Can Objective Reality Exist Unthought? Milidrag, Intramental Essences, and Cartesian Mental Representation

Can Objective Reality Exist Unthought? Milidrag, Intramental Essences, and Cartesian Mental Representation

Abstract

Predrag Milidrag interprets Descartes as replacing the late-Scholastic treatment of objective being as an extrinsic denomination with a considerably stronger ontology according to which essences possess a genuine intramental mode of objective being. On Milidrag’s interpretation, an essence can exist as a res in intellectu independently of whether it is concurrently a res cogitata, that is, independently of whether the thinker is presently perceiving or consciously representing it. This standing ontology of intramental essences is central to Milidrag’s account of innate ideas, the conceivability of essences, and Descartes’s application of efficient causation to objective being. See Predrag Milidrag, “Caterus and Descartes on Ideas, Causality and Eternal Truths,” Theoria 55, no. 1 (2012): 45–69, especially pp. 55, 58, 60, 69.

This post argues that Milidrag’s interpretation faces a fundamental problem concerning the actuality of objective being. I call the relevant competing principle the Objective-Reality Content Exhaustion Thesis (ORCET): in an occurrent pure strict Cartesian idea, the objectively real internal representation exhausts the idea’s first-order representational content. ORCET does not claim that every necessary property of a representatum must be explicitly attended to. Rather, it claims that the actual objective reality of a strict idea consists in its occurrent mental representation of its representatum, rather than in a second, independently standing intramental representational object.

The central question is therefore: Can a representatum possess actual Cartesian objective being in a mind at a time when that mind has no occurrent conscious mental representation of that representatum? The adjective “actual” in this question must not be confused with Cartesian esse actuale sive formale (actual or formal being). The question is whether objective being itself is presently instantiated, rather than merely available potentially or dispositionally. Milidrag has important resources for answering affirmatively, especially Descartes’s theory of innate ideas and the Fifth Meditation discussion of geometrical essences. Nevertheless, neither resource establishes the stronger conclusion that an entirely unthought intramental essence possesses presently instantiated objective being. Descartes’s faculty account of innateness provides an ontologically leaner alternative, while the triangle case establishes only that an occurrently represented object can possess unexplicit essential properties. It does not establish objective being without conscious mental representation of the represented item itself.

The resulting dispute has consequences beyond the ontology of innate ideas. A standing ontology of unthought intramental essences threatens to internalize an object-before-act structure analogous in an important respect to Platonism: cognition becomes the apprehension of a determinate object whose relevant ontological status precedes the occurrent act in which it is consciously thought. This is not literal Platonic realism, and Descartes should not simply be classified as a conceptualist about all essences. Nevertheless, the quasi-Platonic structural analogy exposes an explanatory burden on Milidrag. ORCET also generates a further dilemma concerning the formally real finite mental mode. If the objectively real God-content exhausts what makes the idea specifically an idea of God, then the formally real mode contributes occurrence but not first-order representational identity. If the formally real act is a numerically distinct representational item added to the OR-content, its representational contribution appears unexplained and redundant. If instead “finite mental mode” merely classifies the occurrent thinking according to its formal existence in the finite mind, the formal and objective dimensions do not thereby become two independently caused representational effects. In either case, distinguishing kinds of being does not itself explain the required causal asymmetry. Finally, even if Milidrag’s standing ontology were granted, it would explain why objective being requires causal grounding without yet establishing why the degree of objective reality must impose an equal or greater degree of formal or eminent reality upon its cause.

Introduction

Milidrag’s interpretation of the exchange between Caterus and Descartes has an important virtue. It refuses to trivialize Caterus’s objection. Caterus does not merely misunderstand Descartes’s terminology. The dispute concerns whether objective being is metaphysically substantial enough to require efficient causal explanation. Milidrag argues that Descartes’s answer depends upon a new “ontology of the possible” in which intramental essences possess objective being that cannot be reduced to an extrinsic denomination and consequently require efficient causation. See Milidrag 2012, pp. 55–60, 69.

That interpretation substantially strengthens Descartes against Caterus. But it also raises a new problem. What exactly makes an intramental essence that is not presently thought an actually instantiated objectively existing representational content, rather than a disposition, capacity, potentiality, or intellectual structure capable of giving rise to such content when an occurrent idea is elicited?

Several distinctions must be maintained throughout:

• Objective reality is the ontologically rankable representational content contained in a strict Cartesian idea: the idea’s internal representation of something as a substance, principal attribute, nature or essence, or mode, considered according to the degree of being or perfection of what is represented.
• Objective being is the mode of being possessed by the represented content precisely as objectively present in the intellect. Objective being and objective reality should therefore not be treated as synonyms.
• Occurrent mental representation means an actually occurring Cartesian mental representation in which a representatum is present to a thinking subject. This must be distinguished from representation in general. Tree rings can represent years of growth and a reflection in water can represent the face of the Moon without mentality.
• Explicit attention is narrower than occurrent mental representation. One can mentally represent a triangle without explicitly attending to every property necessarily belonging to triangles.
• Potential or dispositional availability means that the mind possesses a power, faculty, or structure enabling it to elicit a representation without the representation itself presently occurring.

The central dispute concerns whether Milidrag is entitled to move from the last category to the second. The existence of a native capacity for representing X does not by itself establish the presently instantiated objective being of X.

A second issue follows directly from ORCET and becomes especially important in the idea of God. If the objectively real God-content exhausts the first-order representational content by which an occurrent thought is specifically a thought of God, what explanatory contribution remains for the idea’s finite formal reality? Descartes can of course classify the occurrent ideational operation formally as a finite modification of a finite mind. The objection is not that the occurrence therefore lacks formal reality. It is that mode-level formal reality does not determine whether the occurrence represents God, a rock, a triangle, or anything else. Considered merely according to formal reality, these ideational occurrences are alike in being finite modes; their representational differences arise from what they contain objectively. (AT VII 40–41; CSM II 27–28) This raises a further dilemma for any interpretation that invokes the distinction between formal and objective being to explain their different causal requirements: either the formally real act is an additional representational item, in which case its representational work must be explained, or it is merely the occurrent thinking considered according to its formal existence, in which case the distinction of kinds of being does not by itself establish two independently caused representational effects.

Milidrag’s Ontology of Intramental Essences

Milidrag’s interpretation is stronger than the claim that an essence merely becomes an object of thought when an intellectual act happens to terminate upon it. He argues that, for Descartes, an essence has a genuine intramental mode of being. Milidrag expressly distinguishes the essence as a res in intellectu from its being a res cogitata. On his interpretation, the essence can be in the intellect independently of whether it is simultaneously perceived. See Milidrag 2012, p. 58.

Milidrag thereby gives Descartes an ontology with approximately the following structure:

E_X possesses esse objectivum in the intellect.

E_X can exist in intellect ∧ ¬ occurrently-perceived(E_X).

The later intellectual act does not first create the essence’s intramental ontological status. Rather, the act apprehends or represents an essence that already possesses its own genuine mode of being in the intellect.

This is why Milidrag’s interpretation is so useful against Caterus. If objective being were merely an extrinsic denomination imposed upon an otherwise independently existing object because an intellectual operation happened to terminate upon it, Caterus’s question would be pressing: why seek an efficient cause of what adds no intrinsic reality? Milidrag instead makes the objective mode itself metaphysically significant. The objective essence is not nothing, and its intelligibility therefore stands in need of causal grounding. See Milidrag 2012, pp. 55, 60, 69.

This successfully advances the debate from one question to another:

Why should objective being require a cause at all?

becomes:

What must be true for something genuinely to possess objective being?

The second question is the one on which Milidrag’s interpretation becomes vulnerable.

What “Actual Objective Being” Means in This Argument

An important ambiguity must be removed. Milidrag notes that Descartes’s genuine intramental mode of an essence can be described as esse objectivum and, in the relevant Scholastic framework, as esse potentiale, in contrast with esse formale sive actuale. See Milidrag 2012, p. 55. Consequently, to ask whether an unthought essence possesses actual objective being must not mean asking whether it possesses esse actuale or formal existence. It does not.

The issue is instead whether the objective mode itself is presently instantiated. We can therefore distinguish:

Present instantiation of OB(X)

from:

Potential capacity for a future instantiation of OB(X).

ORCET does not demand that objective content become formally actual. That would collapse Descartes’s distinction between objective and formal being. It asks instead whether an essence that is not presently mentally represented possesses the objective mode at all, or whether the mind merely possesses a power capable of producing an occurrent representation in which objective being will then be instantiated.

The dispute can therefore be represented without equivocating on “actual”:

Milidrag: OB_present(X) ∧ ¬ R_m,occ(X) is possible.

ORCET: ¬ R_m,occ(X) → ¬ OB_present(X).

The argument concerns the instantiation conditions of objective being, not whether objective being is secretly formal being.

ORCET and the Idea Taken Objectively

ORCET should not be understood as the thesis that a Cartesian idea has no formal reality. An occurrent ideational operation is formally a finite mode of a finite thinking substance. ORCET concerns what exhausts the idea’s first-order representational content. The formally real occurrence is not a second representation added to the OR-bearing representation.

Descartes’s First Replies are especially important. In explaining the idea taken objectively, Descartes identifies the idea of the sun with the sun itself insofar as it exists objectively in the intellect:

adeo ut idea solis sit sol ipse in intellectu existens, non quidem formaliter, ut in coelo, sed objective, hoc est eo modo quo objecta in intellectu esse solent. [So that the idea of the sun is the sun itself existing in the intellect, not indeed formally, as in the heavens, but objectively, that is, in the way in which objects are accustomed to exist in the intellect.] (AT VII 102–103; CSM II 75)

For the idea of God taken objectively, ORCET therefore favors:

I_G,obj = G_OR.

The identity should not be inferred merely from necessary inseparability. The fact that A cannot exist without B does not establish that A is B. Rather, the identity follows from Descartes’s characterization of the idea taken objectively. The idea of God taken objectively is God insofar as God is objectively present in the intellect.

The Second Replies definition of objective reality reinforces the point:

Per realitatem objectivam ideae intelligo entitatem rei repraesentatae per ideam, quatenus est in idea. [By the objective reality of an idea I understand the being of the thing represented by the idea insofar as it is in the idea.] (AT VII 161; CSM II 113)

The definition is important because objective reality is explicitly tied to a rei repraesentatae per ideam, a thing represented by an idea. This does not yet prove that representation must always be occurrent and conscious, since Milidrag can dispute what it means for something to be “in” an idea. But it places the burden on an interpretation that detaches the present instantiation of objective being from present mental representation.

Mental Instantiation, Thought, and Consciousness

The consciousness issue becomes important once objective being is described as genuinely intramental. Descartes’s definition of idea in the Second Replies explicitly connects an idea with the immediate perception of a thought:

Ideae nomine intelligo cujuslibet cogitationis formam illam, per cujus immediatam perceptionem ipsius ejusdem cogitationis conscius sum. [By the name “idea” I understand that form of any thought through whose immediate perception I am conscious of that same thought.] (AT VII 160; CSM II 113)

The Fourth Replies make the transparency requirement still stronger:

nec ulla potest in nobis esse cogitatio, cujus eodem illo momento, quo in nobis est, conscii non simus. [And there can be no thought in us of which we are not conscious at the very same moment at which it is in us.] (AT VII 246; CSM II 171)

If actual Cartesian objective being entails actual mental representation, and actual mental representation entails an occurrent thought, Descartes’s consciousness principle supplies the final step:

OB_present(X) → R_m,occ(X) → T(X) → A(X).

Here R_m,occ(X) means that X is occurrently mentally represented, T(X) that there is an occurrent thought of X, and A(X) that the thinker is directly aware of that thought.

The most controversial implication is therefore not:

R_m,occ(X) → T(X).

That is close to definitional once “occurrently mentally represented” has been specified. The genuinely disputed premise is:

OB_present(X) → R_m,occ(X).

Milidrag’s interpretation needs to deny this. That is exactly where the debate should be located.

The Actual Representation Objection

The objection can now be formulated without assuming that every feature belonging to a represented essence must be explicitly attended to. It asks only about the represented item itself:

Can a representatum possess actual Cartesian objective being in a mind at a time when that mind has no occurrent conscious mental representation of that representatum?

Suppose the answer is yes. We then have:

OB_present(X) ∧ ¬ R_m,occ(X).

The question is not whether this formula is formally consistent. It plainly can be made consistent by stipulating a sufficiently robust ontology of intramental essences. The philosophical issue is what makes the first conjunct true. Why call the standing state objective being?

Several alternatives already exist within Cartesian metaphysics:

• a native disposition to think X;
• a faculty capable of eliciting the idea of X;
• an intellectual structure constraining how X can be conceived;
• a potentiality for producing an occurrent X-representation;
• a true and immutable nature whose properties are not invented by the finite thinker.

None of these descriptions by itself entails that an objectively real representation of X is already presently instantiated in the mind. An interpretation that adds that stronger actuality therefore incurs an additional explanatory burden.

The fundamental challenge is:

What makes an unthought intramental essence an actually instantiated objectively existing Cartesian representational content, rather than merely a disposition, capacity, potentiality, or intellectual structure capable of giving rise to such content when an occurrent idea is elicited?

Milidrag’s Strongest Reply: Innate Ideas Need Not Be Occurrent

Milidrag has an obvious and important response. Descartes repeatedly says that innate ideas need not always be occurrently before consciousness. An interpreter can therefore challenge the inference from “X is in the intellect” to “X is presently thought.” If innate ideas can belong to the mind while unthought, why could their objective contents not likewise possess objective being while unthought?

This response blocks any simplistic argument of the following form:

In the mind → presently thought.

Descartes plainly recognizes ways in which something may belong to the mind without being the current object of attention. The question, however, is what sort of belonging is involved.

His reply to Hobbes is crucial:

Denique, cùm dicimus ideam aliquam nobis esse innatam, non intelligimus illam nobis semper obversari: sic enim nulla prorsus esset innata; sed tantùm nos habere in nobis ipsis facultatem illam eliciendi. [Finally, when we say that an idea is innate in us, we do not understand it to be always before us: for in that way no idea at all would be innate; but only that we have in ourselves the faculty of eliciting that idea.] (AT VII 189; CSM II 132)

The philosophically important expression is facultatem illam eliciendi, the faculty of eliciting that idea. Nothing in this formulation requires an already actual but unconscious token idea that is subsequently retrieved. Descartes can instead be read dispositionally: prior to occurrent ideation, the mind possesses a faculty capable of bringing forth the idea.

The Faculty Model Versus the Standing-Essence Model

The disagreement can now be represented as a competition between two ontologies of latency.

The faculty model:

t₁: F_X ∧ ¬ I_X.

t₂: exercise(F_X) → I_X ∧ OR_X ∧ A_X.

At the first time, the mind has a faculty for eliciting an X-idea, but no X-idea is occurrent. At the second time, exercise of that faculty gives rise to the occurrent idea and its objectively real content.

The standing-essence model:

t₁: E_X has OB ∧ ¬ A_X.

t₂: E_X has OB ∧ A_X.

On this second model, conscious ideation does not confer or instantiate objective being. It makes an already objectively existing intramental essence an occurrent object of awareness.

Milidrag’s reading of the sun case appears to favor the standing-essence model. He explicitly distinguishes the sun as a res in intellectu from the sun as a res cogitata, treating the intramental essence as existing independently of whether it is simultaneously perceived. See Milidrag 2012, p. 58.

The difficulty is that the faculty model already explains why an idea can be innate without being continuously conscious. Milidrag therefore needs to identify explanatory work that can be performed only by an already objectively existing intramental essence and cannot be performed by a structured native faculty.

The burden can be stated as follows:

If F_X can explain the mind’s standing capacity to produce I_X, what requires the additional posit E_X with presently instantiated objective being during the interval in which I_X does not occur?

Merely answering that E_X is an innate idea would beg the question. The issue is precisely whether non-occurrent innateness consists in an actual OR-bearing essence or in a power to elicit one.

The Triangle Complication

The Fifth Meditation provides Milidrag with a more difficult response. Descartes maintains that a thinker can possess the idea of a triangle while failing to attend to all of the properties that necessarily belong to triangular nature. He even describes mathematical truths as in some sense already “in” him before he directs the mind’s gaze toward them:

quae dudum quidem in me erant, licet non prius in illa obtutum mentis converterem. [Which indeed had long been in me, although I had not previously turned the gaze of my mind toward them.] (AT VII 64; CSM II 44)

Descartes then emphasizes that properties of the triangle can be recognized as necessary even though he had not previously thought of those properties when imagining the triangle. (AT VII 64; CSM II 44–45)

This is genuine evidence that Cartesian representational content cannot be identified with whatever the thinker happens explicitly to attend to at a particular instant. ORCET must therefore reject the following excessively strong principle:

Represented(X) → explicitly-attending-to-every-property-of(X).

That principle is false.

But the triangle case does not establish the proposition Milidrag needs. Descartes’s earlier situation can be represented as:

R_m,occ(T) ∧ ¬ R_explicit(P(T)).

The triangle T is consciously mentally represented, while some necessary property P of T is not explicitly represented. Milidrag’s stronger thesis requires:

OB_present(T) ∧ ¬ R_m,occ(T).

The second formula does not follow from the first.

Property-Opacity Does Not Establish Object-Opacity

It is useful to distinguish two forms of cognitive non-explicitness.

Property-opacity occurs when the thinker consciously mentally represents X but does not explicitly represent every property necessarily belonging to X.

R_m,occ(X) ∧ ∃P [P belongs to X ∧ ¬ R_explicit(P)].

Object-opacity would occur if X possessed objective being in the mind while X itself was not occurrently mentally represented.

OB_present(X) ∧ ¬ R_m,occ(X).

The triangle case establishes property-opacity. It does not establish object-opacity.

This distinction allows ORCET to preserve the intellectual richness of Cartesian ideas. An idea need not consist in an exhaustive inventory of all truths concerning its representatum. A triangle can be represented without every theorem concerning triangularity being simultaneously occurrent. The relevant distinction is between what the idea represents and everything true of what the idea represents.

Thus ORCET can consistently maintain:

T_OR is occurrently represented.

while also maintaining:

Not every necessary truth about T is occurrently represented.

Milidrag’s move from the latter fact to standing unthought objective being would require an additional argument.

The Quasi-Platonic Worry: An Internalized Object-Before-Act Ontology

A further concern arises if an interpreter understands objectively real representations as an independent standing ontology of intramental essences. Such a theory should not simply be identified with Platonic realism. Platonic Forms are not ordinarily understood as mind-dependent entities residing within finite intellects. Milidrag’s intramental essences are precisely intramental, and his broader interpretation connects their intelligibility with divine efficient causation. The ontology is therefore importantly different from Plato’s.

Nevertheless, there is a significant structural analogy. The central feature of the Platonic explanatory pattern is not merely that Forms occupy a transcendent “location.” It is that the intelligible object is already determinate independently of the particular occurrent cognitive act by which the thinker apprehends it. Cognition succeeds because there is already an object there to be cognitively encountered.

A Milidrag-style standing intramental essence produces a structurally similar relation:

standing determinate essence → subsequent conscious apprehension.

The difference is that the object has been relocated from a transcendent ontology to an intramental one. The object-before-act structure remains.

ORCET proposes a different architecture:

structured native capacity → occurrent objectively real representation.

On this account, the mind need not contain an already actual representational object waiting to be apprehended. The standing feature can instead be a determinate capacity whose exercise produces the occurrent OR-bearing idea.

The objection to Milidrag should therefore not be stated crudely as “Milidrag makes Descartes a Platonist.” A better objection is that Milidrag risks internalizing the object-first explanatory structure of Platonism. The determinate essence already possesses its own relevant intramental ontological status, while occurrent cognition subsequently apprehends it.

Why the Issue Is Not Simply Platonism Versus Conceptualism

The anti-Milidrag objection should also avoid an equally crude characterization of Descartes as a straightforward conceptualist about all essences. Descartes rejects autonomous Platonic Forms, but the Fifth Meditation’s true and immutable natures are not merely arbitrary products of finite acts of abstraction or conceptual fabrication. A triangle has necessary properties that constrain what the thinker may truly affirm of it, including properties that the thinker did not invent and did not previously attend to. (AT VII 64–65; CSM II 44–45)

Three positions must therefore be distinguished:

• Autonomous Platonic realism: essences or Forms possess an ontological independence not grounded in finite minds and not reducible to their conceptual activities.
• Simple finite-mind conceptualism: essences are merely products of the finite mind’s conceptual construction or abstraction.
• Cartesian divine-dependent essentialism: true and immutable natures possess determinate necessary structure not constituted by arbitrary finite conceptual acts, while nevertheless lacking the autonomous status of Platonic Forms.

Milidrag can therefore correctly respond that Descartes already has resources for robust essences whose determinate structures outrun what a finite thinker presently and explicitly conceives. But the response does not establish that such essences are continuously instantiated as objectively real representations within each finite intellect.

The critical distinction is:

independence of essential truth from present attention

versus:

present intramental instantiation of objective being without present mental representation.

The former does not entail the latter.

The Idea of God and ORCET

The issue becomes particularly important in the idea of God because the representational determination is not merely finite-substance-level objective reality but infinite-substance-level objective reality.

The relevant distinctions are:

FR(I_G,op) = finite mode-level.

OR(I_G,obj) = infinite-substance-level.

I_G,obj = G_OR.

The first proposition concerns the idea considered as an occurring mental operation. The second concerns the rank of its objectively real representational content. The third states the ORCET-compatible identity between the idea taken objectively and the objectively real God-representation.

ORCET does not imply:

FR(G_OR) = infinite.

That would destroy the distinction between objective and formal reality. Nor does ORCET require a second formally real God-representing constituent. What makes the idea an idea of God is exhausted at the level of first-order representation by G_OR.

This creates a serious causal pressure. Descartes treats ideas considered formally as finite modes while maintaining that the objective reality of the God idea cannot originate from the finite mind because its causal source must contain at least as much formal or eminent reality as the idea contains objectively. (AT VII 40–42; CSM II 28–29)

The resulting causal partition is:

finite mind → finite formal occurrence of I_G.

but allegedly not:

finite mind → infinite OR of I_G.

Yet the infinite OR-content exhausts what makes the first-order representation specifically a representation of God. The finite mind is therefore treated as adequate to the formal occurrence of the thinking-of-God while inadequate to the content constitutive of that occurrence’s being a thinking-of-God.

Merely saying that formal being and objective being are different kinds of being does not yet explain why the causal requirements differ by the required amount. The distinction identifies two explanatory dimensions. It does not derive the cross-modal causal relation between their ranks.

Does the Formally Real Mode Add Anything to the Idea of God?

ORCET generates a further objection to Milidrag’s appeal to the distinction between objective and formal being. The objection must be formulated carefully. It does not deny that an occurrent idea, considered as an operation of a finite mind, has finite formal reality. Descartes explicitly classifies an idea in this respect as a mode of thought. (AT VII 41; CSM II 28) The issue is instead whether this formally real dimension supplies any additional first-order representational content beyond the objectively real representation that, according to ORCET, already exhausts what makes the idea specifically an idea of its representatum.

Consider the idea of God. ORCET maintains:

I_G,obj = G_OR.

The idea of God taken objectively is the objectively real representation of God. That content represents an infinite substance and thereby makes the idea specifically an idea of God. Nothing further needs to be added at the level of first-order representational content in order to convert the occurrence into a representation of God.

Now compare the idea of God with an idea of a rock. Considered merely according to their formal reality as mental occurrences, both are finite modifications of a finite thinking substance:

FR(I_G,op) = finite mode-level.

FR(I_R,op) = finite mode-level.

Their formal ontological rank therefore cannot explain why one occurrence represents God while the other represents a rock. Their representational difference appears only when they are considered objectively:

OR(I_G,obj) = infinite-substance-level.

OR(I_R,obj) = finite-substance-level.

The formal reality of the occurrence therefore contributes something important but comparatively limited: it tells us that an actual episode of thinking exists as a finite modification of the finite mind. It does not tell us what that episode represents. Its first-order representational identity is supplied by its objectively real content.

This distinction generates a dilemma for an interpretation that treats the formally real act and the objectively real content as sufficiently independent to support radically different causal requirements.

First horn: the formally real act is a numerically distinct representational item added to the objectively real content.

Suppose the ontology contains both G_OR, the objectively existing God-content, and M_G, a distinct formally real finite mental act. ORCET then asks what representational work M_G performs. G_OR already supplies everything required for the first-order representation to be a representation of God. M_G, considered merely according to its formal mode-level reality, contains nothing that distinguishes God-directed thought from rock-directed thought.

The structure would be:

G_OR + M_G.

But if G_OR already exhausts what makes the thought a thought of God, M_G cannot be required as an additional God-representing constituent. The objection is not that M_G therefore fails to exist as a mental occurrence. It is that its status as a second representational constituent would be explanatorily redundant.

Indeed, if M_G acquires its God-directedness only by standing in some relation to G_OR, then the explanatory burden has merely been displaced. What makes M_G an idea of God remains G_OR, not anything contained in M_G merely in virtue of its finite formal reality.

The first horn therefore yields:

Representational identity(I_G) is fixed by G_OR, not by FR(M_G).

Second horn: the formally real mode is not an additional representational item but merely the occurrent thinking considered according to its formal existence in the mind.

This reading is ontologically more economical. The mind’s presently thinking of God is a finite modification insofar as that occurrence formally exists in the finite thinking substance. Its being formally mode-level does not supply another representation alongside G_OR. Rather, “finite mode” identifies the formal ontological status of the occurrence in which the objectively real God-content is consciously present.

But this answer creates a different problem for Milidrag’s causal strategy. If the formal classification and the objective representational content belong to the analysis of one occurrent ideational episode rather than identifying two separately produced representational entities, the mere difference between formal and objective being does not establish two independent causal effects whose causal demands may simply be assigned different ranks.

The relevant distinction would then be:

formal question: how does the occurrent thinking exist?

objective question: what does the occurrent thinking represent, and with what OR rank?

These are genuinely different questions. But their difference does not itself establish the causal conclusion Descartes requires.

The problem becomes especially sharp if the finite mind is treated as causally adequate for the formal occurrence of the entire conscious thinking-of-God while simultaneously being treated as causally inadequate for the objectively real God-content that exhausts what makes that occurrence specifically a thinking-of-God.

The resulting structure is:

finite mind → occurrence of conscious thinking-of-God.

Yet:

finite mind ≱ adequate cause of G_OR.

The second claim may ultimately be correct according to Descartes’s causal principle. But it cannot be justified merely by redescribing the first-order representational content as possessing a different kind of being from the formal reality of the mental occurrence. That distinction is precisely what requires a causal bridge.

The dilemma can therefore be summarized as follows:

• If the formally real act is an additional representational constituent, its contribution to the idea’s being specifically an idea of God is unexplained and appears redundant because G_OR already exhausts the relevant first-order representational content.
• If the formally real act is not an additional representational constituent, but the occurrent thinking considered according to its finite formal existence, then formal and objective being do not thereby identify two independently produced representational effects. Their different causal requirements still require independent justification.

Either way, Milidrag cannot solve the causal problem merely by insisting that objective being and formal being are different kinds of being. ORCET can grant that distinction while denying that it yields either an additional formally real God-representing constituent or an automatically rank-preserving causal relation between the two ontological dimensions.

The resulting challenge is therefore stronger than the claim that the finite mode is “unnecessary” without qualification. The finite mental occurrence is not ontologically nothing. What is unnecessary is a second formally real representational constituent added to the objectively real God-content. Formal reality explains the mode of occurrence; objective reality supplies the first-order representational determination. The remaining philosophical problem is why causal adequacy for the latter must be measured by a formal or eminent rank that can radically exceed the formal rank sufficient for the former.

Milidrag Explains Causal Applicability Better Than Causal Proportionality

Milidrag’s interpretation should be granted a substantial success. If objective being is a genuine mode of being rather than an extrinsic denomination, then Caterus can no longer dismiss the demand for a cause merely by saying that nothing real has been added. Milidrag explains why objective being constitutes a metaphysical explanandum.

Schematically:

genuine OB(E) → E requires causal grounding.

That is philosophically important. It provides Descartes with a serious answer to the antecedent Caterus problem.

But the Third Meditation needs something considerably stronger:

OR_n(E) → FR/ER(C) ≥ n.

This states that if an idea contains objective reality of rank n, its adequate cause must contain at least rank n formally or eminently.

The second proposition does not follow merely from the first. Genuine objective being may establish the need for some cause. It does not by itself establish a rank-preserving mapping between objective reality in an idea and formal or eminent reality in the adequate cause.

Thus Milidrag provides a strong answer to:

Why is objective being causally significant?

He does not independently answer:

Why must objective-reality rank be preserved across the transition to formal or eminent causal reality?

The latter is the Cross-Modal Causal Adequacy Problem. The God case makes it especially acute because the required transition is from infinite objective reality in a finite mental occurrence to an infinitely formally or eminently real cause.

Milidrag’s Best Responses and Where They Fall Short

Milidrag has several serious responses available. None should be dismissed. But each falls short of the conclusion required.

• Response 1: Objective being is a genuine mode of being. This successfully explains why Caterus cannot dismiss it as causally irrelevant. Limit: genuine being establishes causal applicability, not cross-modal causal proportionality.
• Response 2: The intramental essence is not an unconscious thought. It is a res in intellectu capable of existing without being a presently perceived res cogitata. Limit: once the essence is detached from occurrent thought, Milidrag must explain what makes its present status specifically representational objective being rather than merely an intellectual capacity or structure.
• Response 3: Innate ideas need not always be conscious. Descartes unquestionably denies that an innate idea must always be before the mind. Limit: Descartes explains this non-occurrence by appeal to a facultas eliciendi, a faculty of eliciting the idea. The innateness text does not by itself establish a standing OR-bearing entity.
• Response 4: The triangle contains more than the thinker explicitly attends to. This is correct. Limit: it establishes property-opacity rather than object-opacity. The thinker represents the triangle while failing to represent some of its properties explicitly. It does not follow that a triangle possesses objective being while no triangle is mentally represented at all.
• Response 5: True and immutable natures cannot be reduced to arbitrary finite conceptual construction. This is also correct. Limit: the objective necessity of an essence does not imply that the essence is continuously instantiated as an objectively real representation inside a finite mind.
• Response 6: A standing essence explains repeatability and determinate content. The same essence can allegedly ground repeated acts of cognition. Limit: a highly structured native faculty may explain repeatability without being numerically identical to an already actual OR-bearing content. Structured capacity must not be collapsed into actual represented content.
• Response 7: Descartes’s ontology of created essences is already robust. Divine causation can explain why essences are determinate and intelligible. Limit: divine grounding of an essence and intramental instantiation of that essence as actual objective content in a particular finite mind are different theses.

The Deeper Ontological Choice

The dispute ultimately concerns two different conceptions of Cartesian objective reality.

Standing-object ontology:

intramental essence with OB → possible later conscious apprehension.

On this interpretation, objective being is ontologically prior to the particular occurrent acts in which the essence becomes consciously represented.

Occurrent-representation ontology:

structured faculty → occurrent idea → OR-bearing mental representation.

On this interpretation, what persists between acts is the power or intellectual structure. Actual objective representational content exists when the corresponding strict idea occurs.

The choice determines whether objective reality belongs fundamentally to an independent ontology of objects available to consciousness or to the ontology of conscious mental representation itself.

It also determines the direction of explanation. On the standing-object model, cognition is explained partly by the prior availability of an intramental object. On the ORCET model, the actual objectively real representation is produced when a native representational capacity is exercised.

This is why the quasi-Platonic analogy has philosophical force. It does not accuse Milidrag of positing transcendent Platonic Forms. It identifies an object-before-act explanatory structure:

determinate object first, cognitive apprehension second.

The alternative is:

determinate capacity first, occurrent representational content second.

The latter requires fewer standing representational entities and fits naturally with Descartes’s language of faculties and elicitation. The former remains possible, but it requires stronger textual and metaphysical justification than the existence of innate ideas or unexplicit geometrical properties alone can provide.

Conclusions

Milidrag’s interpretation should be credited with identifying a genuine metaphysical dimension in Descartes’s response to Caterus. If objective being is irreducible to an extrinsic denomination, then it can constitute a genuine causal explanandum. Milidrag thereby gives Descartes a much stronger response than the bare assertion that objective being is “not nothing.” He also makes intelligible why Descartes’s complicated-machine example and his doctrine of created eternal truths belong to the same larger metaphysics of objective intelligibility.

But this success generates a further question that Milidrag has not satisfactorily answered. Once an intramental essence is completely detached from occurrent conscious mental representation, what makes its presently instantiated mode of being specifically objective? Calling it an innate essence does not answer the question, because Descartes’s reply to Hobbes provides a dispositional alternative. The mind can possess a faculty for eliciting an idea without an unconscious token idea already occurring. The relevant contrast is therefore not between conscious ideas and no innate structure at all. It is between a standing objectively existing essence and a structured native power capable of producing the corresponding objective content when exercised.

The triangle case does not resolve the dispute in Milidrag’s favor. It demonstrates that conscious mental representation need not involve exhaustive explicit awareness. An idea of a triangle can possess essential implications not presently attended to. But this establishes property-opacity, not object-opacity. From the fact that a thinker may represent X without representing every P belonging to X, it does not follow that X can possess objective being in that thinker’s mind when X itself is not mentally represented at all.

The quasi-Platonic objection must likewise be formulated carefully. Descartes is not simply a conceptualist confronting a literal Platonic ontology. True and immutable natures have a necessity and determinacy that exceed arbitrary finite conceptual construction. Nevertheless, an ontology of standing unthought intramental essences risks preserving inside the finite mind the characteristic object-before-act structure associated with Platonism. The essence is already there as an ontologically determinate cognitive object, and the occurrent intellectual act subsequently apprehends it. Descartes’s faculty account makes available an ontologically leaner alternative.

ORCET also sharpens the problem concerning the formally real finite mental mode. The objection should not be stated as the claim that an occurrent Cartesian idea possesses no formal reality. Rather, the issue is that the finite formal reality of the occurrence does not supply the representational determination by which it is specifically an idea of God. The objectively real God-content already exhausts that first-order representational role. If a distinct formally real act is introduced as an additional representational constituent, its contribution is unexplained and appears redundant. If instead the finite mode is merely the occurrent thinking considered according to its formal existence in the finite mind, the formal and objective dimensions are not thereby two independently produced representational effects. Consequently, Milidrag cannot derive their radically different causal requirements merely from their being different kinds of being. The distinction between formal and objective being identifies the dimensions requiring explanation; it does not itself provide the causal bridge between them.

The central unresolved issue can therefore be stated without denying innate faculties, implicit essential structure, true and immutable natures, or Descartes’s distinction between formal and objective being:

What makes an unthought intramental essence an actually instantiated objectively existing Cartesian representational content, rather than merely a disposition, capacity, potentiality, or intellectual structure capable of giving rise to such content when an occurrent idea is elicited?

Until an answer is supplied, the standing-essence interpretation has not established that the latency required by Cartesian innateness is latency of actual objective content rather than latency of representational power.

Finally, even if Milidrag were granted the stronger standing ontology, the principal causal problem concerning the idea of God would remain. The following implication would still require independent justification:

OR_n(E) → FR/ER(C) ≥ n.

Milidrag explains why objectively existing content might require a cause. He does not thereby establish why objective-reality rank must impose a rank-preserving lower bound upon formal or eminent causal reality. For the idea of God, the gap is decisive:

infinite OR → ? → infinite formal or eminent cause.

The question mark marks the remaining Cross-Modal Causal Adequacy Problem. A richer ontology of objective being makes the left side of the inference metaphysically significant. It does not yet supply the missing bridge to the right side.