection of a method,54 only
mathematics is the one which offers the concrete proof of the fact that it
already possesses in itself this absolute certain method that I can use in
order to advance in knowledge.
Or, this method pre-exists the manifestation of God, it “guides” him
in its path towards us; moreover, it is a negative method, a method of
doubt (from which it will appear that the first and most manifest truth
is the one of the presentation of the self to itself in its pure cogitative
activity), which throws into a shadow the positivity of the divine presence.
Let us not also talk about the sui generis, formal, equivalence (omnipotent
God – evil demon) at the end of the first meditation, meant only to evoke
some possible objections regarding the possibility inherent in transcen-
dence of fooling us with regard to everything we know. In a certain sense,
this method is meant to offer human being the possibility to start, by itself,
an absolutely certain cognitive move in a setting where neither God, nor
any other type of truth (apart from the primary truth of the method / the
subject) is present. The Cartesian subject is, initially, a lonely, isolated one,
and the method – instituted by itself – represents exactly that instrument
that allows it to institute itself. The only reality on which it could count
will appear as a result of applying this method.
We can also add here that for Spinoza the axiomatic method plays
the same role of intellectual / cognitive constraints, from a formal point
of view, and in spite of the difference between his synthetic method and
the Cartesian one. An important aspect in this case is played by the fact
that the axiomatic explanation somehow reproduces the manifestation,
“the unfolding” of God. For Windelband, the axiomatic method has the

54.
But for different reasons. Metaphysics offers the image of a perpetual war theater, with
its changeable, uncertain, truths, while theology does not open at all the horizons of
knowledge, and hence of scientific certainty, since, in what concerns the heavens, the
road that leads there “is open no less to the most ignorant than to the most learned,
and the revealed truths which guide us there are beyond our understanding” (AT VI 8;
CSM I 114).
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purpose of rendering visible the manner in which things depend on God

and of offering a palpable model of this ontological dependency: “The
fundamental religious conviction that all things necessarily proceed
from the unitary essence of God seemed to him [to Spinoza] to require
a method of philosophical knowledge, which in the same manner should
derive from the idea of God the ideas of all things.”55
Of course, these are just two of the most popular examples, belonging
to a much larger intellectual current, present in modern thought, through
which it can be said that one of the main tasks of philosophy, if not the
most important, is that of acquiring a method for driving reason on its path
to truth, i.e. of developing in an explicit manner a fully conceptually artic-
ulated methodology, substantiated from an epistemic point of view. But
we should not restrict the meaning of what was said only to the so-called
strict epistemological issues, because there is also a deeper significance,
given in this case by the analysis of the relation of the human being with
reality in general and God in particular56.
The possibility of using the Cartesian method and, consequently,
structured rationalism through the implementation of the former is open
not only to the philosophy of rationalistic inspiration, but also to theology
or religious practice. Thus, in Max Weber’s view, it is not a coincidence
that the last great revival of Puritanism in the eighteenth century bears the
name of “Methodism”, making a reference to the attempt of its members
55.
Wilhelm Windelband, A History of Philosophy, with Especial Reference to the Formation
and Development of Its Problems and Conceptions, sec. ed., trans. James H. Tufts (New
York: The Macmillan Company, 1901), 396. An important difference should (at least)
be noted, however, between the Cartesian and Spinozean method; if in the case of
the former we stress its negativity, for the second we remark precisely its positivity,
as highlighted by Wildenband. In other words, it is about the positivity of the divine
presence, subordinate to the “operation” of the mathematical method involved.
56.
This does not entail, of course, the acceptance of such an epistemological strategy
by all the modern thinkers. Moreover, even some of those considered close to this
philosophical framework, which in this case is rationalism, do not accept this
development. Leibniz, for example, will amend exactly this possibility of a Cartesian
inspiration of extending beyond its area of application and in an automated fashion
a method valid only in mathematics (see the passage „La vraie Methode”). Which
does not mean that he will not make appeal to such strategies – some influenced by
mathematics! – through which he aims to contribute to the consolidation of the process
of the epistemological subordination of God. Ultimately, the same fragment offers the
solution for the construal of a universal language and calculus, of a mathematical
inspiration, which would allow the acquisition of the truth of science in all disciplines
which use the deductive reasoning starting from experience (ex datis). See also
Lachterman’s observation in footnote 59. This footnote is, in its first part, the result of
one of the reviewer’s very relevant observations.
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to transform the believer’s life from a random, unsystematic one, into one
guided by a (very) rational method. The reference to Descartes is obvious,
especially since the implementation of this method involves a constant
reflexivity of the human subject. In other words, “Descartes’ «cogito ergo
sum» was taken over by contemporary Puritans in this ethical reinterpre-
tation.”57
6. The indirect subordination of God through the fundamentally

constructive character of mathematics (through mathematic
constructivism)
One of the most important points of our present argumentation

concerns the specific significance (which presupposes in itself numerous
fruitful semantic openings) of what could be called the constructive char-
acter of mathematics in modernity (or its constructivism) – an element
which marks a radical change in the understanding and practice of mathe-
matics and also (in tight connection with the previous statement) a change
in the profoundness of the relation between human beings and God or
reality, understood in a general manner.58
In what follows we will follow some ideas and conclusions espoused
by David R. Lachterman in his important work The Ethics of Geometry,
subtitled A Genealogy of Modernity, although we will not limit ourselves to

57.
Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the “Spirit” of Capitalism and Other Writings,
trans. Peter Baehr and Gordon C. Wells (New York, etc.: Penguin Books, 2002), 80sq.
But, some authors believe that Descartes’ presence in Weber’s text is “somewhat
unlikely”, Peter Ghosh, Max Weber and The Protestant Ethic: Twin Histories (New
York: Oxford University Press, 2014), 106. One of the problems which Weber’s analysis
confronts is that he invokes Descartes, and his opponent Voet (Voetius) in the attempt
of maintaining a modernized protestant ascetism, which rationalizes, Peter Ghosh, A
Historian Reads Max Weber: Essays on the Protestant Ethic (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz
Verlag, 2008), 58, n. 22.

58.
As we have already mentioned, our interpretation does not exclude the possibility
of identifying thinkers who intuited one way or another some ideas of the moderns
concerning this subject. Thus, we could enumerate, just as an example, Proclus (for
which the soul, in the case of mathematics, oscillates between the intellect and the
sensible, being a “generatrix of mathematical forms and ideas” and characterized
through „life-giving activity) or Cusanus (where we encounter an activity of the intellect
that produces the line, the surface). See Peg Rawes, Space, Geometry and Aesthetics:
Through Kant and Towards Deleuze (Basingstoke and New York: Palgrave Macmillan,
2008), and respectively Ernst Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos in Renaissance
Philosophy, trans. Mario Domandi (Mineola, N.Y.: Dover Publications, Inc., 2000).
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them. If we are to synthesize the general conception of the same author,

we could make the following affirmations: 1) constructivism is one of
the fundamental traits of modernity; 2) mathematical (constructivism)
covers the whole (early) modern philosophy, from Descartes to Kant;59 3)
constructivism is not and should not only be linked with epistemology or
(philosophy) of mathematics, but also with a manner of thinking (or relate
to reality) in general.60
If we are to constrain ourselves only to what happens within the
frameworks of mathematical activity, then we could identify, following
the same author, two important modifications. Thus, in modernity, 1)
“mathematics is essentially occupied with the solution of problems, not
with the proof of theorems”; 2) “mathematics is most fertilely pursued
as the «construction of problems or equations» – that is, as the transpo-
sition of mathematical intelligibility and certainty from the algebraic to
the geometrical domain, or from the interior forum of the mind to the
external forum of space and body.”61 It is interesting to note that also for
Lachterman, the trigger for this ample historical process is Descartes, the
two prior statements finding their source “at the deepest stratum of the
«Cartesian» soul.”62
Technically speaking, all this process is about the passage from a
mathematical model based on theorem-proving to one concerning prob-
lem-solving,63 accompanied by the wish “to move from conceptual
59.
“A fairly direct line runs (…) from the «construction of a problem» (Descartes), through
the «construction of an equation» (Leibniz), to Kant’s «construction of a concept»”,
David Rapport Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry: A Genealogy of Modernity (New
York and London: Routledge, 1989), vii.
60.
“Kant’s «revolution in [our] style of thinking» showed up (…) as an attempt to expend
the entire capital of this constructivist legacy within every philosophical domain
he sought to occupy or to transform, including epistemology, the theory of natural
science, ethics, and his oblique, truncated, but nonetheless seminal philosophy of
history”, Ibid.
61.
Ibid., viii.
62.
Ibid.
63.
In another context, Ortega y Gasset observed that modern science does not aim to
(“directly”) know things / reality, but will convert them into issues (questions); the role
of science is to solve problems defined as scientific. In addition, there are no absolute
problems for modern deductive theory, but only issues relative to specific preliminary
data (freely “selected” by the knowing subject in order to configure a matter of
knowledge). This also means that scientific issues – the proper “object” of knowledge –
are special: they are open, can be modified, changed, abandoned etc. See José Ortega
y Gasset, L’Évolution de la théorie déductive. L’idée de principe chez Leibniz, trans. (in
French) Jean-Paul Borel (Paris: Gallimard, 1970).
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inwardness to outward embodiment”, this being essential for the project

of modernity in its most essential features.
For Lachterman what we discover here
is not a matter of reference or meaning; rather, the difference concerns

the source of the intelligibility of the figure (or statement) at issue: in the
one, the ancient case, this source is the nature of the figure in its own
right, while in the other, modern, case, it is to be found in the strategies
and tactics certain to bring the figure into visible or “bodily” being. A
distinction in the manner of knowing entails a difference in the mode of
being.64
Instead of the subject conforming to a truth, we have a truth (and

a “reality”) that is instituted through its activity. This truth must be
produced, fabricated, it is man’s duty to do it. We must not be surprised,
consequentially, that this change has profound effects, ethical effects as
Lachterman maintains,65 which concern the behavior of the human being
in the world and towards the world.
From this perspective, we identify not only the highlighting of a funda-
mental activism of the (non-contemplative) human being, that we ourselves
stressed earlier, but also the essence of the endeavor of conquering nature
as some of the profound consequences of mathematical constructivism in
early modernity. We do not treat here the strictly concrete aspect of taking
into possession, but the more subtle one that concerns the elimination of
a fundamental otherness understood as Nature (by building this otherness
starting from itself, or better said by designating this self starting from
the impositions of a subjectivity avid of certitude and exactitude), of initi-
ation – we might add – into a process that continues up until our days
through the abolition of transcendence. In Lachterman’s words,
[t]he constructivist project, rooted in Descartes’ geometry and exfoliated

in Kant’s critical enterprise, took its bearings from the desire to master
and possess nature, where nature was understood as the locus of appar-
ently ineliminable or intractable otherness. Mind could aspire to master
its other (in the form of extension, or the manifold of given sensations)
by externalizing itself in a construction carrying the clear marks of its
inward and deliberate origin.66
64.
Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry, xi.
65.
In the sense of the Greek ēthos.
66.
Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry, 23.
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The significance of the issues approached in this section for the subject of
the subordination of God is very well captured by the same Lachterman:
[T]o be “modern” in the most exacting and exalting sense is to be carried

along this trajectory from mathematical construction (in its precise
technical sense) to self-deification. The mind is not nature’s mirror; it is
nature’s generative or creative source. (my italics)67
In other words, the very capacity of the human mind of producing

(constructing) truth through itself, of not just thinking an ‘imposed’ truth
as a transcendence, is affirmed through the way in which moderns under-
stand mathematics. The movement of mathematical construction inaugu-
rates through the ‘meaning’ of truth, in spite of a contemplation that tried
to capture exactly what it lacks: immutability, eternity, purity of a form, all
of them attributes belonging to the divine.
From Descartes to Kant (we only stop at these references), we
find such well defined projects, through which mathematics will firmly
maintain a new type of relating of the human being to reality and God.
Maybe one of the most suggestive passages in this sense can be found in
Salomon Maimon, a contemporary of Kant’s maturity period. For him,
“[a]ll of the concepts of mathematics are thought by us and at the same
time exhibited as real objects [als reelle Objekte] through construction a
priori. We are, in this respect, similar to God. (my italics)”68
But the concerned similarity might seem a little too less. As a short
adagio to this subject that has echoes up until our days, we should take
notice of the fact that there is one more step to make – the total, program-
matic elimination of any transcendence from the activity of the mathema-
tician (a self-censuring with the ultimate aim of total auto-referentiality)
and this will be realized in the XXth century by mathematical construc-
tivism.69 To put it shortly, this means leaving mathematics to man and only
to him. Errett Bishop stressed that: 1) classical mathematics presupposes
operations that could be developed (only) by God;70 2) we should reject
67.
Ibid., ix
68.
Quoted in Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry, 18.
69.
Critics including intuitionist mathematicians (in particular Brouwer) whom are anti-
realistic (anti-platonists) are representatives of this school. In their view, math was not
totally purged of those items that can not be subject to a strict constructivist procedure.

70.
Errett Bishop, “Schizophrenia in Contemporary Mathematics,” in Errett Bishop:
Reflections on Him and His Research, ed. Murray Rosenblatt (Providence: American
Mathematical Society, 1985), 9.
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this mathematics and solicits the initiation of a pure(ly) constructivist

process. In his own words,
[m]athematics belongs to man, not to God. We are not interested in prop-

erties of the positive integers that have no descriptive meaning for finite
man. When a man proves a positive integer to exist, he should show how
to find it. If God has mathematics of his own that needs to be done, let
him do it himself (my italics).71
7. Conclusion
The following idea, which I will only sketchily develop here, is still
worth stressing; it concerns the fact that there is a decisive correspondence
(both from an epistemological and ontological point of view) between
the dynamism of the intellect expressed through mathematical construc-
tivism and the centrality of the category of movement in the bigger picture
of reality.
First and foremost, we can remark, in a much more restrained
context, a correspondence between the manner in which mathematical
constructivism is thought of and the one in which visible movements in
the physical realm are conceived. As Domski showed, by making appeal to
the Cartesian approach of movement in nature in Le monde,
[t]he visible motions of his new world are thereby modeled on the
continuous motions used by geometers to generate clearly conceivable
curves; and thus, we see Descartes integrating his approach to geometry,
and his geometrical standard of intelligibility in particular, with his early
mechanical account of nature.72
Of course, what we could call the standard reading concerning this issue,
sees in God the source of the reason for the existence of this situation. The
same Domski mentions that
71.
Errett Bishop, Foundations of Constructive Analysis (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967),
2. See also John Byl, “Matter, mathematics, and God,” Theology and Science 5, no. 1
(2007): 79.
72.
Mary Domski, “The intelligibility of motion and construction: Descartes’ early
mathematics and metaphysics, 1619–1637,” Studies in History and Philosophy of
Science 40, no. 2 (June 2009): 127.
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at any given instant, all we can conceive is the direction of God’s push,
so to speak; and because of the limits of what we can humanly conceive,
this direction at an instant must be in a straight line. Put differently, God
creates motion in the simplest possible way, where simplicity is deter-
mined by appeal to that which is clearest and most distinct to the human
intellect – the very same standard embraced in the geometrical works
written around the same time.73
But, in an opposite manner, which takes into consideration that

the attributes of clarity and difference could become (and they indeed
become!) the expression of a self-sufficient, wholly immanent, intellectual
power, we could read this state of affairs as a collapse of the expression
of divinity within the frameworks of nature – by way of mathematics –
through what is ‘allowed’ to the human intellect, through the instituted
constraints.
Secondly, this correspondence could be extended to a specific
cognitive behavior which is observed within the frameworks of a new
constructive manner of understanding mathematics by moderns and an
universalization of the category of movement, from an epistemological
and ontological point of view, which determines a profound movement of
the way in which God is incorporated into reality, with the latent supple-
mentary effect of his subordination.
We are also dealing here with a correspondence between the inherent
activism of the human subject (in a cognitive sense, but with decisive
effects towards the physical and social reality) and the immanent-con-
structive endeavor through which the internal necessity of the object to be
known is determined. Cassirer, when talking about Galileo in his Dialogue
Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, stressed that we are dealing here
with
a new synthesis within the world of mind, and together with it a new
correlation of “subject” and “object”. Reflection on human freedom, on
man’s original, creative force, requires as its complement and its confir-
mation the concept of the immanent “necessity” of the natural object.74
Moreover, if we are allowed an over-simplification, the same process

is about understanding the ‘object’ of physical analysis not in the horizon
of the determination of individual substance (of the thing), but in the
73.
Ibid.
74.
Cassirer, The Individual and the Cosmos, 153.
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horizon of movement: of processualism, of the dynamic relation between

bodies.
The centrality of movement is not the only thing to be considered.
The unification / homogenization of physical reality, which institutes
the sublunary / superlunary Aristotelian division corresponding to two
different ontological realms is another issue. To put it shortly, movement
thus understood appears as a unifying explicative factor of phenomenal
diversity. This also means an ‘indifference’ towards individual substance
(towards the in-itself of things) and a focus on processes, movements – in
other words, on the relations between them. And this endeavor will be
realized by way of mathematics. Thus, within the frameworks of a new
mathematical physics,
[t]he task has been to attempt to unite what superficially appears to be

separate. It was not the things in themselves which were sorted out and
compared, but their motions and behaviours. Mathematics furnished the
tools. Newton succeeded in describing the commonalities in the fall of
an apple, the motions of the moon and the planets, the tides, and much
more.75
God is not totally eliminated from this picture of physical reality,

he is still present in the form of immutable laws that regulate various
processes. God is not (exactly) equivalent with moving matter (with
continually moving it, with sustaining, in a way, its movement, with even
its existence – as movement / moved). God is not at all eliminated from the
(concrete) phenomenal register, its presence is palpable, even necessary,
through movement. But this movement (given by or through God) can be
judged by way of mathematical equations (relations), and, hence, precisely
through the human intellect. It is a God (in or as movement…) transparent
for the human being. Given for its evidence. From this perspective, math-

75.
Torsten Hägerstrand and Tommy Carlstein, “The Two Vistas,” Geografiska Annaler.
Series B, Human Geography 86, no. 4 (2004): 317. The same authors observe that:
a) on the one side, in the medieval period, the concept of movement has suffered an
accentuated impoverishment, being reduced to two types of movement corresponding
to two ontological domains; the concepts of change, modification, transgression,
perishability etc., as they were mentioned by Aristotle, were left behind (Ibid., 315);
b) on the other hand, we are dealing with a program that is only now triggered by its
fundamental traits – „[ot]hers took up where he left off. Örsted connected magnetism
and electricity. Then Maxwell introduced light into the same conceptual apparatus.
And so it has continued inward towards the microcosm and outwards towards the
macrocosm.” (Ibid., 317). Ultimately, today’s science is about the continuation of the
same type of endeavor.
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ematical physics does not firstly represent the application of mathematics

to the sensible reality (i.e. a cognitive success through an exterior initiative,
contingent to the human being), but the ubiquitous, fundamental presence
of man through the possession of (mathematical, self-evident) truth within
this reality. God is confounded with the total transparency of its presence
in the phenomenal, a presence without mystery, miracles or wonders.
***
Ultimately, this constructivism characteristic to mathematics is found

in numerous – and only apparently disparate – realms of human thought
and action in modernity. For Lachterman, the idea of a ‘constructive’
human being, of a ‘productive’ mind, allows us
to make coherent sense of a wide range of phenomena, all of which we

have good reason to associate with modernity even when they stand at
considerable distances from one another – phenomena such as individu-
alism and the mechanical organization of the «state,» a belief in human
perfectibility and in the ineluctable need or desire for self-preservation,
the inwardness of selfhood and the program of conquering external
“Nature”.76
It is self-evident that all these elements have a potential of profoundly

changing the connections between human beings and divinity.
As a very concise conclusion of our whole contribution, we want to
stress that mathematics is not,stricto sensu, the unique source77 of this
modification, both in the ontology of the human and in that of nature
(in all its various modalities quoted above), but besides other endeavors,
mathematics comes with a decisive contribution, as it can be seen as a
model for the cognitive success within the new configuration, belonging
not only to science in a restricted sense, but also to spirituality in general.

76.
Lachterman, The Ethics of Geometry, 4-5.

77.
Here we part Lachterman, for whom the constructivism characteristic to modern
mathematics is indeed the source of all other fundamental aspects of modernity.
For him “«construction» in the strict and technical sense in which it issued in late
sixteenth – and seventeenth-century mathematics (…) stands patently at the center of
the modern constellation in this inaugural, self-formative period.” (Ibid., 5).
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Ways of Subordinating God to Human Beings in Early Modern Philosophy A General

Ways of Subordinating God to Human Beings in

those places where philosophical endeavors were undertook especially in

scientific – knowledge becomes the expression of the humane, the privileged

1. A short (and somewhat speculative) intermezzo. What is the

Before properly starting our analysis I would like to invoke a certain,

as targets, within the agendas of the modern Anglophone philosophical

If we accept the hypothesis that God is expressed – and deformed… –

[i]n effect, Descartes’ argument entails the non-existence of a deceiving

apophatism, problematic in its structure,18 but only to what could be

We mentioned that the subordination of God within the frameworks

2. The epistemological subordination of God

This section, dedicated to the role played by epistemological elements

the three big characteristics usually invoked in order to determine the

3. The direct subordination of God through the development of

The idea that in modern philosophy in general we can find a subor-

dispute, which dates back to Descartes. It is sufficient to keep in mind

Descartes is a rationalist and his theory about God is largely based on

finding / substituting itself as truth. Moreover, the evidence of this first

Finally, we must observe that the effects of Descartes’ intellectual

But, if our analysis proves to be correct, we could identify more than

4. The indirect subordination of God through the preeminence

The shaping of truth after the mathematical one, especially because

In a schematic presentation, this concerns a replacement of one kind

This process may seem today a perfectly legitimate one, even if

[c]ertainly, the idea of God, or a supremely perfect being, is one which I

In fact, The Fifth Meditation in its entirety is full of examples and

The mathematical analogy in the proof of God’s existence is at the same

Descartes’s rationalistic example is not an isolated one, the mech-

5. The indirect subordination of God through the imposition of an

purpose of rendering visible the manner in which things depend on God

6. The indirect subordination of God through the fundamentally

One of the most important points of our present argumentation

them. If we are to synthesize the general conception of the same author,

inwardness to outward embodiment”, this being essential for the project

is not a matter of reference or meaning; rather, the difference concerns

Instead of the subject conforming to a truth, we have a truth (and

[t]he constructivist project, rooted in Descartes’ geometry and exfoliated

[T]o be “modern” in the most exacting and exalting sense is to be carried

In other words, the very capacity of the human mind of producing

this mathematics and solicits the initiation of a pure(ly) constructivist

[m]athematics belongs to man, not to God. We are not interested in prop-

But, in an opposite manner, which takes into consideration that

Moreover, if we are allowed an over-simplification, the same process

horizon of movement: of processualism, of the dynamic relation between

[t]he task has been to attempt to unite what superficially appears to be

God is not totally eliminated from this picture of physical reality,

ematical physics does not firstly represent the application of mathematics

Ultimately, this constructivism characteristic to mathematics is found

to make coherent sense of a wide range of phenomena, all of which we

It is self-evident that all these elements have a potential of profoundly

Bishop, Errett. Foundations of Constructive Analysis. New York: McGraw-Hill, 1967.

Francisco: Harper, 1991.

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