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Malebranche's criticism of descartes's proof that there are bodies

2007; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 15; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/09608780701604930

1469-3526

Monte Cook,

Historical Philosophy and Science

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1See The Search After Truth, Bk One, Ch. Ten and Bk Six, Pt Two, Ch. Six, specifically LO 48 and LO 481–4 (OC 1: 122 and OC 2: 371–7). An important passage at LO 48 (OC 1: 122) that Lennon and Olscamp translate as ‘this is very difficult to prove conclusively’ would be better translated as ‘this is very difficult to prove demonstratively’ (the key word is démonstrativement). LO = Nicolas Malebranche, The Search after Truth, translated by Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Cambridge, 1997). OC = Oeuvres Complètes de Malebranche, edited by André Robinet, 20 vols. (Paris, 1972–84). Dialogues = Nicolas Malebranche, Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion, edited by Nicholas Jolley, translated by David Scott (Cambridge, 1997). CSM = René Descartes, The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, translated by John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, and Dugald Murdoch (Cambridge, 1985). Where a translator is not indicated, the translation is my own. 2Geneviève Rodis-Lewis notes that this elucidation must have been prompted by Desgabets's remarks in the Critique de la Critique de la Vérité about how easy it was to give a proof of the existence of bodies (see OC 3: 360, n21). For a discussion of why Desgabets thinks it is easy to give such a proof, see Monte Cook, ‘Desgabets's Representation Principle’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 40 (2002), No. 2: 189–200; and compare Chs 3 and 4 of Tad M. Schmaltz, Radical Cartesianism: The French Reception of Descartes (Cambridge, 2002). In Dialogue VI of Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion, Malebranche also discusses the difficulty of proving that there are bodies. He does not discuss Descartes's proof, however; and in general Malebranche's purpose in the Dialogues is more positive. (Malebranche's introductory description of Dialogue VI begins ‘Proofs of the existence of bodies drawn from revelation’.) At one point in Dialogue VI Malebranche offers a demonstration that it is impossible to give an exact demonstration that bodies exist. While it necessarily follows from God's existence that, for example, God rewards good deeds, it does not necessarily follow from His existence that bodies exist. ‘Thus it is not possible to demonstrate rigorously that bodies exist’ (Dialogues, 95; OC 12: 137 – cf. LO 574; OC 3: 64; and OC 6: 185–6). If we know that bodies exist, then it is only because God has revealed this to us, either naturally, by the sensations He causes in us, or supernaturally, by faith. See Dialogues, 89–103; OC 12: 130–46. 3See Charles McCracken, ‘Knowledge of the Existence of Body’, The Cambridge History of Seventeenth-Century Philosophy, edited by Daniel Garber and Michael Ayers (Cambridge, 1998) 630–1 (the emphasis is McCracken's). I think that, despite appearances, McCracken is not actually attributing an occasionalist criticism of Descartes's proof to Malebranche. In neither Malebranche and British Philosophy nor ‘Stages on a Cartesian Road to Immaterialism’ does McCracken suggest that Malebranche offers such a criticism. See Malebranche and British Philosophy (Oxford, 1983) 74–6, and ‘Stages on a Cartesian Road to Immaterialism’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 24 (1986), No. 1: 23–7. 4Daisie Radner, Malebranche: A Study of a Cartesian System (Assen, 1978) 62–3. 5I discuss this passage further below. 6In both Descartes's original proof and Malebranche's understanding of the proof, God would be a deceiver because God would give us misleading ideas without giving us a way to recognize that they are misleading. 7I have dropped Malebranche's talk about natural judgements. Malebranche closely relates making a natural judgement that there are bodies and having a strong natural propensity to believe that there are bodies. For a discussion of Malebranche on natural judgements, see Andrew Pyle, Malebranche (London, 2003) 239–42. 8Richard Glauser comments on how Malebranche ‘mutilates’ Descartes's argument. See Richard Glauser, Berkeley et les philosophes du XVIIe siècle (Sprimont, 1999) 233–4 (n19). 9It might seem unimportant that Malebranche denies that ideas have a cause: after all, he believes that our sense perceptions have a cause, so it seems that he could just restate Descartes's proof in terms of the cause of our sense perceptions. Still, one would have expected him to criticize Descartes's actual statement of the proof before amending it in this way. In fact, he does not amend Descartes's proof in this way. His version of the proof says nothing about the cause of our sense perceptions. 10Richard Glauser and Andrew Pyle note that Malebranche drops the causal element from Descartes's proof. See Richard Glauser, Berkeley et les philosophes du XVIIe siècle, 209–10 and Andrew Pyle, Malebranche, 122. 11In Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man, Thomas Reid acquiesces in Malebranche's distortion of Descartes's proof: ‘though he [Malebranche] acknowledges with Des Cartes, that we feel a strong propensity to believe the existence of a material world, yet he thinks this is not sufficient … ’. Thomas Reid, Essays on the Intellectual Powers of Man (Cambridge, Massachusetts, 1969) 130–1. 12Malebranche is attacking Descartes's Meditation Six proof and not the proof at the beginning of Part Two of the Principles. Though there are similarities between the two proofs (for example, both are causal and both draw on the senses and on God's not being a deceiver), the proof in the Principles differs significantly from that of the Meditations. The Principles proof says nothing explicitly about objective reality, and unlike the Meditations proof, it contains the problematic step ‘we have sensory awareness of, or rather as a result of sensory stimulation we have a clear and distinct perception of, some kind of matter’ (CSM 1: 223). Most importantly, the Principles proof says nothing explicitly about our lacking a faculty to correct our propensity to believe in corporeal things. For discussion of the two proofs – and an argument against the common view that the two proofs differ fundamentally – see Cecilia Wee, ‘Descartes's Two Proofs of the External World’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 80 (2002) No. 4: 487–501. See also Richard Glauser, Berkeley et les philosophes du XVIIe siècle, 204–8. 13After explaining why we need a proof of the existence of bodies, Malebranche says that ‘for these reasons, or reasons like them, Descartes … thought he could not assume that there are bodies’ (LO 572; OC 3: 60). Malebranche has to say ‘or reasons like them’ because he sets up the problem in terms that he, but not Descartes, can agree to. (Later, as he further discusses the problem, he falls into peculiarly Malebranchean language. Thus he explicitly evokes his distinction between what we see and what we look at: ‘Let us be careful here: the material world we animate is not the one we see when we look at it, i.e. when we turn the body's eyes toward it’ – LO 572–3; OC 3: 61.) 14Radner sees this distinction in Malebranche but fails to appreciate that Malebranche attributes the ‘correct’ premise to Descartes. See Daisie Radner, Malebranche, 63. 15Malebranche has a response, then, to Pierre Bayle's assertion that if God would be a deceiver in leading us to believe that there were bodies when there were none he would equally be a deceiver in leading us to believe that objects have colours. For colour we have a correcting faculty – reason tells us that bodies lack colour. See Pierre Bayle, ‘Pyrrho’, Historical and Critical Dictionary, Selections, edited and translated by Richard Popkin (Indianapolis, 1965) 197–8. 16In his Response to Arnauld, Malebranche suggests that reason does tell us that bodies do not exist: since, properly speaking, bodies do not act on us and we do not see them, it is useless for God to create them; yet God does nothing useless. Malebranche raises this argument against Arnauld's claim to have demonstrated the existence of bodies, however, and does not seriously take it to demonstrate their non-existence. See OC 6: 184. 18Thomas M. Lennon, The Battle of the God and Giants (Princeton, 1993) 231. 17Pierre Bayle, ‘Pyrrho’, 198–9. 19Ferdinand Alquié, Le Cartésianisme de Malebranche (Paris, 1974) 76 (my translation, drawing on LO). 20Richard Glauser, Berkeley et les philosophes du XVIIe siècle, 212 (my translation, drawing on LO). 21For Charles McCracken see ‘Knowledge of the Existence of Body’, 631. Martial Gueroult is less clear. On the one hand, in his main discussion of Malebranche's criticism of Descartes's proof Gueroult says that ‘Malebranche contests the invincibility of the Cartesian proof, by contesting the invincibility of the inclination on which it is based. If, in fact, the inclination is not invincible, it depends on our freedom and does not depend on God. But God only guarantees what depends solely on him; therefore God does not guarantee this inclination'. This sounds as if Gueroult takes Malebranche to challenge the claim that if there were no bodies, God would be a deceiver. Nevertheless, elsewhere, in discussing Descartes's proof, Gueroult also says that: Divine veracity … extends not only to clear and distinct ideas, but also to a natural inclination. Malebranche, who criticizes the Cartesian proof, freely admits this extension. See Martial Gueroult, Descartes' Philosophy Interpreted According to the Order of Reasons, Volume II: The Soul and the Body, translated by Roger Ariew. (Minneapolis, 1985, 92–5 and 72) 22Richard Glauser agrees that in the Elucidation VI discussion of Descartes's proof, Malebranche never actually says that if there were no bodies God would not be a deceiver. However, whereas I argue below that Malebranche believes that God would be a deceiver, Glauser takes Malebranche to leave this open. He acknowledges passages in which Malebranche seems to be saying that God would be a deceiver, but he thinks that a close reading reveals that Malebranche is not saying this. He lays heavy emphasis – too heavy, I think – on the fact that at crucial points Malebranche qualifies what he says. Malebranche only says that, given that God is not a deceiver, it seems that we should believe there are bodies, that if there were no bodies God would seem to be a deceiver, that perhaps the argument from God's not being a deceiver is sound enough, and that if there were no bodies it seems to him certain that God would be deceiving us (the first three are from LO 574; OC 3: 63; the last is from Dialogues 99; OC 12: 141–2). Glauser resists taking Malebranche positively to declare that God would be a deceiver because he believes that elsewhere, in the Response to Arnauld, Malebranche explicitly denies this. I discuss this passage below. See Richard Glauser, Berkeley et les philosophes du XVIIe siècle, 209 and 211–14. 23I discuss this passage below. 24See Ch. 28 of On True and False Ideas. 25The talk of being ‘invincibly led’ by evidence occurs on LO 573 (OC 3: 62) and again on LO 574 (OC 3: 63). 26See also LO 10 (OC 1: 54–5); Dialogues 95–6 (OC 12: 137–8); and Méditations Chrétiennes et Métaphysiques, OC 10: 49. 27For a discussion of this question, see Henri Gouhier, La Philosophie de Malebranche et Son Expérience Religieuse (Paris, 1948) 276. 28Cf. Dialogues, 95; OC 12: 136–7. 29Actually, Malebranche is a bit unclear on what observation he has in mind. He might be referring to his statement at the end of the preceding paragraph that since our natural judgements that bodies exist agree perfectly with faith, we ought not to refrain from judging conformably to them. The explanation he goes on to give, however, says nothing about natural judgements agreeing with faith. The explanation he gives reads much more naturally as an explanation of why he made the observation that he has been explaining throughout the Elucidation, namely that it is very difficult to prove that there are bodies. 30Another motivation Malebranche has for arguing that it is very difficult to prove that there are bodies surfaces in the Méditations Chrétiennes et Métaphysiques, where he tells us that when men think of extension, they think of it as a necessary being. They conceive of the world as being created in an immense space that has itself never been created and that not even God can destroy. However, since, on the Cartesian view, matter and space or extension are the same thing, they are thinking of matter as eternal and necessary. Their mistake, according to Malebranche, is that they confuse intelligible extension, which is eternal and necessary and of which we have sure, evident knowledge, with material extension, which is not eternal and not a necessary being and the existence of which we have the assurance only of faith. (OC 10: 98–100) 31For this sort of reading, see, for example, Michael Friedman, ‘Descartes on the Real Existence of Matter’, Topoi 16 (1997) No. 2: 153–62. 32Cf. McCracken, ‘Stages on a Cartesian Road to Immaterialism’, 24. See also Jean-Christophe Bardout's ‘Metaphysics and Philosophy’, in The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche, edited by Steven Nadler (Cambridge, 2000) 150–2, and his Malebranche et la métaphysique (Paris, 1999) 283–95.