Ep. 286: Malebranche on Causality and Theology (Part One)

0:07 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by. Some guys were at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 286 is something like, what is causality? And we read Nicolas Malebranche's Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, Dialogues 5 through 7, plus selections from 8, 9, 10, and 12 from 1688. For more information, please visit partiallyexaminedlife.com this is Mark Linsenmayer, Madison, Wisconsin. And I lost the power over the part of my brain by which every change in the world is invariably followed by some new thought.

0:39 Seth: Oh, this is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas. Oddly, only occasionally, but always directed by God to follow his will.

0:50 Wes: This is Wes Alwan, very much enjoying the laws of the union of soul and body in Cambridge, Massachuset.

0:58 Dylan: And this is Dylan Casey, occasionally colliding with the bookcase and getting a bruise in Madison, Wisconsin.

1:06 Mark: All right, we are continuing more or less from last time. Wes was wondering if we actually got all the way to the end of dialogue four last time. I think we at least talked about all the themes from those first four dialogues last time. And there were things that we were confused about, about how the epistemology worked that I think we should be able to sort out this time. So maybe we should start off just kind of reviewing our new understanding based on what happened last time and the first couple dialogues here of what his rationalist epistemology amounts to. Do you guys remember what the issues we had? I remember we were kind of wondering.

1:39 Seth: No, man, we've been through the holidays. It's like. That's like a lifetime ago.

1:42 Mark: Well, I remember we were wondering about how physical objects, how substance out in the world actually affects us. Because on the one hand, it seems like it's bumping into us all the time, it's giving us these ideas. But on the other hand, well, we're not totally sure that's even there. And really everything that we know with any kind of certainty, with any kind of clarity comes from the understanding, comes from this intelligible world of ideas, more or less straight from God's mind. And so how those two things fit together was the issue.

2:14 Dylan: The first part of that, about the causality. I guess the thing I was getting out of this was you maintain all the laws, right? It's just that the laws that we have that are regular in the world aren't inherent in the world. They are instituted and activated by God. And so we relieve ourselves. But all that law, like behavior is still There it's just made to appear law, like in that particular way. So you could do experiments, I expect to get what those laws were, but those laws would not be powers of the world.

2:48 Wes: You know, this is what he gets at in the force dialogue in Section nine, right. He asks us to think about that eye pressure trick where you can induce a qualia, you can induce the experience of light without there actually being light out there causing it. And that's because there are what he calls these, you know, laws of the union and the soul and body, which is a. I think in this reading for today, he calls it the general laws of the union of soul and body, which I just gave an acronym to called glusab because I don't want to keep writing in my notes.

So that's the acronym. It's like GLUSAB this glue SAB that. It's almost like I'm talking about some alien creature. And then I'm starting to get confused. Is he really. Is God really necessary here or should I just talk about the Almighty Glusab? But anyway, the laws of the union of the soul and body, these are laws that God basically adheres to, even if it leads to deception, as in the case of dreaming or madness or pressing your eyeball and seeing light, or when it doesn't really exist. There are certain correlations between qualia and these physical brain states.

That relationship is kind of fundamental and brute. Right. You can create a ledger of correlations between brain states and mental states, but that's not a straightforward quote unquote causal relationship, which is something that's very important to Malebranche. Right. We might want to speak of causes between bodies, which turns out, strictly speaking we can. But at the very least we know that a mental state and a physical state, these are two radically different things. And we can't derive the mental state from the physical state. So what we get is a kind of ledger united by these laws of union that God has basically rigged.

4:28 Dylan: The ones you're talking about specifically are mind body relations. So you sort of have laws by fiat that are the relationship between mind and body and how we perceive things and stuff like that. But the same thing would hold true for the relations of bodies and bodies, that those laws of collision and stuff like that, those laws would be the same kind of laws. They would have law like relations that could in fact be determined, but they are not causal. The ball hitting the other ball isn't the cause of the other ball's motion.

5:07 Wes: Yeah. So that's what he gets into. For Today's reading. And he does mention that in the fourth dialogue. So it says, you know, say, yep, just like there's no causal relation between mind and body, there's no real causal relation between body and body. I'll show you that later. Yep, that's what we're going to be talking about today. How does he show us that there's no actual causal relationship between body and body?

5:28 Mark: So the epistemological point that I was fishing for is that our sensations just kind of get our attention in order to then evaluate the way in which Glusab is. I'm gonna start trying to use that too. It's being instantiated in any given case. In other words, is this particular perception veridical or not? Then we have to completely use reason. Even when I'm looking at a book in front of me and my senses are telling me the book is there, well, my senses are really just giving me a ping, something's going on. And I have to then use the ideas that I already have of extension of substance and reflect on those about the intelligible relationships.

Let's see if this is where this falls off the track, intelligible relationships between the various things. So if I'm going to confirm, I'm going to try to reach out and touch the book, I'm going to heft it around, I'm going to do whatever scientific tests that I want to do to make sure that what I thought was just an immediate perception. I'm just aware without any doubt of the books being there. But no, it's really just because I've gotten some news and I need to use my reason to confirm it.

6:38 Wes: The beginning of the fifth dialogue is actually really informative with respect to what you're talking about, Mark, because it's going to tell us about schematization. It's going to tell us how a particular geometric figure that we've imagined or we've drawn in the sand or on paper could stand in for something general. Seems like if we were doing a proof for a, say, the Pythagorean theorem for a particular right triangle, we're not really doing that for all right triangles. And hey, anyway, the thing we've drawn on paper isn't exact and isn't really a triangle because we could never get that perfect.

But somehow, even though what we're doing is on paper and in the sensory world, it's somehow also not in the sensory world. What we're doing really is just about the intelligible realm. So some of this example of triangles applies generally epistemologically. Right. All of the formal elements of our experience and the law, like generalities and all of that stuff belongs in that God grounded domain, accessible through reason and our particular sensations. Mark you use the word remind. They sort of stimulate that formal component. Right. So for Kant, the mind would jump on that and apply its categories.

Right. By contrast from Malebranche, where we're talking about all this stuff being outside of us in God, let's say, or in some fundamental ontology, it's aroused by, or we're reminded by the sensations. It sounds very Platonic, but we're in the intelligible realm when we're doing anything that involves knowledge per se. Do you see the connection to the triangle thing with a square at the beginning?

8:20 Mark: Yes. And I'm wondering whether we should. The gravity seems to be that we should just get right into the fifth dialogue. The punchline, the occasionalism stuff is not going to come in detail until the seventh dialogue. So I want to make sure that we at least get that far to outline what that is by the end of part one. But I guess we are right at the beginning now, so I don't mind, just given that this is the second time we're dealing with this text. Just getting right into the text and let's deal with geometry in as full a way as we're going to. Unless you have some objections, Seth.

8:49 Seth: I don't have any objections. I just have no desire. This was like easily the worst part of the reading from my perspective, that the geometric stuff, well, we could be quick about it.

9:00 Mark: I mean, I think that the story

9:01 Seth: was just be so quick as to skip it.

9:04 Wes: I can give a very quick summary if you guys want me to go ahead. So the idea is that when we have knowledge of things, we're in the realm of ideas. It's not that we get them from sensations which are necessarily confused. So it's not like we get a bunch of sensory stimuli and then we extract the generalities from them. We extract the formal information from them and have knowledge of that. Rather, we're directly in touch with this kind of formal realm all by ourselves. Suppose we want to prove that A plus B squared equals A squared plus B squared plus two ab.

Right. We all know that that algebraic equation. If we do that in geometric terms, it looks like we get the truth of that from our senses. Right? Because all we have to do is draw the square and say where the lines are divided and label the lines. And then we can look at a bunch of we can say, look at the big square. Here's the two little squares inside it, and here's the two identical rectangles. And you just say, it's apparent to use this phrase that I forget who uses it. It's probably every stays, it's apparent to the eye, quote unquote. So in a way, it seems like reason is the thing that leaves us in darkness.

And we can see that when we try to do the same thing with numbers, when we just do it as a number thing, it's far more abstract and far less intuitive. So the idea here is that geometric demonstrations are grounded in spatial intuition and ultimately grounded in the senses. And then the move in the second section away from that is to say that actually it's not that we're getting this information out of the senses, it's that we get it from reason, quote unquote, joined to the senses. So there's a clear idea of extension. And it gets joined to our perception, our confused sensation, say, of a colored rectangle on the paper.

And so when we reason, when we do the geometrical proofs, it's not that we're reasoning about the particular colorful triangle on the paper, sorry, square, we're reasoning about that abstract square, even though we're doing it via the particular sensation of the particular triangle. So where do we get the truth of A +B squared equals A squared plus B squared plus 2 AB. Where does that come from? Not from the senses, but from that reasonable realm of extension, even if we get at it by using our senses?

11:32 Mark: Well, what was a little confusing about this whole example for me is I thought, clearly when you're using paper and drawing squares on paper and things to alert yourself, you're basically engaging in an imaginative act, right? If you were smart enough, you wouldn't even have to write it on paper. You could just kind of draw it in your mind on the Etch A Sketch in your mind. If you're one of those people that could track, like, chess moves in your mind rather than drawing a diagram or something, whether it's memorized or externalized shouldn't make a lot of difference, because the point is that you are representing in whatever way in your imagination, basically these pure geometrical figures, right? They are not the kind of thing you ever could perceive in the real world.

12:16 Wes: Later on, he's going to say it's not even imagination. So the figure in the imagination is also imperfect.

12:22 Mark: I saw this entire thing as being about imagination and not even really about the senses anymore anymore. So, I mean, that's all Fine. It's two different stages of the argument.

12:30 Wes: He's going to make a point of saying, hey, if you thought the square could be in your imagination, that doesn't work either. It's the same thing as the sensory square. They're both imperfect and the real square is in that abstract realm.

12:43 Dylan: I didn't really disagree exactly when I was reading it about that idea that, well, your senses are at some level a utility here, a instrument of your imagination kind of thing. Just didn't feel like it was that big of a deal. Like the observation is. Like it felt like a strawman, right? That you would ever have thought when you went through proving the Pythagorean theorem, that you were operating with actual triangles, that you weren't sort of doing something that was abstract from the beginning. You have to have been doing that. You can't get to the Pythagorean theorem unless you do that. You can't engage in the act of doing geometry at all unless you do that. And maybe he's underlining that and articulating that.

13:30 Wes: But what's the big deal? I mean, this is Plato, right? This is as old as Plato. This is not new. Plato does all of this. But the big deal is that. So this is the question of whether geometrical knowledge is in some sense a posteriori or a priori, whether it can be acquired through the senses, or whether we must have innate ideas already of this stuff or a rational intuition to that intelligible godly realm, you know, some sort of faculty to do that. So what's really interesting here is that just that we can do this. Kant calls schematization, right?

This is a very big deal epistemologically, schematization, the possibility of it. It's a very puzzling thing when you think about it. And the fact that a sensible particular can somehow stand in for a concept or an abstraction, and that my operations on that particular could tell me something about the general concept or the abstraction, when the abstraction, many, many, many different particulars fall under it, right? So I choose a particular right triangle when I draw it in the sand. But it could be a million different right triangles. How do I know that the things I'm doing to this one apply to all of them, all those questions.

And ultimately the larger issue is whether the formal elements of our experience, whether structure, causality, unity, all the elements of Aristotle's table of categories, or Kant's variation on that, or even Hegel's in a way, whether all that stuff can actually come in through the senses, or whether it already has to be in the mind, or the Malebranchian alternative, whether it has to be in a noumenal realm to which we have access through intellectual intuition. So you have these two parallel things going on at once. So the idea, he says, tells us about the nature of things, their properties, their relations to one another, and we just have direct access to those ideas through reason.

And then on this other plane we have sensations, and all sensations tell us about our existence, difference, and then practical advantages, relation they have to the convenience and preservation of life. Right. So I find that whole problem inherently interesting. And I think you got to talk about schematization ultimately, if you're going to talk about knowledge.

15:53 Mark: What seems different here as compared to Plato, is that we got the impression in the early dialogues that you could basically play outside the cave, right? That if you're a philosopher, you're not paying attention to the world of the senses. You are playing in this intelligible realm. So what the actual phenomenal experience of that seems like it would be is imagination, with the proviso that like, well, you don't want to use imagination to create chimeras, to create strange combinations, and all the things that philosophers like to do when their imaginations run wild.

How do we actually pare that down? He makes it clear in these latter sections of the dialogues that we're sort of walking on a razor's edge at all times. The demands of the senses are so intense upon us, and as I think you were saying before Wes, that the imagination is really sort of a doppelganger. It's only one level abstracted from the sensible world. So that if the imagination, our minds even just shutting our eyes and shutting out the world and not taking what the senses tell us for granted, we're still basically leaning on faulty ground, right?

We have some access to the real stuff, the real, not, he doesn't call them forms, but the things of reason, the concepts of reason. But mostly just like we have. You were saying that what we have awareness of in the external world, we know that something exists, but we don't know its nature. Well, we already said last time that's the same relationship we have for God. So on the inside, you know, I know God exists, but I don't know God's nature. Well, if everything is part of God's nature, that's really going to be my attitude toward all concepts.

That's why mathematics, yes, you can figure it out with certainty if you're very deliberate about it, but it's not like we just know mathematical truths without having to kind of sit down and do quite a bit of work analyzing this inner world.

17:48 Dylan: I think it is very interesting what the relationship is between how our senses inform, you know, whether or not the generation of categories or the generation of relationships is a mind activity abstracting and acting on that sensory input or not. Right? And so maybe there's those kinds of questions that are at play. I find it very challenging, very puzzling how you can imagine thinking about anything abstractly without having at some point started with something that you were receiving as sensory information that you were acting on. And that's not the same thing as saying it comes from the senses.

It's saying that there is an activity of mind that would be having information that it's acting on. And it may be that there are inherent powers in the mind. And maybe we'll go down to, you know, whether or not some of those constraints are a priori, I mean, the whole critique of pure reason and stuff like that.

18:50 Wes: But we get more information about the relationship between intelligible extension and sensations, right. In the next few sections. And just to remind ourselves, and we've seen this in the previous dialogues, we think of our sensations as modalities of the soul. So almost like properties of the soul, things that have, we've been affected. And so, you know, our particular sensations or modalities, when we have access to something like intelligible extension, that is not a modality, that is us dipping into the well of reason, getting direct access to it. So it's not like our souls are just being affected in some way.

19:28 Seth: Is there an active and passive component to this, Wes, is that the sensation is passive and that the intelligibility is somehow active.

19:37 Wes: I'm just asking what I think he says and what I think he said before previous in the dialogues, is that basically we're getting a primary quality, secondary qualities distinction. So that he's going to say intelligible extension actually quote, unquote, causes. So treat every instance of the word cause as put that in brackets, because ultimately it's going to be God doing it. But the primary qualities, intelligible extension, actually will cause our sensations. So in section three, while color seems to be extended, it really isn't. It's no more extent than sound or pain.

Really what happens is intelligible extension affects the soul, modifies it causes that sensation, and then we refer the modification back to the extended thing. Right? So we're familiar with this from Locke and from others that this is all about the reduction of Qualia like yellowness to spatiotemporal activity of matter affecting the mind, I guess.

20:39 Mark: Seth, to answer your question, though, I feel like that what we get from the senses is passive, and what we get from reason is. We're also passive with regard to it. I mean, this is what I was calling imagination. What do you actually call the activity of the mind as it is flipping around under your control? And maybe we don't actually have as much control as we feel like we do, right? We don't even have will. Well, I don't know. It seems like. No, he does want to say that we do have freedom of the will. We can't actually do anything. I can't even will to move my arm and then move my arm by myself.

God has to come in and intervene. Occasionalism works across the board, but because it works across the board, as Dylan was saying before, when you're doing science, when you're actually charting the correlations, you don't actually need to take it into account at all. It's just this ontological presupposition that he needs because he has a particular view of God's omnipotence and our complete impotence compared to God. But it just seems like it does not actually help explain anything other than just making his ideas about God more coherent. I guess I'm jumping ahead here, but.

21:43 Wes: Yeah, jumping ahead. I mean, I think with regard to will, I don't think he talks about our free will. He says. What we do know, though, is that he says some things reminiscent of people who are strict determinists, right? So, for instance, when I'm about to say something, saying what I say right now, I don't know what I'm about to say. It's not under voluntary control in any sense. That would be endorsed by an unsophisticated proponent of free will. This is all causally determined. I'm hearing what I'm saying come out of my mouth right now. I can't plan it.

I can't go to the drawing board and say, here's what I'm about to say. And what's more, I don't. If I could plan it, you know, it certainly wouldn't involve details about how to move my vocal cords, for instance, or how to move my neurons and make my neurons active in the right way to do what I'm doing. I am a embodied being stuck in a causal network, and I don't have that kind of voluntary control. So whatever he thinks about free will, I think he would have to go Some sort of compatibilist route. But he doesn't. Unfortunately, he doesn't tell us.

22:46 Seth: I don't want to say we're complicating this already somewhat obtuse argument, but can we go back to a portion of the text? He speaks more directly to it. When you get into section five, 201 and 202. Can we go there?

23:00 Wes: So with five here, he's going to try and explain to us why sensations can't contain the idea of extension. The idea of extension must come from somewhere else. It can't come in through the senses. It's not included in sensations.

23:14 Seth: Let me read the quote that sticks in my head. And then maybe that can be an anchor to try and make something intelligible out of this. The last paragraph in section five. Therefore you must not be surprised, my dear Aristes, that you can learn certain evident truths by the testimony of the senses. Although the substance of the soul is not intelligible to the soul itself, and though its modalities cannot enlighten it, sensations cannot enlighten it. These same modalities, when they are joined to the intelligible extension, which is the archetype of bodies, and they make this extension sensible, can show us the interrelations in which the truths of geometry and physics consist.

But still it is true to say that the soul is not a light unto itself, that its modalities are only darkness, and that it discovers exact truths only in the ideas contained in reason. So sensation combined to the intelligible reasoned extension. So somehow there's an activity of the mind that has to connect sensation with ideas essentially through reason. And it's only in that way that then somehow the sensations then in turn can manifest or color or make the intelligible practical. I'm struggling to understand how this is supposed to work.

24:43 Wes: I think the way to think about it just bracket the whole God is force.

24:48 Seth: Let's talk about sensations and ideas or intelligibility.

24:52 Wes: Yeah. So if we were Kant, we would just say, hey, there's this data that comes in. And then our. Our mind goes to work on it and adds all the formal stuff. Right? What's the correlate of that? If you don't want to be someone who says it's all in the mind, you establish an external domain where all the formal stuff is. And you say that somehow the sensations are connected to that. And ultimately God is going to play his role in implanting the right sensations in our mind at the right time. But we'll talk about that later, I

25:28 Mark: guess the difference would be that for Kant, the categories of schematization are transcendental, as he says, which means it's just a structural feature of the mind. Whereas for Malebranche, they are literally transcendent, that they are literally beyond human experience, human understanding. But we can get some edges of them, some shadows of them, you know, however we want to put the Platonic metaphor of participation or.

25:54 Wes: Well, we have direct access to reason. Right. So we get very solid knowledge of math.

25:59 Dylan: Yeah. To intelligible extension.

26:00 Wes: Right, yeah.

26:01 Dylan: We have direct access to intelligent extent.

26:04 Wes: Yes.

26:04 Mark: I'm overstating. Everything is not like the idea of God. There's plenty of things. The idea of number that, you know, if we can have clear and distinct ideas of a number of things.

26:13 Wes: Yes, right, right.

26:14 Mark: And I think there's something to the analogy, right. When he was talking about God about this is like, well, we can know that God exists just by thinking about the concept of God. What we can't do is perceive how the idea of God is really simple. We just have to kind of keep that in mind, keep it on faith. But we can't. It's not something we can really understand. Whereas the idea of substance, insofar as it is an intelligible idea, we do have the idea of it being simple. Like, we know all there is to know, just like we know about the number three. We know all there is to know about the intelligible idea of substance, which is not very much.

26:50 Wes: Right.

26:50 Mark: It's passive, it's extended. It can move, but it can't move itself. Like, there are a few things that sort of all are derived from the very, very basic definition of extension. But that's not what we think. If we want to say, you know, think about nature as the entire web of the causal network between all these different things and the structures that are within it and the different ways that we could analyze it. Of course, we don't know that, but that apparently is something over and above and beyond just the intelligible idea of extension.

27:21 Wes: Extension and the Cartesian and Malebranchian scheme of things just is matter, Right. So when we say matter, we just mean extension and relations of distance and these impenetrable figures and everything else is derivable from that. This has precedent. Right. If you recall Lucretius, atomism, there's an element of this, and again, it kind of gets at the distinction between primary and secondary qualities. But the really important idea that's foundational to modern science is that the qualitative can be reduced to theoretical Entities that don't share any of those qualities.

Right. So for Lucretius, it's, hey, everything, including color boils down to colorless atoms, things that have no color, that they're just shape, they're just extension, they interlock, they interact in certain ways, and everything else is emergent on that. So that's the view at work here, is that emergence can mean different things. And here he does it, I think again through secondary qualities. But everything is, is emergent on the interaction of matter and mind, where matter just is extension.

28:29 Dylan: An interesting point here is that matter is not something that has powers, it's just extension. I might say, well, there's matter's charged. It's either positive, negative or neutral. And that is an inherent characteristic, a power of the matter. Someone like Malebranche is going to deny that and say that it's going to be an arrangement of the matter of its extension that gives rise to that. Yeah, as far as I can tell, it'd be considered a secondary quality that would arise from that extension. It wouldn't be abstracted to say, well, charge is a magnitude that something has and that by abstraction, magnitudes are kinds of extension. Because as far as I can tell, that isn't going on. That's not happening. Extension really means extension in space, like physical extension, not merely analogous magnitude.

29:21 Wes: The argument is that those of us who are used to contemporary science, matter is stuff and force is in it at having these inherent properties of involving force. And the argument against that is just that, that's not something we ever actually see. We see motion of extended things and then we come up with these theoretical explanations and we project our own sense of, you know, hey, I feel what it's like to push a ball. And I say, hey, one ball is pushing the other. Some of this is reminiscent, right, of Hume's worries about causality. When we think about what's included in the idea of matter as extension, when we think about our own empirical observations, force is not something observable except by its effects. We infer it or we come up with a theoretical explanation in terms of it, but it itself is not an observable entity.

30:14 Mark: Well, you're talking about magnitudes, Dylan. If that is not what matter is in itself, that has to be a structural thing, Right? Is that what you were meant about, like the temperature of something? So it's about arrangements, which is what all sophisticated scientific knowledge is, even what we would consider very basic chemical knowledge that, like this is a boron atom and this is a helium atom. Even that would be something that is about the arrangement of matter rather than the basic facts of matter itself. So I understand that what Malebranche is doing is trying to set groundwork for doing science, that he's not trying to actually give us a philosophy of science or explain science.

I'm having trouble just seeing it as an epistemology where it is that we actually learn the stuff that science is supposed to teach us. Right. It seems like it's only after we've gotten through all these basics and understanding what matter is, we also understand that scientific laws are going to be sort of as basic and simple as possible. We kind of get all that meta stuff and then we can start making observations and saying actual substantial things about

31:19 Dylan: nature from the earlier stuff that he did. He gave a couple of examples about sound earlier, right. In the readings we did before. And he took Aristes through this sort of exercise of right thinking, the right exercise of reason. And to me it all turned on being disciplined about relations of extension. And maybe there's a certain flavor of simplicity that goes into it too, but it was really necessary relations of extension. So there's an assumption of law like behavior, an assumption of causality that's going in there, which is to me, the whole occasionalism part.

Like, you know, where's the first cause? In the end, it's just not that interesting because you just put off where the cause is and you say, well, the way I'm going to figure out things in the world is I'm going to act as if these things are causal and law like. And to accept that I find exceptions to that. Well, God, you know, have miracles and stuff like that, but everything. But it's going to all behave that. That way.

32:21 Wes: Right?

32:21 Dylan: And it's right that we can sort of bracket the whole God thing. But his reason for having a causality put there in that way is because he wants it to be God.

32:34 Wes: We haven't really explained occasionalism yet. That's kind of in the second seventh dialogue.

32:40 Seth: Feels like it. Every. All roads lead to.

32:43 Dylan: Every once in a while they do.

32:46 Seth: Can I. I got that. Sorry, I got.

32:48 Mark: Give the. Just by memory the summary of the overall argument. That is because God is the most powerful thing, we are absolutely dependent on Him. He creates everything. And if he creates something, well, it has to be in some specific location. He doesn't just create it in general, he has to create it in a specific spot. And if he does that, then nothing else is going to move it from that spot except God. Right? God has such the power, the Way that I'm describing this, you can't just substitute God for something else in the metaphysical system.

This is literally the way he spells it out. So you can't then have a deist sort of picture where like, God sets stuff up and then it can. Then billiard balls can bounce around and hit each other. No, he is actually not only creating it, but creating it continually. He's sustaining it. He is responsible for everything being the way it is at all times. So even though he has these general ways that he allows things to interact using the simplest scientific manners, he doesn't evaluate. Is this going to hurt your feelings if I let it happen the way it normally happens?

No, it just happens the way it normally happens because that is in keeping with the majesty of God's properties that he needs to be consistent and awesome that the laws he set up are so good that he would not just violate them. Well, except when he wants to do miracles. But then, you know, that's sort of built in. There's a. There's a sort of a backdoor to allow that. And that's not really important for us. But that's supposed to explain why no causality is possible by anything besides God.

34:18 Wes: Why don't we just move to the seventh dialogue and explain this in more detail? Because what does it mean to say you need God ultimately? You don't need a theological God for this system. That's not what's going on here. It's not like I need a Christian anthropomorphized God to do the work that God is doing in Malebranche's system. So we have to ask why he wants it and what does he think it does for him that he can't just get from saying, oh, the force is in the matter. And there's a lot of context to that. I mean, some of this is these guys are trying to demythologize science, right?

They're reacting against scholastics, medieval Aristotelian scholastics, you want to say, give explanations in terms of things like, oh, why does this thing make you sleepy? It's a dormitive power. They're going hardcore and they're gonna. They're saying, no, this is all reducible to matter in motion. But then once you do that, you are left with a very big puzzle regarding force and causality and law and all these elements that, while they glue everything empirical together, don't themselves seem to be empirical. So let's take the idea of. He thinks that existence is an inertial, right?

So if we Take time slices of some entity, Time one, time two, time three. It's not just that if I were to create something magically right now, it doesn't persist through its time slices without some active, buoyant, active principle undergirding it. Otherwise it just vanishes again. And so that in the system is God, right? So this is known as conservation. And Malebranche's famous claim is that conservation is creation. It's almost like if I have a film projector that displays a movie of like a stationary apple, let's say I can't just have the apple on the first frame, I gotta have it on every single frame.

So what he's saying, in every temporal frame, every temporal slice, I gotta have a new apple. Conservation is creation. It's not just that I start out with one apple and then it's there and time does its thing. So I don't know how you defend that idea exactly that existence involves this underlying active engine for each time slice. But if you accept that, then the idea is that movement, right, is just if the apple moves, it's varying its location in the frame. And God is doing that. Whatever underlying buoyant, active principle creates and conserves the thing, does it in whatever place it is.

So if it's in a different place, it did it in that place as well. And finally, when we get to the whole idea of objects bouncing into each other and causing motion in each other, there are very, very good reasons to think of that in terms of one object transferring a magical force to another object. And that's what he's trying to work out. So he's working with some very real problems. And by externalizing force, in a way, in his ontology, even if it's crazy solution, once you call it God, it's a motivated solution to a real problem. And all this stuff comes up later, right?

In Hegel. Force and the understanding.

37:29 Seth: And my reading of this in the secondary literature that I looked at was that ultimately occasionalism is in some sense a solution for reconciling causality between the sensible and the intelligible. If you think of the sensible as matter extension, right, and the intelligible as basically Cartesian dualism. You have a mental substance, you have a physical substance. The two things can't interact, and yet somehow they do. We have to explain how it is that the mind can make the arm, you know, move, or how the physical sensations can generate the ideas.

And so ultimately it all boils down to that, him trying to resolve the apparent causal problem between a notion of A mental substance and a physical substance. I don't know if that's true, but I agree with Wes. He is solving a real problem. What I'm concerned about is that the problem, you know, it's like that thing where the framework for the argument have been set, the assumptions have been laid down, and now he's working very, very hard to rationalize, given those assumptions, to make sense of the things. But it feels like it's the assumptions that need to be questioned.

It's this notion of substance that needs. That's causing the problem, and that he's just working to try and, you know, go through a bunch of mental gymnastics to try to work around these. These things.

39:02 Mark: So just to clarify, though, it's not that mind and body, the idea of substance, is an intelligible idea.

39:09 Seth: Right.

39:09 Mark: All the talk of causality is ultimately in the realm of ideas. Any way that we're going to make sense of the physical world is taking place in the realm of ideas. Right. He's a lot closer to Berkeley, really, than he is. Yeah.

39:22 Seth: Yes, that's fair. That's fair.

39:24 Wes: How about before we break and. Because maybe this is something Dylan can help us with because he's closer to it. But Huygens, right? Is it Hoygens? Is that what we say?

39:34 Dylan: I always pronounce it Huygens.

39:36 Wes: Huygens. I think you're right. So Huygens is also active around the same time. And Newton 2. This is one of the things that Malebranche and others are thinking about, right? So you have your billiard ball. You have another billiard ball move towards it and hit it, and then the other stationary one moves, and the existing billiard ball stops. It transfers all its motion of force to the other billiard ball. The problem with that picture is that that's only from one frame of reference, right? It just depends on your inertial frame of reference. If I'm moving with the other billiard ball, I can completely reverse which one looks stationary and which one looks like it's moving.

So if I change my frame of reference, it's not the billiard ball on my right going and hitting the one on my left. And then that moving. It's the. Exactly the other way around. So there is no absolute answer to the question of which billiard ball is moving. There is no absolute answer to the question of which billiard ball has the force to transfer. That is the objection. There is no force in one of the billiard balls getting transferred to the other billiard ball. Force is something that happens between them. This is something we talked about with Hegel as well.

So I think that's one of the intuitions or one of the observations that he's working with. All these guys, including Leibniz, are thinking about the problem of force and what that could possibly mean in a material world, in a naturalistic framework. They're having problem, a problem integrating that into a naturalistic framework. And that's why they just want to say, hey, you know, we're going to talk about it. We're just going to have to make it a very basic ontological principle. It's mysterious and we might as well call that God and say God is doing it instead of pretending that we know that it's in the objects.

41:21 Mark: There was something I ran across in researching this, a little bit of this physical influx theory. So when you're saying, Wes, that the thing that he's arguing against is some magical force being passed between two things. And I think a lot of listeners are going to be like, why magical? Isn't it just like one has kinetic energy and then it. Or when it's potential. Yeah, it has kinetic energy and it puts it on the other one, some actual transfer of energy. So there was this theory, physical influx. I'm looking at actually the Leibniz article in Leibniz on Causality in the Stanford Encyclopedia, where one substance passes something to the other substance.

That this was something that. The way of influence that the scholastics believed, and Leibniz at least dismissed it, for instance, by the scholastic Francisco Suarez. A barbaric expression, metaphorical and more obscure than what it defines. There's no evidence. It sort of just even begs the question, if you think that somehow the first billiard ball passes a little bit of itself to the next one. Well, what is this passing? What is. You know, you'd have to come up with the same explanation for how the first billiard ball creates or affects the part of itself that's passing to the next one.

Like it doesn't actually solve anything.

42:30 Dylan: You still have this question, I guess, if you're using force language, I still. I think it's correct to wonder where the force is and what you mean by force when you start talking about

42:41 Mark: it all around us, the forces.

42:44 Dylan: But it's one of the reasons why. I think that there are good reasons why to quickly move from force language to energy language, which is a different kind of thing, because the energy that's moving around is part of the system as a whole. You move to energy language and momentum language and conservation talk, where the System is conserving those relations between one another. It's not coming into and out of existence. It is just being moved around. Motion is being moved around and the system is conserving that motion.

43:21 Wes: And by system, Dylan means God. Just kidding. I'm just joking.

43:27 Dylan: So I think that's where Malebranche goes with it. But of course this is where the part of my question about the inherent properties of things and the problem of just thinking of things as extension in Newton's second law, Well, I guess it's the first. First law is where you just get inertia, that something in motion tends to stay in motion until something else acts upon it. It's that motion, whatever something is doing, its relative state is the same, unless it interacts with something else. Maybe that leads up to the question, well, what does interacting mean?

And what it ends up meaning is some kind of touching relationship. They end up connecting at the same place at the same time. Then there's a balance effect, right? That connection at the same place in the same time is subject to conservation rules. But those conservation rules, I think I'm way off topic for Malebranche at this point, right? Malebranche isn't saying any of this. He's focusing on the world is full of extension. And then the causal relations, like I said before, the world will be able to be intelligible by understanding its pieces in terms of extension and the relationships between them.

And we can figure that out. But all those laws, if I want to say, well, why do those laws exist? Where do they come from? All of that is because God makes the world a perfect place. And God makes all these laws, everything in the world, the repeatability of the world, the uniformity of the world, all of that is because of acts of causation that are just God doing it all, all the time.

45:05 Wes: So we take the laws of nature, take the laws of the universe, whatever we say about those, at some point there's an explanatory terminus and we just say laws are what they are. There's no reason why they are what they are. They just are what they are and that are what they areness. Is I think one way that is part of what people are trying to get at when they talk about God. This sort of explanatory term, this. But the other way to think about this is just think about a planet orbiting the sun. Think about gravitation and what do we want to say about force there?

Do we really need to say that there's push and pull, right? Why don't we just be Humeans and say, let me just give a description of the system. This thing moves around this thing according to these laws. Here are the laws, here's what it does. Why do I need to talk about push and pull? So I think what's going on here with Malebranche is he's trying to point us to saying the law is all we need. The law is the force. In a way, you know, if you want to get at some way in which this is more appealing as an explanation, instead of saying God, just say, well, maybe the law, maybe the whole, you know, the lifetime description of every behavior in the system or something like that.

Maybe that's what we want to call force or something like that. I'm speculating here, but I'm trying to get at for listeners the ways in which this might actually be actually motivated, not just crazy.

46:28 Mark: So would that mean that if you say that the law sort of is determinist, that instead of the very impoverished notion of intelligible substance that he has, this seemed to be, I think, what both Dylan and Seth, when you were saying that he needs to maybe question his assumptions, and Dylan, you were saying that you should have this energy language that, oh, this is going way off topic for Malebranche. Well, that's because it's going off topic for Malebranche because Malebranche had such impoverished basic concepts that he thinks this is all that our mind can understand about what nature is.

And it's got to be just, you know, something that is, as we've been saying, comparable to a basic atomism of a Lucretius or a Democritus, when really the idea of energy opens up some additional basic basic building blocks. And maybe we should say that is the basic thing beyond which no further supporting substance, God or whatever is necessary. That's not just taking Malebranche's explanation and changing the terminus from God to something else, from God to law. It's changing the whole epistemology and saying that his idea of substance is wrong, which is like the absolute core of the theory, as far as I'm concerned.

47:40 Wes: Yeah, I don't think so. I think there's a broader worry that doesn't depend on the fact that he's doing Cartesian vortex theory with extension as his basis for, you know, it's a naturalistic framework. The same question arises with regard to any naturalistic framework. How do you deal with law with force, with certain invisible and formal structure, all that stuff?

48:03 Mark: Well, that is very, very charitable. I'm glad that you have an interpretation of this that makes it.

48:08 Wes: It's not charitable. I find it exciting and really fascinating and it really helps me understand what Hegel is up to and other philosophers like. It fits into the bigger picture.

48:22 Mark: Let us wrap up part one here. We of course have lots and lots of more text to go through if you want to hear that. Need to listen to part two supporters can get that right in your feed. If you support us through Apple. You're not going to see that until next week. Sorry.