Malebranche is interested in where things get the power to be causes. He does not see how bodies have this power. Nor does he see how minds could cause bodies to move. (Well, finite or created minds. God is different.)
But bodies do move one another around. And minds do cause bodies to move: mine is making my fingers press keys on a keyboard right now.
Malebranche’s solution is God. Since God is omnipotent, his will has to be effective in making things move.
when a moving ball collides with and moves another, it communicates to it nothing of its own, for it does not itself have the force it communicates. However, a ball is the natural cause of the motion it communicates. A natural cause is therefore not a real and true but only an occasional cause, one that determines the Author of nature to act in such and such a manner in such and such a situation. (Malebranche [1675] 2019, 241L)
There is a distinction between, on the one hand, “natural,” “secondary,” or “occasional” causes (those three terms are used interchangeably) and, on the other hand, real causes that make their effects happen. As you might have guessed, his view that what you and I think of as causes are actually “occasional” causes is why he is called an occasionalist. Spelling out this distinction between occasional and real causes is something we are going to have to work on in class.
We will want to identify out the variety of cases that Malebranche uses to make his case. What sorts of cases of cause and effect does he discuss? We have balls colliding with one another: body-body causation. What else goes on the list?
It seems to me that there are two arguments for the view that so-called natural or secondary causes are inadequate without God on the left hand column of page 242. I want to try to spell them out to see how they are different and to get practice at identifying the steps of an argument. Who doesn’t like making numbered lists of premises and conclusions?
Between pages 245 and 249, Malebranche discusses objections to his view. I think that these ones are worth our time.
The second objection: if secondary causes were not genuine causes, then anything could cause anything. Fire could be cooling and cold water could burn (245R).
The third objection: this is a version of fatalism, like we saw in the debate between Hobbes and Bramhall on free will. Here, the argument is that if God is going to make everything happen, there is no point to doing things like watering your plants. God is either going to make them grow or not, after all. (246)
The fourth objection: why would God cause some things to collide with one another rather than moving one of them out of the way? This becomes a discussion of evil. In a nutshell, if God makes everything happen, then he makes pointless and bad things happen as well as good things. (247-48)
The sixth objection: free will. Again, if God makes everything happen, then that seems to include things he has forbidden, like sinful actions. Why would God do that? (248)
Descartes also held that bodies are not capable of moving by themselves. If they cannot move, they cannot displace other bodies from their place in space. So they cannot be causes.
By “body,” I understand all that is capable of being bounded by some shape, of being enclosed in a place, and of filling up a space in such a way as to exclude any other body from it; of being perceived by touch, sight, hearing, taste, or smell; of being moved in several ways, not, of course, by itself, but by whatever else impinges on it. For it was my view that the power of self-motion, and likewise of sensing or of thinking, in no way belonged to the nature of the body. (Descartes [1641] 2019, 44L)
What about the mind or soul? Descartes did not state a view one way or another about the ability of one thought to cause another. But he did notice that the mind remains the same over time. Given that the essential feature of the mind is thought, it is not obvious how it could do this. How does thought or the ability to think preserve itself from one moment to the next?
because the entire span of one’s life can be divided into countless parts, each one wholly independent of the rest, it does not follow from the fact that I existed a short time ago that I must exist now, unless some cause, as it were, creates me all over again at this moment, that is to say, which preserves me. For it is obvious to one who pays close attention to the nature of time that plainly the same forces and action are needed to preserve anything at each individual moment that it lasts as would be required to create the same thing anew, were it not yet in existence. Thus conservation differs from creation solely by virtue of a distinction of reason; this too is one of those things that are manifest by the light of nature.
Therefore, I must now ask myself whether I possess some power by which I can bring it about that I myself, who now exist, will also exist a little later on. For since I am nothing but a thinking thing — or at least since I am now dealing simply and precisely with that part of me which is a thinking thing — if such a power were in me, then I would certainly be aware of it. but I observe that there is no such power; and from this very fact I know most clearly that I depend upon some being other than myself. (Descartes [1641] 2019, 52–53)
Descartes also had a question about how minds and bodies interact that he did not do a great job of answering. Would Malebranche’s version of occasionalism help?
Hume is going to make the same basic point that Malebranche is making: we do not understand how causes make their effects necessary. He is even going to use the same example!
Were any object presented to us, and were we required to pronounce concerning the effect, which will result from it, without consulting past observation; after what manner, I beseech you, must the mind proceed in this operation? It must invent or imagine some event, which it ascribes to the object as its effect; and it is plain that this invention must be entirely arbitrary. The mind can never possibly find the effect in the supposed cause, by the most accurate scrutiny and examination. For the effect is totally different from the cause, and consequently can never be discovered in it. Motion in the second Billiard-ball is a quite distinct event from motion in the first; nor is there any thing in the one to suggest the smallest hint of the other. A stone or piece of metal raised into the air, and left without any support, immediately falls: But to consider the matter à priori, is there any thing we discover in this situation, which can beget the idea of a downward, rather than an upward, or any other motion, in the stone or metal? (Hume [1748] 2019, 589R)
One of the wonderful things about modern philosophy is that the authors are all in conversation with one another. You can see how an idea or observation gets picked up and used as it is passed from hand to hand.