← History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
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Hi, I'm Peter Adamson and you're listening to the History of Philosophy podcast brought to you with the support of the Philosophy Department at King's College London and the LMU in munich. Online@historyoffphilosophy.net Today's episode no Particular Reason Nicolas Malebranche despite their shared names, there are a lot of differences between the sport that Americans call soccer and the rest of the world calls football, and the sport that Americans call football and the rest of the world largely ignores the name. Notwithstanding, American football is mostly played with the hands, and the so called ball isn't even spherical, so that doesn't exactly speak in its favor. On the other hand, when tackled with enough force to total a small car, American football players make a point of bouncing to their feet as if nothing has happened, whereas soccer players famously collapse and writhe on the ground at the merest caress of an opposing player. One thing the sports do have in common is the way many players react to success on the field. You'll often see them celebrate scoring a touchdown or goal by pointing to the sky, giving both thanks and credit to God. I can't be the first person to wonder what Nicolas Malebranche would make of this. At first you might think he would approve because he was famously an occasionalist, meaning that he thought all worldly events are caused by God. In fact, he might say you should point to the sky after successfully making breakfast, or even successfully twitching your finger, because no matter what you manage to do, it is really God doing it. And of course, if you did point to the sky, it would really be God doing that too. But I think Malebranche would in fact strongly disapprove. He categorically denied that God performs arbitrary actions like favoring just one player in a game with a touchdown or a goal. His God does not move in mysterious ways. Instead, he abides by predictable and general laws that he himself has laid down. A major clue to Malevranche's intellectual allegiances is that he thinks there are only two such laws. First, bodies tend to continue moving in straight lines unless interrupted. Second, when bodies do collide, they deflect one another. These laws are of course taken from Cartesian physics, which Malebranche largely accepts. For him, as for Descartes, bodies are nothing but impenetrable extensions. This might lead you to suspect that Malebranche's occasionalism had the same underlying rationale as the occasionalism of other, less famous Cartesians, men like La Forge and Coid'd'd' Moi. And you'd be right, at least in part. Indeed, Co d' Moy and Malebranche seem to have exerted some influence on one another as they worked out the implications of Descartes physics. But there was another major influence on Malebranche, namely Augustine. After studying theology at the Sorbonne, he had joined the Oratory, an institution founded in 1613 by six theologians led by an Augustinian named Pierre Berulle. His name may sound familiar, since I mentioned him as the host of the event that came to be known as the Berul Affair, in which Descartes publicly announced his intention to place philosophy on secure foundations. Descartes enjoyed a good relationship with Berulle, which set a tone for the oratory. Other oratorians would also embrace Cartesianism, and Malebranche was one of them. Actually, Scholasticism, followed by Augustinianism, would have been earlier influences on him than Cartesianism, since Malebranche seems to have encountered Descartes thought only in 1664, by which time he had already become a priest. But like Descartes, he largely had a negative reaction to the Scholasticism he learned in his youth. And the writings for which he is known instead bear the powerful imprint of Cartesianism. These include Search after truth, published in two volumes in 1674 and 1675, a treatise on nature and grace from 1680 and eight years later, the Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion. Those three works represent only a fraction of his prodigious output, which has received a modern edition in no fewer than 20 volumes. The dual impact of Augustine and Descartes might remind us of Arnaud, who was inspired by the same sources. Yet Arnaud turned out to be the most profound and relentless critic of Malebranche. The most bitter intellectual hostilities often erupt between thinkers who have a lot in common. And so it is. Here, for instance, both Arnaud and Malebranche enthusiastically adopted Descartes method of seeking absolute certainty, but wanted to exempt from that method things that Christians believe by faith. We saw Arnauld pressing this point in his objections to the Meditations. Malebranche arguably goes further still, since, as we'll see, he thinks that religious belief is needed to assist philosophy when rational argument fails to provide watertight demonstrations. Which brings us to a central paradox of Malebranche's thought. On the one hand, he was remarkably skeptical on certain topics, including topics where Descartes thought philosophical certainty was available. On the other hand, Malebranche was a convinced rationalist who would be criticized by Arnauld for presuming to think that he could use his own intellect to discern the priorities that God must adopt in creating and governing the universe. This despite the fact that the very existence of the universe is one thing that Malebranche subjects to skeptical challenge. Descartes had, of course raised the problem in his Meditations, but then answered his own worry by saying that God is not a deceiver. Thus, we can trust in our senses and what they tell us about the world around us, including that it exists. Malebranche sees Descartes strategy as fairly persuasive, but not fully reliable, since it gives us no direct demonstration that bodies do exist. We are not, he says, in the search after truth, invincibly led to believe there is something other than God and our own mind. It is true that we have a strong propensity to believe that there are bodies surrounding us. I agree here with Descartes. But this propensity, as natural as it is, does not constrain our belief through evidence. It merely inclines us towards belief. Similarly, in the Dialogues on Metaphysics, Malebranche has his spokesman character say that there is no proof that God had to create bodies at all. As for the sensations that supposedly inform us about those bodies, these are, using Descartes terminology, only modifications of the soul. In the words of Mado branch specialist Stephen Nadler, they are epistemically empty because they have no inevitable or intrinsic connection to anything out in the world. Consider the standard Cartesian explanation of pain. Something sharp stabs your foot and this causes emotion in the animal spirits that flow between the foot and the brain. The sensation of pain is simply a mental event that is prompted by this physical process. So there's no pain really in the foot. Rather, pain is in the mind. On good Cartesian principles, we can therefore say that pain is not an accurate report of anything in bodies. Remember, bodies are just extensions and have no sensible properties like color, heat or painfulness. To believe in such mind independent qualitative properties is, as Descartes taught, a sort of childish credulousness typical of the university scholastics. Malebranche pushes the case for external world skepticism still further. Though you may find yourself in a room as you listen to this. If so, look around. It certainly seems real, right? I mean, you can see it. Or can you? Modbranche argues that the room is effectively invisible, since all you are experiencing is sensations that do seem to show you the room, but are in fact in the mind. God could destroy the whole world of bodies while making your mind keep seeing the room. Or he could produce identical sensations to the ones you are having in the mind of someone who is halfway across the planet in China by manipulating that person's brain in the right way. The upshot is that for Malfanche, radical skepticism about the nature and even existence of our immediate surroundings cannot be defeated by rational argument. Which isn't to say that he believes the environment is not there, of course. For one thing, there's no watertight argument against its existence either. And for another thing, as we just saw, he. He admits that there is a strong natural propensity to believe the world does exist. But the final confirmation comes only through faith, since many of the things Christians believe, for instance about the life of Christ and the rituals of the church, would be false if the physical world were not real. We just saw that. Even as Malebranche expresses doubt about the external world, he says he is confident about the existence of the mind. Descartes cogito argument would supply that confidence. But when it comes to the nature of the mind, Malebranche again thinks the skeptical method should be applied more strictly than we find in the Meditations. For Descartes, we can grasp our own minds directly, which is how we know we are thinking substances. Malebranche thinks not. He says that we only have access to the experiences that arise in the mind and not to the mind in itself. It's true that we have a kind of interior sensation through which the mind is aware of its own workings. But this is confused and indistinct, not the sort of thing a Cartesian should be taking as a foundation for philosophy. In fact, we have better knowledge of bodies than of our own souls, and have even less access to the souls of other people whose very existence is a matter of mere conjecture and indirect inference. Malebranche puts the point in rather dramatic terms that may remind us of Montaigne or Pascal. I am entirely unintelligible to myself. One implication is that Malebranche cannot really follow Descartes approach improving mind body dualism. Since that approach presupposes that we grasp mind and body through their essential attributes of thought and extension. Malebranche combines these skeptical attitudes towards bodies and minds with a breathtaking confidence when it comes to the third main element of Cartesian God. Not that we can grasp God's essence directly. Malebranche denies that this is possible for humans in this life. What we can do, though, is grasp God's rationale in creating the universe and ordering it as he does. This provides Malebranche with a theodicy that is an explanation of how there can be evil and suffering in a world made by a perfectly good and omnipotent God. God's goal is not to create the best of all possible worlds, as Leibniz was putting it around this same time. Actually, it's not so clear what Leibniz meant by that, but at first glance the phrase seems to suggest that every last detail of the world is optimized. If so, then apparent defects like illnesses, natural disasters and Arsenal failing to win the league must be offset by benefits that could not have been achieved in any other way. This is not Malebranche's view. Instead, his God prioritizes simplicity. Far from stepping in to help one team score a goal against another or prevent individual mishaps like car accidents and illnesses, God simply institutes those basic laws of physical motion and allows events to unfold in accordance with them. God is not like humans, who need to make what Malebranche calls particular volitions, responding to circumstances in a one off manner. Rather, God is a universal cause whose will is exercised through general determinations that are equivalent to the laws of nature. This means, as Malevranche freely admits, that many features of the world are not the best they could be at an individual level. For example, to keep us from harm, our bodies and minds had to be arranged so that we can feel pain. When the body is damaged, the brain is moved in a certain way, and this occasions the feeling of pain in the mind. Though God could intervene constantly to prevent us from being harmed, so never feel pain that would violate his broader goal of governing the world through unvarying laws. As Malebranche puts it in On Nature and Grace, which is largely devoted to this issue, God does not accomplish by complex means that which may be performed by more simple ones. For instance, he would not disrupt the natural dynamics of rainfall to help the crops grow on just one farmer's field, or change the natural development of a fetus to prevent birth defects. All of which prompts the obvious why not? Wouldn't we prefer to live in a chaotic world where everything is wonderful all the time, than in an orderly world full of pain, anguish and Manchester City? Beyond his assumption that simplicity is better than complexity, Malebranche doesn't have much to say in answer to this question. Apart from the idea that God's will must be general and uniform, he considers particular volition to be tantamount to volition that is arbitrary and bizarre, something obviously inappropriate to divine wisdom. One might thus say that Malebranche's theodicy sacrifices the perfection of the universe to safeguard divine perfection. But here's another obvious what about miracles aren't these precisely events in which God does step in and disrupt the natural order, exercising a particular volition that goes against his general policies? Matabranche admits that this is precisely what miracles are, which seems to mean that he must deny the existence of miracles in order to preserve his own theodicy. And of course, he doesn't want to do that. Instead, he says that the initial creation of the universe must have been the result of particular volition, or, in other words, a miracle. God created the universe for his own glory, as a kind of stage setting for the incarnation and establishment of the church. This requires an orderly world, which would never have been produced if God had just started with a random assortment of bodily extensions and let them bounce off each other, following the laws of physics. Rather, God needs to put appropriate starting conditions in place and only then let the laws of nature play out. Next, we have the question of miracles that take place once the world is up and running. Here, Malebranche offers several considerations which don't necessarily lead in the same direction. One is that we can never be entirely sure that a given event is in fact a miracle. That seems to edge towards skepticism about miracles apart from the initial creation. But Malebranche also notes that there may be higher purposes that trump the goals of simplicity and order, like the purpose of God's own glory. In pursuit of these purposes, God might indeed perform a genuine miracle. But Malebranche says this would only be when absolutely necessary to his intentions, and for reasons we cannot understand. Miracles would quite literally be the exceptions that prove a rule, because they would depart from physical laws but follow some other unknown general law that trumps physics. Malebranche's ideas on this problem seemed to have developed as he was put under pressure by critics like Arnault, who was outraged by Malebranche's theodicy. Malebranche was willing to say even that God is powerless to stop individual evils because he simply must adhere to his own general laws. Arnaud sarcastically noted it is a little surprising that no one has noticed how this language must offend Christian ears. Beyond sarcasm, he offered a rival philosophical theology. Malebranche spoke of God consulting his own wisdom and then choosing to do whatever he found to be best, as when his wisdom dictates that simplicity is more important than the avoidance of suffering. But, Arnaud protested, God's wisdom and will are just the same thing, even if from our perspective it seems that they could be distinct. So whereas Malebranche thinks that God always acts in accordance with general reasons, not particular reasons, Arnaud suggests that it is misleading to speak of him as if he were responding to reasons at all. This relates to another flaw Arnaud detects in Malavanche's theodicy. He holds not just that God's wisdom dictates to God what he ought to do, but that we mere humans are able to understand what those dictates would be. Thus we can see that simple order is indeed a fitting goal for divine creation to pursue. In Arnauld's view, this is wildly presumptuous. God's will is untrammeled, and he moves in ways that are mysterious to us. So here we have a deep disagreement between Malebranche and Arnaud. Malebranche adopts a highly intellectualist account of God's action that emphasizes God's rationality and wisdom, whereas Arnaud seems more indebted to the voluntarist traditional, which emphasizes that God simply does whatever God wants. Relevant here would be Arnaud's Jansenism, which involves accepting that God arbitrarily chooses certain humans to receive invincible grace. For Malebranche, by contrast, God is never arbitrary. All his actions are well justified. And if the falling of grace upon human hearts is just as irregularly distributed as rainfall upon farmland, then this too is in keeping with general laws. Which is not to say that we puny humans can grasp the general laws governing grace. Our insight into God's ways does not go that deep. Indeed, despite his rationalism, Malebranche is no less keen than Arnault to emphasize the limits we face in understanding God's actions. He cautions that philosophy on its own can never solve the problem of theodicy, because the Christian faith is needed to inform us about God's plans. Here only religion can get the philosophers out of the difficulty they are in. In a similar vein, he begins his work on nature and grace by admitting that we often know the truth only through religion, and even then, many things remain obscure to us. We saw an example with the question of why and whether God performs miracles. So here, as in that discussion of skepticism about the external world, Malebranche is firmly convinced that reason can go only so far needs to be supplemented by faith on many important topics. Reason simply doesn't provide the kind of certainty demanded in Cartesianism. In light of this, Malebranche writes, nothing appears to be more irrational than lack of faith. Nothing appears to me to be more imprudent than not accepting the greatest authority we can have in matters which we cannot examine with geometrical precision. This confirms that Malebranche does resemble his rival, Arnaud in offering a heady mixture of Cartesian rationalism and Augustinian theology. This initial impression will be confirmed in the following episodes as we turn to two of Malebranche's signature ideas. Ideas is an apt term, in fact, because one of the topics we need to look at is his theory of how we grasp ideas through divine illumination. Malebranche says that he is following Augustine with this teaching, but that won't stop Arnaud from subjecting it to extensive and furious refutation. Before we get into that, though, we're going to turn to an even more famous aspect of Malebranche's philosophy and find out that not everyone liked it either. He was a constant, and not just occasional cause of controversy, as we'll see next time here on the History of Philosophy without any gaps.