Abstract

When one thinks of Descartes as a philosopher of freedom he appears as a fearless researcher who without loud declarations broke with indecision. If the usual fate of philosophers of freedom is to philosophize about it in straitened circumstances, that is, when people regard it with suspicion, avoid it, fear it, or curse it, then one should not be surprised that Descartes's "philosophical freedom" and his statements about freedom have been used to reproach him. One should be surprised, rather, at the obstinacy with which Descartes, having resolved to think freely, pursued the path leading to the ideal of absolute freedom. The origin of Descartes's freedom-loving ideas about absolute, divine freedom can be explained in different ways: for example, one can assert with Sartre that in his description of divine freedom Descartes reveals "his original intuition of his own freedom," and that "what we have here is, evidently, the phenomenon of sublimation and transference," or one can have a different opinion. However, what cannot be doubted is that these thoughts lie at the basis of the entire Cartesian theory of freedom and in a certain measure are its apotheosis. Since Descartes first gave a detailed treatment of the problem of absolute freedom in the form of the so-called theory of the creation of eternal truths, it will be useful to dwell on certain aspects of this interesting theory