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History of Philosophy Without Any Gaps
HoP 489 All Power to Him: Malebranche and Occasionalism
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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 All Power to him Malebranche's Occasionalism it's often noted that the Muslim theologian Al Ghazali anticipated David Hume's famous skeptical discussion of causation. Al Ghazali noted that we see no necessary connection between, to use his example, touching fire to cotton, and that cotton's burning. And this does indeed sound a lot like what Hume would later argue. But there are a couple of reasons I find the comparison unsatisfying. One is the context of Al Ghazali's discussion. As I explained in an episode released back in 2013, he was trying to establish the possibility of miracles. His point was that if created things do not necessitate the effects they seem to produce naturally, this leaves room for God to produce those effects supernaturally. In fact, Al Ghazali probably agreed with other Islamic theologians that God makes everything happen in the world around us, and not only evident miracles. In a way, everything is equally miraculous. It's just that some things, like things failing to burn when thrust into flames, are more unexpected than others because they depart from God's usual custom in making things happen. Which brings us to a second reason I object to the comparison between these two culturally and historically remote figures. The only reason Hume's argument reminds us of Al Ghazali's is that Hume was drawing on another early modern thinker, one whose views were actually much closer to Al Ghazali's. This was, of course, Malebranche, who, unlike Hume but like many theologians in the Islamic world, was an occasionalist. This term may conjure up a professional who specializes in throwing parties, but in fact occasionalism is a philosophical theory, namely the theory I just mentioned. Though we seem to see things having an effect on one another, as when fire touches something and it burns, in fact God is the cause. Something like fire is only an occasional cause, meaning that it is on the occasions when fire is brought into contact with things that God causes burning in them, and likewise for all the apparent causes in the world around us. This may seem a rather outlandish theory, but there's a straightforward rationale for it. Namely, the one already given by a true cause must necessitate its effect. That we find no necessary connection between worldly causes and their effects. There is no contradiction in Something's failing to burn when it is touched by fire. We're just so used to seeing it happen that we assume it must happen. But this is a habitual expectation and involves no true necessity, as is clear from the fact that we can easily conceive of the apparent cause occurring without the effect following. Now, someone might admit that even if there is no logical contradiction in fire failing to burn cotton, it's impossible. In another sense, fire causes cotton to burn, which means that its causal influence renders the burning necessary. If this were so, then not even God could prevent the fire from burning the cotton. But hang on a minute. God is omnipotent, so of course he can prevent it. As Malebranche puts it, if any body could genuinely move another body, then that would mean that God could not do it. Conversely, since God and only God cause whatever he likes, and with genuine necessity, nothing other than God can cause anything. For instance, says Malebranche, a human cannot move a chair, and all the angels and demons working together cannot even move a wisp of straw. So part of the motivation for occasionalism is a certain view of causation, according to which genuine causes render their effects inevitable. This might seem to be an implausibly strong demand, because we routinely accept causal explanations that don't rise to this standard. Suppose you meet a friend who's chuckling to themselves and ask why they are laughing, and they say that they just heard a good joke. Did you hear about the Tyrannosaurus rex who sold guns? He was a small arms dealer. Unfortunately, this doesn't strike you as funny, which is fair enough. But it would be ridiculous for you then to insist that your friend wasn't really laughing because of the joke, since the joke doesn't necessitate laughter, as shown by the fact that it didn't make you laugh. Similarly, we sometimes drop dishes without breaking them. But when dishes get dropped and break, the fall is still the cause of the breakage. Come to think of it, fire sometimes does touch things without burning them. Though we still suppose fire to be the cause of burning when it does happen. A proponent of the demand for necessity might say, though, that this everyday way of thinking of causation is a bit sloppy. If you factor in the exact tensile strength of the dish, the the hardness of the floor and the height from which it is dropped, you'd see that in each given case the dish is either necessitated to break or necessitated not to break. And a complete understanding of the psychology of two people, their background knowledge of dinosaurs and the arms trade, the skill of the joke teller and so on, would let you know for sure whether a given joke is going to cause laughter on a given occasion. And this way of thinking has a certain plausibility too. After all, if a supposed cause, like telling a joke, only sometimes yields the relevant effect, like laughter, we might feel a need for filling out the causal story to explain why the effect does ensue in one case but not in another. Thus, in both later Islamic philosophy and Latin Scholasticism, they sometimes talked of the complete cause. This means the cause that, all things considered and with nothing else being needed, is guaranteed to yield its effect. Though Malebranche does adopt the strong demand that true causes necessitate their effects, there's a lot more going on in his occasionalist theory. For one thing, unlike Al Ghazali, he is facing opponents who agree that God needs to be factored in to all causal explanations. His target is concurrentism, which is not the view that everything tastes better with dried fruit, but the theory that God makes things happen together with or concurrently with a natural cause. If fire touches cotton, then God needs to do more than just refrain from sending down a miracle to stop the cotton from burning. He has to cooperate with the fire to create burning in the cotton. Concurrentism was the dominant view among scholastic philosophers, which is probably to be expected since it sounds so similar to their teaching on grace, according to which both God and the human need to contribute something to the human's righteousness and salvation. But Malebranche sees it as a meaningless dodge. Surely God doesn't need the fire to cause burning, whereas fire does need God. So the fire is superfluous in the sense that it is not needed for the causal explanation. Malebranche's verdict on the Scholastics, then, is that they are effectively denying God his proper agency. And of course, it isn't only the Scholastics who believe in natural causes. This is a near universal belief. But this just shows that though the heart is Christian, the mind is basically pagan. I say near universal because, as we know, other Cartesians like Codemois and Lafauge were adopting occasionalism around this time. They questioned whether there is genuine causation between bodies, between bodies in the mind and within the mind. Malebranche is the most thoroughgoing kind of occasionalist, with one exception, which I'll explain a bit later. Neither bodies nor human minds can exert any causation at all, neither on other bodies nor on other minds. His main rationale for denying causal power to bodies will be familiar to us. It's just the usual cartesian point that bodies are nothing but impenetrable and inelastic extension. It seems that such an extension would have no way of causally interacting with another extension. Extension as such has nothing to do with the concept of force, and it is force that would be needed to cause motion. Mahavanch puts the point like When I consult my reason, I clearly see that since bodies cannot move themselves, and since their motor force is but the will of God, they cannot communicate a power they do not have and could not communicate even if it were in their possession. Here it's worth asking whether this conclusion is really inevitable. Once you accept Descartes physics, it may seem so, given that Cour de moi, La Forge and Malebranche all came to the same conclusion. Could this many Cartesians be wrong? One man who thought so was Bernard Le Bovier de Fontenelle. He thought that divine causation had first been introduced to fill an explanatory gap in Cartesian physics, and that Matavranche had unjustifiably extrapolated from this to full blown occasionalism. Occasional causes, wrote Fontenelle, were weak at their birth, invented to meet an urgent need. But little by little, the convenience found in them made, made them be carried infinitely farther than the first necessity demanded. Seeking to block Malebranche's train of thought from leaving at the first station, Fontenelle argued that in fact, Cartesian physics implies that there has to be causal interaction between bodies. Suppose, he said, that two bodies are moving towards each other and meet. Since they are impenetrable and cannot be in the same place at the same time, they are going to have to bounce off one another. This is implied simply by the nature of body. Admittedly, there's no necessity that they will bounce off in a certain direction with a certain speed. God might be needed to decide that, but some deflection will need to occur which shows that bodies are not in fact causally inert. This line of objection did not trouble Malebranche. He simply responded that when the collision occurs, anything can happen. Next, it is up to God. The fact that bodies deflect in predictable ways is, as we saw last time, simply God's application of his general laws to this particular case. Here, another of Malebranche's opponents was ready to pounce. This was Arnaud, who thought he found an inconsistency in Malebranche's theory. On the one hand, he declared that God makes no particular volitions and only follows general laws laid down from the beginning of the universe. On the other hand, here's Malebranche's God busily having to intervene to make every particular motion happen in the right way. While this seems like a telling criticism, Anod was really just misunderstanding what Malebranche meant by speaking of God's general volitions. He did not want to say that God made a single volition in order to dictate the laws of nature that would henceforth govern the universe, and never has to make another volition unless he wants to perform a miracle. Rather, the idea is that God does exercise his will constantly to produce each particular event and even to ensure that the universe keeps existing. It's just that these acts of will are in conformity with the general rules he has prescribed for himself. So much for the supposed causal relations between bodies and other bodies. What about the relation between minds and bodies? It may seem undeniable that you can say, use your mind to lift your arm. We might even say that here we do perceive or feel the sort of link that was missing in the case of bodies affecting other bodies. After all, there seems to be an immediate perception that the decision to move your arm makes the arm move. Yet Malevranch denies this, and given the apparent absurdity of his conclusion, his argument is surprisingly convincing. He reminds us of just what it takes to make an arm move. In the terms of Cartesian physiology, spirits need to move through the nerves, causing intricate further motions in the tendons and muscles. Even medical specialists of the time had only a vague idea of what was involved, and most people are even more clueless about it. But how can you be causing your arm to move if you lack any notion of the mechanism involved? Furthermore, even if you did have a comprehensive scientific understanding of the anatomy, you couldn't deliberately move each bit of spirit, tendon and muscle. But it's precisely these tiny motions that come together to cause the larger motion of the arm. From this we can draw a more general A true cause needs to know how to produce its effect. This is another reason that bodies can't be causes. They have no knowledge at all. The human mind would be a better candidate, since it is at least capable of knowledge. But as we just saw, human minds don't really know how to produce physical effects. It's more like the relationship between me and my microwave. I can't explain how the thing works. I just press a button and it does the rest. Except that in the case of the mind affecting the body, it's even worse because there's no button. You just will to move the arm. And then, as if by magic, it moves, but it isn't magic. It's God. This argument from lack of knowledge, by the way, is one of the strongest parallels between Malebranche's occasionalism and the occasionalism of the medieval Islamic world. Muslim theologians gave the example of writing. If you had full control over the act of writing as a proper cause should, then you should be able to write your name and then immediately afterwards write it again in exactly the same way, without even the tiniest difference between the two signatures. But of course you can't do that. You can only produce another bit of writing that looks very similar. So by the same reasoning used later by Malebranche, it must be God who is the true cause. This gets us towards an answer to a question that may have been at least at the back of your own. What's so special about God that He is able to be a genuine cause when bodies and minds cannot? It can't just be that he's more than a body, more. More than mere extension. Because that is true of human minds too. And according to Matt Branch, our minds are no more causes than bodies are. The difference is that God is infinite in both knowledge and power. This means he has what it takes to bring about any effect he desires. Unlike you, he can knowingly move each tiny corpuscle in your nervous system and your muscles in just the right way to bring about the motion of your arm. And you can bet that if he wanted to sign his name twice in exactly the same way, he'd have no trouble doing so. It seems to me that this is the whole point of Malebranche's occasionalism. He wants us to recognize God's majesty as the true cause of all things, so that we will accept him as our true and unchallenged sovereign. This motivation usually remains tacit, though in Malebranche's dialogues on metaphysics, we do find the following. By ourselves, we can do nothing. Hence, by ourselves, we should not will anything. We can act only through the efficacy of divine power. Hence we should will nothing other than what agrees with divine law. Nonetheless, Mahbranch is not forbidding us to refer to created things as causes, at least not in everyday life. If someone says, hey, how did my favorite dish get broken? You don't have to say, actually God did it, and if you did, it would be unlikely to get you off the hook. Similarly, if anatomists are asked what makes the arm move, they they shouldn't just say divine power, but should give an explanation about spirits, tendons and muscles. For most purposes, it's entirely reasonable to invoke occasional causes as if they were real causes. It would, says Malebranche, be ridiculous to say that it is God who dries the roads or who freezes the water of rivers. Still, we should realize that this pragmatic talk of finite causes masks the true infinite cause that is God. Now let's move to a question that would be at the front of your mind if you were a contemporary of Male if God causes everything to happen, isn't he also the cause of our sinful actions? This is an obvious problem, as we can see from that story about La Forge immediately being confronted with the worry by a fellow student when he revealed his own occasionless sympathies. Malebranches answer at first looks, yes, God moves us even when our emotions defy his will. But here we come to the exception to his occasionalism that I mentioned. Though my mind cannot cause my arm to rise, it can cause a volition or intention to raise my arm. As plenty of other philosophers had argued in earlier times, for instance, the Stoic Epictetus and the medieval thinker Peter Abelard, moral responsibility has to do with acts of will, not the physical acts that flow, or seem to flow from those acts of will. For it is the act of will that is truly under my power, not the physical motion that may or may not result from the act of will. With this, Malebranche may seem to grant to humans a small but crucial bit of genuine causal agency. But he offers a theory of the will that makes it as inactive as possible, so to speak. This theory presupposes that the will's function is to choose between alternative possible goods. He might, for instance, be torn between pursuing wealth and pursuing honor, or just between chocolate croissants and almond croissants. But for Malebranche, no worldly good is the correct object of our will, which is absolute and general goodness, namely, God himself. By nature, we have an inclination to pursue this perfect good. Sadly, we are all too easily deflected towards imperfect goods in the created world, like wealth, honor, and, of course, common croissants. We are free or possess liberty in the sense that we can direct our will towards the different goods at first. In his treatise Search for Truth, Malebranche argued that this means steering our inclinations towards one or another goal. We could think of this as a kind of purposeful focus on that goal. But as Malebranche thinks through the full implications of his own occasionalism, he comes around to a different view. He starts to argue that willing is not really a positive action, not even focusing of the attention. Rather, we allow ourselves to be pulled towards one apparently good object simply by declining to pursue any other object. When we opt for worldly goods, we are just passively letting them draw us away from the higher good, that is God. But the reverse is also true. When we choose God, we are passively allowing him to draw us away from lower worldly goods and merely refusing one or another good is, as Malebranche says, nothing real or positive on our part. This is characteristically clever on Malevranch's part, and no less clever for being a reworking of and correction of an idea found in Scholasticism. Thinkers like Suarez had suggested that when humans choose between two possible goods, they passively decline to pursue one and actively choose to pursue the other. Against this, some scholastics held that rejecting and accepting a possible good would both be active. The Matavanche takes the opposite view, suggesting that both the negative refusal and the affirmative pursuit are in fact passive. I'm not sure this is fully convincing, though it may seem a bit more persuasive if we remind ourselves of another idea from the Scholastic Aristotelians that the target of our desire is itself a kind of cause, namely, a final cause. If we think of how almond croissants entice us to eat them by being so darn delicious, we might agree with Malebranche that choosing to eat one is passive. It's letting oneself fall under its sweet, sugary sway. Now, final causation isn't counted as real causation by Cartesians like Malebranche. So for him, there's no danger that the seduction offered by amen, croissants or other goods undermines God's sole and supreme claim to effective causality. And crucially, because the will does have liberty as to which goods it passively accepts and which goods it passively rejects, it counts as free and morally responsible. To deny such freedom, Malebranche says, would make God unjust and cruel in punishing us. That's a reminder that the deep religious sentiment motivating Malebranche's occasionalism is Catholic piety, not Calvinist piety. You may have one last objection in mind. Even if my body can't move another body, even if my mind can't move my body, even if I can't actively form so much as an intention to eat an almond croissant, surely I can at least actively cause ideas in my mind by thinking about them. After all, we're all good Cartesians here, and Descartes made thinking the distinctive, essential activity of the human mind or soul. So we might suppose that thinking involves genuine, active causation within the mental realm. We might say that the mind causes itself to think, or that one idea causes another idea, or that the will causes ideas to arise. But however we think about thinking, this would give us a significant exception to Malebranche's occasionalist picture. Malebranche would, however, take exception to that proposal. For him, minds are no less impotent than bodies because they need God to have knowledge. How so? We'll find out soon, because I'm going to devote a whole episode to the debate between Arnault and Malebranche on the nature and origin of ideas in the mind. But first, I have an even better idea. Let's talk to Steven Nadler, a leading specialist on malevanche and occasionalism, who will join us next time here on the history of philosophy. Without any guess.