Ep. 285: Nicolas Malebranche on Knowledge (Part One)

0:09 Mark: Life, a podcast by some guys who at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 285 is what can we know? And we read Nicolas Malebranche's Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, Dialogues 1 through 4 from 1688. For more information, a link to the text, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer broadcasting from my invisible room in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:33 Seth: This is Seth Paskin with all of the sufficient and necessary extension needed in Austin, Texas.

0:40 Wes: It's hilarious you said that. This is Wes Alwan, not a modification of extension in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:49 Seth: I sense a theme.

0:50 Wes: I am a mental being.

0:53 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey groping about in the dark for the switch of universal reason in order to find the table

1:00 Wes: of my nourishment in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:04 Mark: So a long anticipated episode just because it was a name, a B lister that we joked about. But you know, he's, I don't know, a Leibniz quality intellect. Pretty close. He's the forerunner of Leibniz.

1:17 Wes: Leibniz quality.

1:19 Mark: I didn't have in mind his mathematical achievements, but in terms of the philosophy,

1:23 Seth: there's about seven people in the history of the world that are Leibniz quality.

1:27 Wes: Well, are you thinking, yeah, what is Leibniz quality, Bean? Was that your way of saying he's a second rater of some sort?

1:34 Dylan: Or he was trying to elevate him to his first rater?

1:36 Mark: This is a great example of a rationalist epistemology. We have not had a straight up what can we know as the question in a long time. And just like we skipped John Locke the first time and then came back to him last year for an extended treatment. We are now, after we had returned to Descartes a couple years ago now to do him in more detail, you know, that sort of opened the door. We should do Malebranche. He was a student of Descartes. I didn't realize that he was before Leibniz, that he was before Hume and that he was before Berkeley, I guess

2:07 Wes: around the same time as Locke.

2:09 Mark: Okay, yeah, so. And a big influence on those other folks. And even though we're only going to do two episodes on this text, not five, Malebranche has some long things. We chose this selection, Hackett selection of Leibniz readings. And it had some of his search after truth, that is maybe his most famous thing. 1674. So this is about 13, 14 years later. So this is a refinement and it's written in dialogue form and according to the editor of this book, Stephen Nadler, is just much better written in general. So this seems like a painless way by comparison to Search After Truth, which is more of a tome, from what I understand, that we would get a good picture here. And I don't know, it's funny that we're doing this right after Twain, you know, another dialogue.

2:57 Wes: I found this really enlightening in a lot of different ways because of the whole history of early modern philosophy and German idealism that comes after it, which is really preoccupied in different ways with some of the same points. So, for instance, when Kant says, yeah, we're not going to do rational intuition, I don't know if I could have spelled out exactly what he meant by rational intuition right when he wants to say space and time, you know, our intuitions that we supply that come from our own minds. And the, you know, how do you spell out the alternative in terms of rational intuition?

Well, Malebranche does that here. When we intuit extension spatiality, we're dipping into the mind of God via rational intuition. So you get a point of view here which later philosophers reject, and you get other points of view. Similarly, you know, there's a counterpoint to Locke, the idea that generality can't come from just assembling different particular ideas together. He's going to say, why, by associating generality with infinity. What I think fleshes out my understanding of early modern philosophy and then even later, idealist reaction to it.

4:06 Dylan: I enjoyed it a lot more than I expected to. If you listened to the Nightcap recently, you would expect that I didn't expect to enjoy it at all. So for me, similar to Wes is it clarified some of the things that came later. But also I got a little bit better idea about how one would make the mind body dualism argument sort of double down on that. I mean, Descartes is famous for formulating it, but in all honesty and practicality, I guess I never really engaged the Descartes that really focused on that part. And so hearing Malebranche really make that sort of a central focus of his work, and especially the beginning of it getting to ideas being the thing that we're connected to and not connected to the world, it was enlightening.

5:01 Wes: One theme here is that the intelligible world, the world of ideas, is something to which we have more immediate access. It's more real. And this is what will later what we will call the a priori realm. And it is the realm of necessary connection, the kinds of things that grounds Mathematics grounds, the sciences. There's one other important connection that comes up that becomes a later preoccupation. In fact, it kind of reaches a climactic moment and Hume and. Right. Knocks Kant out of his dogmatic slumber. This idea that causality is not something that can come in through the senses.

Right. But also just the idea in general that generality, universality cannot come in through the senses. And so how does that work? And again, for Malebranche, we are somehow connected to this intelligible realm which is kind of identical to God, but we have this direct, unmediated access to this intelligible realm. Whereas for other philosophers, they're just going to say, well, it actually just comes from our minds. So that is what stands out most to me in this. This idea of. He wants to convince us that an intelligible realm is actually less problematic than the material external world.

There's some camaraderie with Berkeley and all that too. The material world is more problematic than the intelligible world.

6:20 Dylan: Just as a last opening thought, you reminded me, Wes, of the way in which it came across to me as an alternative of the same kind of problem that Plato's trying to solve with the forms that you're. Rather than start with material things and look to see how the way we think of them are shadows of the perfect versions of them, we just jump right to everything and everything that we perceive is somehow less real than the things that we think and we have immediate access to our ideas.

6:56 Seth: Yeah, but this doesn't have the. Although I read in the Stanford Encyclopedia that he did go that direction on like Rules for the direction of the mind and discourse on method. Kind of like he followed in Descartes path there. It doesn't read like a traditional skeptical epistemological thing. He's not trying to solve the skeptical problem or anything like that. Which is actually the refreshing part about it is that he's not talking about. We could be mistaken here or there. He's got some, you know, very interesting observations about why the intelligible world is quote unquote truth, whereas the sensory world is not. But he's not playing around with notions of your epistemic grasp of the sensible. And he's not trying to ground or anything like that.

7:39 Wes: I thought he was right. I thought he did the Cartesian doubt. These guys aren't skeptics. They use skepticism as a reductio ad absurdum. Right. Descartes was anti skeptical, he's anti skeptical. But they bring up the skeptical arguments in order to get us where we want to go.

7:55 Seth: I'm just saying that's not the flavor of this dialogue.

7:58 Wes: Yeah. He brings up, for instance, the idea that, you know, like a brain in the vat thing, God could be controlling your brain fibers such that you have experiences of things that aren't really out there in the external world. Same sort of, you know, very Cartesian stuff.

8:11 Seth: Sure. I'm talking about style, not about substance. Because it's a discourse, because it's a teacher, student kind of dynamic, because it's the seeker after truth thing. It's not the tediousness that comes along with. But couldn't you be mistaken about your perception of the stick in the. What doesn't that tell you that? Just something. It doesn't have that kind of tone to it. He has some very, very direct and I think clear ways of articulating about how you cannot get to the general from the particular or the universal from the particular that don't require that kind of rhetorical flourish, which is what I was worried when I started reading it, that that's where we were going to come to.

8:49 Mark: The framing device is that you got these two characters, Theodore and Aristes. And Theodore is the teacher. Aristes is his jocular. He said, you know, fun loving companion. But Theodore is telling him, quit your clowning around. All your cleverness, all your saying things that please the world. This is all shallow nonsense. You gotta close your senses. All the things which you took to delight you, that you used to delight others. I'm leading you instead to an intelligible, meditative kind of state, looking inward. If you can shut all of your senses down, that would be even better.

Right. And they have a thing at the beginning should be turn the lights off. Well, no, even the dark might freak you out. Just kind of make it neutral so you can get in the state where you're really paying attention, really doing phenomenology. I mean, it is kind of like an assisted Cartesian, you know, instead of the one guy sitting down in his chair, it's like I'm going to sit you down in your chair and try to make you do this reflection and look inward. This is really the most Platonic feeling figure from the modern era. More so than Descartes, in my mind, that it ends up being very much.

You're kind of getting out of the cave. It's just that, you know, for Plato, makes it sound really hard to get out of the cave, that, you know, we're just locked in there, our ordinary experience. But for Malebranche like actually your normal perception of things. It seems actually this changes during the dialogue. I don't want to kind of spoil this arc here too much because it's not going to make sense. But the way he seems to start it. Is that why I said in my intro that I'm in my invisible room? Is that strictly speaking, the world that we walk around in is not the world that we even perceive.

It's sort of the intelligible world, right? Concepts, generalities, infinity, all these things are informing our everyday perception. And so it's like the magic from outside the cave is already there in our everyday experience. It's only as the dialogues go on that that he wants to emphasize how many snares there are. And the skeptical stuff that you were talking about. Seth really does come up by dialogue three and four, I guess, where he's talking specifically about how sense perception can mess with you. So there's sort of different parts of our experience that you can pay attention to.

He even refers to it as a confused double call that like you say something to me, Theodore, I answer, there's a voice in me from the intellect and there's a voice in me from the senses. And those are giving me different answers. And I choose the intellectual is the overall lesson.

11:18 Dylan: Yeah, it is. But there are times, especially when he gets out of this, just sort of staring googly eyed at the universal light of reason, right. And just talking about how glorious and wonderful it is, where he gets down to brass tacks in demonstrating how you think through a problem. It becomes really, really efficient, causy, very mechanistic. The way you got to think through this is that one thing's linked to another, links to another. And so the chain of reasoning aspects that comes through in rationality becomes really, really manifest. So I'll be interested to talk about that aspect of it. He clearly makes it. Well, that's how ideas work. That's how we think about the world. We think clearly about it by having this chain of reasoning that happens. But the way you have to think clearly about it to sort through something is incredibly and decisively mechanistic. Yeah.

12:09 Wes: This is the third dialogue, right. So he wants to give an explanation of resonance between two vibrating strings. And he wants to say, and we can about the details later, but you

12:19 Seth: know, are we better because that.

12:20 Wes: We're gonna do that. Yeah, we're gonna do that in scientific terms, right? In terms that all of us today would recognize as straightforwardly naturalistic and scientific. The strings vibrate, the air is transferred, the vibrations transferred. Through the air. The string wants to vibrate at a certain frequency, so there'll be interference if the frequency is wrong, blah, blah, blah. Right. You could give that sort of explanation. But what we can say, this is kind of an argument for the primary secondary quality distinction. We want explanations in extension and motion, spatiotemporal qualities in terms of matter.

What we don't want is someone to say, hey, there's sound spread out there in the world. Right? Qualia. The qualia are out there and then there's sympathy between the two types of sound. Our intuitions about how secondary qualities like sound or color, the idea that they're out there in the objects. He wants to make that sound unscientific. Right.

13:15 Mark: And it's a very. I want to even say modern sounding because I still hear very similar things out of David Chalmers, out of these dualist flavored philosophy of mind folks now. But you know, I'm sure Malebranche was not the only one voicing this. That we cannot picture it does not make sense to us how something that only has mechanistic properties, only has motion, only has extension, how that could then produce a qualia, produce an idea in our head. And so he just has to say, well, God put those things together. We can kind of use our reason, as you were saying, Dylan, to figure out when we're talking purely on the physical level.

We could do physics experiments or whatever and push one thing and make it hit another and put. And you can calculate the momentum and all the stuff that you'd want to do. But what you can't do, we can draw correlations between when I pinch you, this will hurt, but I don't know if you're more prepared. He gives that old example of like you put your hand in water and it's the same temperature water, but if your hand is already cold, it's going to feel warm. If your hand's already warm, it's going to feel cold. So there are systematic things, there are psychophysical laws, but we do not understand them.

Yeah, like it just is. God hooked them together. That's the only explanation we can give. He doesn't talk here in terms of separate spiritual substance versus physical substance. It's not exactly that Cartesian language, but clearly that's the picture that the realm of the mental is. It's the intelligible world versus the physical world. That's the distinction that he makes here.

14:48 Wes: The reason to say, well, this is kind of God correlating these things is because some philosophers of mine might want to say well, that's great. We can correlate all these different brain states, all these different subjective experiences. That's science. We know that certain brain states cause certain experiences. There are a lot of differences. You know, one of them is right. The causality we're talking about is not internal to typical physicalist explanations. Normally we're talking about something physical, publicly observable, causing something else that's physical and publicly observable.

Here we have physical brain states being correlated to subjective experiences that someone else is reporting and that we only know about because we've experienced them and can identify with them and so on and so forth. And ultimately we can't do a derivation. We could never be given a brain state or brain activity. And absent some sort of ledger of correlations that's been created, what I in my notes call God's ledger. Absent that ledger, we could never infer from certain types of brain activity, certain types of qualitative subjective experiences.

In other words, what he's saying is that this is all ad hoc, right? Thinking back to our philosophy of science episodes, all these correlations, as far as we can understand them, are just ad hoc, right? Someone says, this goes with this, this goes with this. And we don't have any other explanation of why they go together.

16:12 Seth: He could have created them otherwise, but they're that way now, and they're not ad hoc. There's a necessity to the system. But why they are the way they are. When you say ad hoc, it just makes it sound like it's kind of made up or in the moment. And it's not that it's in the moment made up. It's that whatever God decided, that's what he decided. But now it's, you know, necessity, eternal law, whatever.

16:34 Wes: The way he puts it, he calls it general law. In other words, what we might call a final law. At the end of any causal chain, as we try and explain things, we're talking about causes. But once we get to something basic, we get a very unsatisfying ledger, like causal explanation. I've talked about this before with, right? If we got to the most fundamental particle and said, okay, here are its properties, here's what it does, here's how it interacts with other particles. And someone wanted to say why? And we said, we don't know. This is the most fundamental one.

We're not going to be able to analyze it into smaller parts that explain the way it works. That's what he's talking about. You get to the most basic general law. And his argument in this is that it looks similarly. It's unsatisfyingly weird. It doesn't feel like a normal explanation where we feel like we've been able to satisfactorily derive something like in a geometrical proof or satisfyingly explain in a satisfying way the connection between two different physical things according to physical laws.

17:33 Dylan: Even in your. The way you just accounted for, you would run into that same kind of boundary in any discipline of knowledge, right? In geometry, you're going to run into it with your common notions and your axioms that inform your geometry. You gave the example for a physical law, a standard model, right? You start with particles and characteristics of them that are just given or measured as variables that just go into the theory. And where charge comes from on the first pass through, that's just a characteristic of stuff. It seems like you just run into the boundary.

It does seem like the kind of account of sense perception. I couldn't tell if it was just that we don't know as much about it. Mark seemed to be implying that that was Malebranche's case as well. We just don't know that much about how that all works. And it's just less certain than it is about, say, the account of vibrations and the physical world. It felt to me like it was qualitatively different than the account of the vibration of the strings. And because it felt qualitatively different, I didn't really understand why it was. It felt like there was a lot more uncertainty about our perceptions.

That was not just born out of lack of information.

18:45 Wes: Well, they're necessarily deceitful, right? That's the idea. The explanation in terms of the vibration of the string. That's access to the intelligible realm. We're working in the intelligible realm at that point. And that's part of the point of that example. When we talk about sound being spread out, that's when we're in the realm of deceptive perception.

19:03 Dylan: I'm fine to continue this part of the conversation when we get to the string vibration thing, but I agree that part of the. Is having mechanical causes. And what I found confusing is I thought that the account for sensory perception, it was either that it's confused and so it's not refined enough to admit of mechanical causes, or it was in a. Just a different category, which I found that to be like the way Malebranche seems to be talking about it. And that itself was confusing because it seemed to me there was no reason why you wouldn't be able to have the clarity of our sense perceptions. Along those same lines, that you have the clarity of your vibrating string, ultimately that there are mechanical physiological causes for those experiences, that you can understand how they're happening, and you would still have the problem of the abstract idea about what they mean and all that jazz.

20:02 Mark: So on the one hand, you're right that there are supposed to be qualitative differences between physical causing physical. Right. Just through motion, and then physical causing mental, because there's that conceptual leap that we just don't even understand. However, I'm also reading this through. I don't think we've explicitly said the reason we're doing two episodes here. Besides that it was just too much effort for us to figure out, like a selection for one episode, is because the thing that he is famous for, which Wes referred to at the beginning, is his theory of causation called occasionalism. We don't have to define it now. We're going to talk about it at great length next time when we actually read about it.

20:37 Wes: He refers to it several times in this, though, he straight up says, I'll prove this later, but here's what's going on.

20:42 Mark: Okay. The way that it appears in here is in the mind body distinction is that you're right. He says many times things in the body do not directly cause things to happen in the mind.

20:54 Wes: He says all of them, actually. But just in summary, towards the end, he'll say, okay, bodies don't cause minds, minds don't cause minds, and bodies don't cause bodies.

21:03 Mark: Right, okay. So this is where he's going to get with occasionalism. I think he's playing here. I think there's a rhetorical game going on to say, isn't it mysterious how something simply moving around a substance could cause an idea to jump in the mind? And you're going to say, oh, yeah, that is mysterious. And then he, in our next reading is going to say, actually, it's also pretty damn mysterious how one physical thing could cause another physical thing to move. In both cases, we need God to jump in and be the explanation for the actual causation that's going on in every single circumstance.

So this is the thing that he was anticipating, Hume, that Hume likewise said, this whole idea of one physical thing causing another thing, we're imputing like a mysterious power in the first thing, that it's somehow. And so I think he's getting that discomfort straight from Malebranche. So I was reading that, you know, what I know about occasionalism and what we're going to read Explicitly next time throughout this reading, that he's preparing the ground by, again, making something less controversially weird, prepare us for everything. But he's very fine, right at the beginning to tell us stuff like the room that you're in is, strictly speaking, not visible to you.

Like he's willing to say very counterintuitive stuff right up front.

22:18 Wes: Well, he even uses this phrase, bodies in themselves. I don't know if you remember that. Very reminiscent of the thing in itself and section 10 of the fourth dialogue. So he'll tell us, we do not see bodies in themselves. All we see is our ideas. This idea is pretty straightforward by now, right? Well, first there's Kant and then there's Locke and distinctions between secondary qualities and primary qualities. But the idea is that what we see and feel and experience, when we experience an external room, is just kind of a veil of illusion that doesn't give us access to things as they are in themselves, at least the qualia, except to the extent, right, that they are extended, that they have these certain scientific qualities to which we do have direct, unmediated access.

This is kind of reminiscent of Hegel in a way. It kind of returns to this. But we have direct access to extension as intelligible to all these necessary aspects of any given experience. But as far as the trappings, the colors, the sounds, all that stuff that's just in the mind.

23:21 Mark: But he has a different enough way of breaking things down. I mean, of course, seeing this as a step toward Kant's making the distinction between phenomena and noumena is right on. But it's interesting that for Malebranche, the phenomena, the world that we actually are in touch with, that is the intelligible world, that is the world of the forms, that is the world outside the cave. So when you say, well, we don't have access to the physical world in itself, the physical world in itself is like kind of all corrupt bullshit and is not something that he's really that interested in, except insofar as, yeah, we want to give scientific explanations about movement and things like that.

But the good stuff, the thing that he's wanting us to really pay attention to, is all going to be in our experience of things. So even the beauty of the sunset. And again, this is something that he changes from the early dialogues. He seems to be saying, you think that you're beholding the beauty of the world around you, but actually the beauty is in your mind, in a shared mental space, right? A shared Platonic form like mental space. That's where all the Good stuff is this thing that you're attributing it to the real world that's just kind of.

That's just material, you know, it's just substance, it's just extension. So it's not like this, oh, if only we could get to the things themselves, the physical world, like. Because the physical world is, as Plato,

24:43 Wes: you can't say, just extension. Because extension is in these dialogues, like the most important part of the intelligible world. Right. Intelligible extension. So, yes, extension is like beauty and its intelligible form. It gets complicated. Right, because we have particular extended things that we have access to in part by the fact that they vary in color. Right. He brings up the fact that your differences in color allow us to detect shapes, for instance. So we have particular extended objects which in their secondary qualities. Those secondary qualities are not out there, they're not in themselves.

But extension per se and other intelligible qualities are access to them, even in particular things. Yeah, that's access to something real. It just happens to be in the intelligible realm. We get manifestations of objects that. It's very Platonic objects that participate in the intelligible realm.

25:32 Dylan: This is getting down the avenue of the part that I find a bit confusing. So the way you just talked about it sounded right. That extension is the thing that we have access to in itself. It is part of the infinite. It is the correspondence to being is like being. And then particular objects in the world participate in extension. They are instances of extension, but they're all finite. So it's in that way that we get a connection between the intelligible, make it intelligible by it participating in that extension. But then there are a whole bunch of other things that these secondary qualities or whatever that don't participate in extension because they all just happen in the mind.

And the parsing out of the infinite, which is intelligible in itself on its own terms, into the particular, which is not intelligible in itself. And the breaking apart of the infinite, which we can hold on its own into the finite. It's a link between the body and mind, the real and the ideal. That seems to be kind of cherry picked. It's an attempt to bridge that connection.

26:48 Wes: What seems cherry picked?

26:50 Dylan: Extension, you. I guess you could call it being, you call it anything. He's standing from the intelligible realm. That extension is the thing we have access to. And now the means by which the things in the world are intelligible is because they participate in extension, but only in a finite manner.

27:09 Wes: Which is like saying they're intelligible to the extent that we can do science on them. It's helpful to listeners to know that Galileo is the first to push this primary secondary quality distinction. And all of this stuff arises out of the advent of modern science where people are looking at light, right? And they're thinking about particles, they're thinking about waves, and they're thinking about the fact that when we see color, it just means that our pupils are being bombarded by light of different frequencies, which is like a huge wow moment.

Yellow isn't really out there. It's actually just extension or matter moving. That's the idea. So when he's saying extension, right, he's identifying extension with matter, and he's just saying we have to explain everything in terms of matter and the motion of matter in terms of naturalistic scientific terms. And so to the extent that it's a science, it involves access to what's intelligible, which is predominantly matter and extension.

28:04 Dylan: Okay. I guess I just don't understand why that's not yellow. So yellow's extension. I mean, I don't understand what the big deal is.

28:10 Mark: He just doesn't like to use that language because yellow, to him connotes a phenomenal property, okay? Not the causal thing in the world that causes that phenomenal property. Especially because he doesn't want to say it actually causes it, that it's God jumping anyway. But putting that aside, yeah, it's even

28:25 Wes: more complicated with Malebranche because he. Just. Because of what Marcus said. So ultimately, he wants to get the point where he's not explaining our subjective experiences in terms of. Well, it is and it isn't. We'll talk about that later. Maybe.

28:38 Dylan: Maybe. My confusion is, on the one hand, it makes sense that general terms, generalities like in abstractions, aren't in the world as extension. Beauty doesn't participate of extension, and extension isn't extended. Right.

28:52 Wes: The intelligible world isn't just extension.

28:54 Mark: Can we just clarify? So he even says intelligible. Extension is sort of the Platonic form of extension, and that is the only thing that we actually have access to. Somehow, though, we infer. Maybe we haven't gotten to this. But you were saying, Wes, that we actually have direct access to extension as it exists in particulars in the world? I don't think so.

29:15 Wes: No, I didn't mean to say that. Oh, okay.

29:18 Mark: Because toward the beginning of. I'm looking at page five of this PDF version. Let us suppose Aristes that God were to annihilate Everything he has created except you and me, your body and mine. Let us suppose further that God were to impress upon our brains all the same traces they are in fact impressed, or rather that he were to present to our minds all the same ideas that we in fact have in our minds today on that supposition aristes, in which world would we spend the day? Wouldn't it be in an intelligible world? So even though, Seth, you were saying at the beginning, like, oh, he's not a skeptic.

This is right at the beginning. This looks like kind of the Cartesian evil demon thing or whatever, but just getting at a similar. We actually don't know too much about the physical world, even that it's there. Like God could make it not be there. Maybe it is not there right now. For all we know, we're going to assume that it is, but that's not the thing that we experience on a regular basis.

30:08 Seth: Yeah, let me clarify my earlier comment just so I can get it off the table. If you are, like me, the kind of person whose eyes glaze over when it comes to epistemology and traditional skepticism, and you find the assumption of the difference between mind, body mistaken, and then the attempts to bridge the world with consciousness as tedious, this will not cause problems for you. It does not have that tenor, it does not have that flavor. I was talking about the style, the tone, the feeling. That's it.

30:42 Wes: All right, we'll stop picking on you about that. But Mark, he does do a straight up brain in the vat version of Descartes, right before Putnam does it later on by talking about someone messing with your brain fibers. Basically, as long as you make the brain do the right thing, it's going to have those experiences regardless of whether there's something actually really out there corresponding to it. But then you're also talking about the problem of particulars. It's at the end of dialogue three where he says, whether or not I'm looking at intelligible extension or seeing a particular extended thing is about my mode of access.

So he says there's three ways of seeing a circle. One of them is I can conceive it, have a concept of it. You know, the eidos of circle. I can imagine it and then I can see it. I can see a circular particular thing to which I'm ascribing circularity via that concept of circularity. So the first way, which he also calls knowing, that's where I have access to the intelligible idea. And in that idea there's this variation between an infinite number of particulars, that's the connection between generality or universality and the infinite. So infinite number of different diameters fit under that concept of circle.

And then when I imagine a circle, I fix the diameter. And then when I see a circle, I get other sensory qualities. Maybe I get it in my imagination as well. But aspects like color, the way I put it in my notes, there's one intentional object in a sense, and it just is intelligible extension, which corresponds to what Kant called the intuition of space. So there's intelligible extension, quote, unquote, diversely applied to our minds. Diversely applied. Depending on the application, we might get the concept of a circle or we might see a particular circle.

This still leaves us with the problem of particulars. And we saw this with German idealists as well. It's all good to say whether you want to say it's in our mind or it's in God's mind that we have this direct access to the formal features, features of things, that the formal a priori features of things are right there for us. It doesn't tell us where the data comes from. And Berkeley, that was clear. It's like, where does this particular desk come from? God is putting it in your mind, in my mind, or the ideas associated with it. At the same time, he's coordinating everything.

He's making it nice. So we have a publicly accessible world in common. That is part of what I don't think Malebranche really, at least yet. And what I've read has not addressed that problem. So it is weird for someone to say, well, there's just intelligible extensions and then somehow particulars fall out of that.

33:19 Mark: You know, I forgot about this place where he. This is in dialogue. One still where he talks about the difference between special revelation and natural revelation. So in other words, how do we know that creatures particulars exist? Well, we have sense perception that can be wrong. I'm not sure whether he's saying it can be wrong in particular circumstances or it could be wrong all the time. But in any case, we don't need to rely only on it because we also have scripture, special revelation, which is absolutely infallible. So I think he kind of has a backdoor that I'm not going to really worry about global skepticism because the Bible talks about God created stuff. So there is stuff in the world we might be wrong about exactly how we're perceiving this particular stuff, but we absolutely can know with certainty that there is stuff out there in the world.

34:09 Seth: Yeah.

34:10 Wes: This is just his way of articulating what. What is it? The sixth meditation. Just saying God guarantees that there really is an external world out there. He's not an evil deceiver. He could do it, but. And that's the important part. Could, but doesn't.

34:22 Mark: And I'm sure there's somewhere else in Malebranche's corpus where, just like I think we even read this in Leibniz, in part of his theodicy, where he was defending, or at least that was in the same book where he's defending Scripture. So much of Malebranche's theology in here, he thinks is just basic and given by reason. I would imagine that he's going to have something similar to say about Scripture, that it's not like we have to go through some. It wouldn't be to the sixth meditation. Right. Just like in Descartes, it's to the third meditation.

34:51 Wes: It's probably like more the third or the fourth.

34:54 Mark: The third meditation, we establish God, whereas Malebranche's argument. For God is. If you can think about God at all. I think we had something similar in Spinoza. It was this simple. Then you know that God exists. The fact that you have that idea in your head, it's just a. It's a form of the ontological argument that the idea of the infinite is something that we couldn't have come up with. Therefore there has to be an infinity that we are getting it from. It is that simple.

35:20 Wes: Yeah.

35:21 Mark: I don't know if that we've hammered up. Maybe we should read some quotes or whatever about this basic first dialogue. And we said meditation, first dialogue, us living in the intelligible world thing. And what that actually means.

35:34 Wes: It's really around section five that he gets into that. He kind of gives an argument for dualism by saying extension is necessary and sufficient for the composition of material things, but it's not necessarily to the composition of mental states. He's going to wait till later in the dialogue to address a counter argument that it might be sufficient. So extension is a substance. It's something different than the mind. The mind is another sort of substance. And then you might think, well, isn't the external world the thing that we're most sure about at some point?

Is it aristes? Is that how you pronounce it says something to the effect that I feel when I press against the floor. I kick a rock and I feel it. I press against the floor and I feel it. My sensory perceptions are my surest Access to the world. In a sense, it's at 5 where he starts to say, actually it's easier to demonstrate the reality of ideas, just the same way that Descartes says it's easier to demonstrate the reality of ourselves, of our own minds, than the external world, because we have direct access to them, whereas we have mediated access to the external world, which we've gone over.

I think at this point he mentions the whole brain fiber example. The existence of the external world is not necessary to the existence of the ideas that we have about it. And the properties that we see in the external world are not really in it, they're just in our minds. By the time he's getting to seven. That doesn't mean that there's not a mind independent reality. We need that. And that's where we start to get into this kind of intelligible Platonic world, which is mind independent in the sense of independent of our particular minds. It's the mind, like, right, it's the mind of God, or it's intelligible, or whatever you want to say about it.

But it's not just that. When I stop looking at something, it vanishes. He brings up that direct example. So this intelligible world is our external world, in a sense. It becomes that from Malebranche.

37:23 Mark: Yeah. And it has transcendent qualities that he ends up worrying quite a lot about. Yes, we know just by thinking about, as I was saying that you were saying that it is Platonic, that any of our ideas, not just like the ideal form of dog or the ideal form of the number one, but even a momentary idea that I have about this particular yellow on this particular object. That idea exists as an eternal entity. And he has arguments for that. That we could stop thinking about it and then we could, like, what shade of yellow does that have? Again, you could recall it to mind.

And somehow these are all supposed to show that it's not just that our mind invents it, it is not recollection either. Exactly. It's capturing it from this shared mind of God, external intelligible world. And there are things in that intelligible world, specifically God. This whole intelligent world is kind of God's body. And so there's all this worry in dialogue four of like, so are we really, in getting hold of the intelligible world, are we perceiving God? Well, in a sense we are. We're perceiving sort of the God stuff, but we're only perceiving God as the side that he shows to us.

Basically, the forms of ideas that then enable us to make sense of what we take to be the physical world. Like it's kind of, you know, has this Platonic structure of form versus thing. But we never. God himself is a transcendent being within that. So that we can know immediately, because we're perceiving the God stuff, that God exists, but we can't know God in his simplicity, in his ultimate perfection, God in his own internal nature. So that's interesting that there's a transcendent thing in the intelligible world. You know, it's not just that in the physical world, there's stuff that transcends our experience of it.

Intelligible world as well.

39:08 Wes: Someone might want to say, well, if you're saying God kind of is intelligible extension plus a bunch of other things, right? A bunch of other intelligible things, including its perfections. Are you saying that when I look at a particular table, I'm seeing God? And the response to that is no, not in the particular, but only in its formal aspects. Only to the extent there is something necessary and intelligible. So whatever is intelligible in that table, it's maybe it's rectangularity and maybe even more abstract than that. To the extent that I'm in touch with the infinite, anytime I'm in touch with generality with what is necessary, with what is universal, I am in some sense connected to the infinite.

And that means I have to be connected to God. Again, the infinity part there is just that. To understand it as rectangular is to understand it as something that could never come about by induction from a bunch of particulars. It has to be that there are an infinite number of particulars that fall under that generality, that general idea. And I can never build up that general idea by simply multiplying particular after particular. We could talk about that specific argument later on. So we kind of see God in the interstices. I don't even know how to pronounce that word.

We see God in the structure. We see God in the joints of things, not in their materiality.

40:24 Mark: Interstices, Interstices. That's not.

40:28 Wes: It's definitely not that. One of those words you read a lot, but you never use or pronounce

40:35 Mark: any other sort of broad themes to elaborate. Living in the intelligible world. And this before, you know, we're going to wrap up part one pretty soon.

40:43 Dylan: I've been just listening to particularly you two go back and forth. It's just accentuating my confusion about what experience is for Malebranche, because he seems to powerfully come from the point of view that the very intelligibility of experience at all is coming from the infinite towards the finite. Our experience itself is coming from that direction. So, and that is how I know anything insofar as it connects with the infinite. And so then parsing out how the particulars of the world come in to my experience then just becomes a problem. It's almost like a version of the Parmenidean problem.

Everything's a one and all of the particulars are somehow not real. And it becomes confusing and unclear about if it's all a one, how you then have an account of the particulars that inform the world. Because in some ways they don't inform the world. Right? It's only the generalities by which you inform the world. So to me it raises the whole problem of, well, what the hell do you mean by experience from this point of view, this rationalist, I'm going to stand at infinity and understand the particulars of experience.

42:00 Wes: Where does the data come from?

42:02 Dylan: And is there such a thing as data that inform the knowledge that you have? And this gets to the mind body connection and what kind of connection it is and how it's informing or getting informed. And that's probably for the next section. But I was confused about that when I was reading Malebranche because the way we've been talking about in particularly Wes and Mark have been articulating this rationalist account in Malebranche sounds right to the Malabranche that I read. I'm just way more confused about what the heck experience could possibly be. And it might just be that experience is completely degraded for Malebranche. He certainly talks about that in his flowery language.

42:42 Mark: This is that thing that I keep referring to is between what I'm seeing in the early dialogues and the later dialogues within our thing that it does sound like in the early dialogues, our entire experience is of the intelligible world. And so it's like we're already out of Plato's cave, we're already running around. But then how is that intelligible? And so by dialogue four, then he's clarifying. Well, no, actually, insofar as we can figure out, maybe God actually annihilated the world seven days ago and we're running on autopilot or there's never been a world.

But at least if you read the Bible that says there really is a world, then the things that are caused by bouncing particles hitting our sense organs, giving rise to ideas in us, it comes from such a mishmash of different purposes that it ends up being confusing to us. Right? He really sounds very modern when he talks about, like, the evolutionary advantage, like, why do we feel pain? It's because our body wants us to pull your hand away from the hot stove. It's that kind of stuff. It's strictly speaking, not giving us information. It's trying to get us to do something.

It's just that when we take that as information and then we try to sort of make sense of it, and maybe we would even proclaim the world is suffering. Because, like, you know, I keep feeling pain from all this stuff, so I impute this into some sort of worldview. And maybe I say, yo, if you're saying that all I am really experiencing is the intelligible world, well, the intelligible world is suffering. It could be Schopenhauer, I could say the whole intelligible world is this chaotic mass of bullshit. And Malebranche wants nothing to do with that.

So he has to have some sort of dividing line between, okay, I know I said earlier that everything is outside the Plato's cave and you're experiencing everything so wonderful and pure and intelligible. But really you got to separate those voices, the voice of reason, from the voice of the senses. And even though they both give you ideas and ideas are in the intelligible world, the ones from the senses are just de. Emphasize those, put them into perspective, try to understand why you're feeling that way. Don't read too much into them.

44:48 Wes: I think he thinks there are two types of ideas, though they're not all in the intelligible world. So we have ideas corresponding to sensations. He warns us against the fact that sensory ideas are not corresponding to anything real. But what he is going to say is that for all intents and purposes, our naturalistic explanation of the world is well and good. We have bodies, we have brains, There are objects out there, light bounces off them into our eyes. We have particular experiences because of that. It's just that the because part and all the intelligible aspects of that picture which confer intelligibility are going to get grounded in a interesting ontology, right?

So he wants to say causality doesn't work unless I can make this appeal to God. And similarly, with every other, you know, extension, every other intelligible aspect of our understanding and knowledge of the world. This is what becomes the a priori. This is what becomes concepts, categories, space, time. These are all the special formal things to which supposedly, if we can have a science, we have a different access to those sorts of things than we do to data, to contingency.

46:01 Mark: My only quibble with that is I think maybe light ends up being a phenomenal quality like color. I don't think that light is allowed to be in substance. Maybe there's some corpuscular thing.

46:13 Wes: That word means two different things. Yeah.

46:15 Mark: Okay, so there's a corpuscular light.

46:16 Wes: Yeah.

46:17 Mark: That is just like every other substance, merely extension either sitting there, taking up space or moving around very rapidly. So light has to be that if we're doing physics and then there's the light that we actually perceive.

46:29 Wes: A physicalist theory of light is what starts all of this off. And atomism via Lucretius. Atomism and thinking of light as particles hitting the eyes. That is like the beginning of what we know of as modern philosophy and all of its epistemological concerns.

46:46 Mark: All right, well, in part two of this discussion we will get into more quotes and I'm sure we'll reveal a few more aspects of this that we have overlooked in this part, which is going to be the next thing in your feed, unless you're paying for your support through Apple, in which case you'll see it next week.