SUÁREZ AND MALEBRANCHE ON NECESSARY CAUSES
Sydney Penner
University of Colorado, Boulder – July 15, 2015
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Goals
• to investigate Suárez’s views concerning the necessity, or not, of causal relations
• to show that Suárez would see little reason to be moved by Malebranche’s ‘no necessary connection’ argument
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Malebranche’s ‘no necessary connection’ argument
• The argument is on behalf of occasionalism, i.e., the view that God and only God is a true cause.
1. There is no necessary connection between a finite mind’s will and any bodily motion.
2. There is a necessary connection between God’s will and bodily motions.
3. Something is a true cause only if there is a necessary connection between it and the effect.
4. Therefore, finite minds are not true causes of bodily motions but God is a true cause of such
motions.
• Malebranche seems to have a strong form of necessity in mind, namely, logical necessity. To deny
a causal relation would be to posit a contradiction.
• Nicolas Jolley deems this ‘Malebranche’s most powerful and intriguing argument for occasionalism’.
• Steven Nadler, Sukjae Lee, and others consider it a weak argument.
• A key part of this dispute concerns whether Malebranche’s opponents would have had reason to
be moved by this argument. Suárez has become a representative figure in recent discussion, with
Ott and Fisher, for example, arguing that Suárez shares enough of Malebranche’s conception of
causation to be vulnerable to the argument.
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Overview of Suárez on efficient causation
• All efficient causation is agent causation; causal picture is filled with substances, forms, powers,
and actions.
• The principle quod is that which acts, typically a substance, while the principle quo is the power
by the principle quod acts.
• Created things have causal powers and exercise those powers but all their actions require God’s
concurrence. In other words, Suárez is a concurrentist, rejecting occasionalism and conservationism.
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Necessary and free causes
• Efficient causes can act either necessarily or freely.
– Natural, i.e., non-rational, causes do not have powers directed to opposites and so act necessarily.
– Rational causes have powers directed to opposites and so act freely and contingently.
• Suárez takes it to be obvious from experience and from induction that natural causes act necessarily.
– Mumford and Anjum in Getting Causes from Powers argue that we should not look for necessity in causation because any causal process can be interfered with or prevented.
– They suggest an ‘antecedent strengthening test of necessity’: if a cause necessitates an effect,
then the effect should obtain given that cause regardless what other condition is present.
– More formally: ‘if A necessitates B, then: if A plus φ, for any φ, then B’.
• Suárez’s response: this is why the clause ‘if all the things required for operating’ needs to be built
into the antecedent.
• Four requisite conditions:
– a full and sufficient power to act
∗ includes God’s aptitudinal concurrence, i.e., God’s being prepared or disposed to concur
with the secondary cause
∗ does not include God’s actual concurrence, since that is not distinct from the action itself
– a susceptible and sufficiently close patient
– a medium, if there is one, that is suitable for and susceptible to the agent’s action
– nothing sufficiently powerful impeding the action
• Suárez’s strategy seems exactly the right one for an agent-causalist.
• Mumford and Anjum object that (i) it is illegitimate to include negative factors among the causes
of an event and (ii) that the more that is built into the antecedent, the more singular and unrepeatable it becomes and so of less use to someone trying to establish necessity.
– Regarding the first objection, Suárez distinguishes between causes and requisite conditions.
A negative factor may be a necessary condition for a cause to operate but it is not thereby a
cause.
– The second objection is more difficult to evaluate. It does not show that Suárez’s view is incoherent, false, or even implausible. On the other hand, it does put into question Suárez’s
claim that the necessity of natural causes’ operations is obvious.
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The necessity of natural efficient causal relations
• Ott and Fisher argue that Suárez agrees with Malebranche that causal relations are logically necessary.
• Philosophical case: In contemporary philosophy, causal necessity is thought weaker than logical
or metaphysical necessity because the laws of nature could have been different. We might think
of causal necessity as a conditional necessity, conditional on the laws of nature. The classical Aristotelian, however, just posits a nexus of powers without appeal to laws of nature. Consquently,
there is no space for a nomological necessity distinct from logical necessity.
– Objection: what about God’s omnipotence and power to perform miracles?
– Answer: God’s concurrence is part of the first relatum of the causal relation as one of the
requisite conditions, so God can simply withhold said concurrence.
• Textual case: see DM 19.1.14.
• In both philosophical and textual case, Ott assumes that God’s concurrence should be included in
the first relatum. But why is that the relevant relatum?
– If the first relatum only includes the secondary cause, then clearly there is no logically necessary relation between it and its effect.
– At the other extreme, if the first relatum includes the secondary cause plus all the requisite
conditions, including divine concurrence, then the resulting relation is plausibly logically
necessary.
– If the first relatum includes the secondary cause plus all the requisite conditions except divine
concurrence, then again the resulting causal relation is not logically necessary.
– Why not think, contra Ott, that the last is the relevant first relatum? God’s concurrence
seems to play a role in Suárez’s account analogous to laws of nature in contemporary philosophy. Given that Ott omits laws of nature from the first relatum, it seems he should omit
God’s concurrence as well.
• Further matter: Suárez thinks there are free causes in addition to necessarily acting causes and he
clearly does not think that free action requires a logically necessary relation.
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Implications for persuasiveness of Malebranche’s argument
• Malebranche’s argument again:
1. There is no necessary connection between a finite mind’s will and any bodily motion.
2. There is a necessary connection between God’s will and bodily motions.
3. Something is a true cause only if there is a necessary connection between it and the effect.
4. Therefore, finite minds are not true causes of bodily motions but God is a true cause of such
motions.
• As stated, Suárez obviously rejects (3), since it makes no mention of the requisite conditions.
• Perhaps Malebranche can revise (3) to avoid this objection:
30 . Something is a true cause only if there is a necessary connection between (a) it and all the
requisite conditions and (b) the effect.
• Of course, this requires revising the first two premises as well. The first premise now reads:
10 . There is no necessary connection between (a) a finite mind’s will and all the requisite conditions and (b) any bodily motion.
• Two ways of reading the first premises:
– Faculty reading: ‘will’ refers to the faculty,
– or ‘will’ refers to an act.
• On the first reading, Suárez may accept (10 ) but will reject (2).
• On the second reading, (10 ) becomes problematic.
• Dilemma: either Malebranche means to include only the putative cause in the first relatum or he
means to include the cause plus the requisite conditions.
– If the former, then Suárez rejects (3) without hesitation.
– If the latter, then Suárez will reject (10 ).
• This seems sufficient to show that Suárez will find Malebranche’s ‘no necessary connection’ argument unpersuasive.
• But suppose Suárez became persuaded that there is no necessary connection to be found between
any natural beings and their putative effects. Would he then join Malebranche?
• I see no reason to think so. After all, he explicitly allows for true causes that do not act necessarily:
God, angels, and human beings.
• Malebranche needs necessity to be necessary to true causation. But that is no part of Suárez’s view.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Fisher, A. R. J. ‘Causal and Logical Necessity in Malebranche’s Occasionalism’. Canadian Journal of
Philosophy 41.4 (2011): 523–48.
Jolley, Nicholas. ‘Metaphysics’. In The Cambridge Companion to Early Modern Philosophy, edited by
Donald Rutherford, 95–135. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006.
Lee, Sukjae. ‘Necessary Connections and Continuous Creation: Malebranche’s Two Arguments for Occasionalism’. Journal of the History of Philosophy 46.4 (2008): 539–65.
Loeb, Louis E. Loeb, From Descartes to Hume: Continental Metaphysics and the Development of Modern
Philosophy. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1981.
Malebranche, Nicolas. The Search after Truth, translated by Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997.
Nadler, Steven. ‘Malebranche on Causation’. In The Cambridge Companion to Malebranche, edited by
Steven Nadler, 112–38. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Ott, Walter R. Causation and Laws of Nature in Early Modern Philosophy. Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 2009.
Penner, Sydney. ‘Final Causality: Suárez on the Priority of Final Causation’. In Suárez on Aristotelian
Causality, edited by Jakob Leth Fink, 121–48. Leiden: Brill, 2015.
Pyle, Andrew. Malebranche. London: Routledge, 2003.
Suárez, Francisco. Disputationes metaphysicae. Salamanca: John and Andreas Renaut, 1597.
Sydney Penner
Suárez and Malebranche on Necessary Causes – Texts Handout
July 15, 2015
1. Malebranche, The Search after Truth 6.2.3 (p. 447):
But if one should not render sovereign honor to leeks and onions, one can always render them some particular adoration; I mean, one can
think of them and love them to some extent, if it is true that they can to some extent make us happy. We should render them honor in
proportion to the good they can do.
2. Malebranche, The Search after Truth 6.2.3 (p. 450):
A true cause as I understand it is one such that the mind perceives a necessary connection between it and its effect. Now the mind perceives
a necessary connection only between the will of an infinitely perfect being and its effects. Therefore, it is only God who is the true cause
and who truly has the power to move bodies.
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3. Suárez, DM 17.1.5:
For an efficient cause will, according the explanation given, be a
per se principle from which an action first exists.
4. Suárez, DM 27.2.10:
Just as an efficient cause is constituted in second act by the concurring end for the sake of which it causes (and for this reason is said
to be caused by the end with respect to its causality), so also, conversely, the final cause is not constituted in second act except by
the efficient cause concurring in its genus for its causality. In this
they have, then, a mutual causality between each other in their
genera, just as matter and form have between each other.
5. Suárez, DM 17.2.6:
A physical and true cause, however, can have one of two ways
of acting, namely, either naturally or freely, either necessarily or
contingently.
6. Suárez, DM 19.1.1:
This question is easy, and so one should say briefly, first, that
among created causes there are many that operate necessarily if
all the things required for operating are present. This is obvious
from experience and from an easy induction; for the sun necessarily illuminates, fire necessarily heats, and so on for the other cases.
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. . . erit enim causa efficiens, iuxta expositionem datam, principium per se, a quo primo est actio.
... sicut causa efficiens constituitur in actu secundo, concurrente fine propter quem causat, et ob hanc rationem dicitur causari a fine quoad causalitatem suam, ita e converso
causa finalis non constituitur in actu secundo nisi concurrente causa efficiente in suo genere ad causalitatem eius, ergo
habent in hoc mutuam inter se causalitatem in suis generibus, sicut materia et forma inter se.
Causa autem physica ac vera duplicem potest habere agendi
modum: scilicet vel naturaliter, vel libere, seu necessario, vel
contingenter . . .
Haec quaestio est facilis, et ideo breviter dicendum est primo,
dari in causis creaturis plures, quae necessario operantur, si
omnia, quibus ad operandum indigent, adhibeantur. Hoc
constat experientia, et inductione facili; nam Sol necessario
illuminat, ignis calefacit, et sic de aliis.
7. Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers, 56:
. . . any causal process can be interfered with or prevented by the introduction of some additional factor.
Sydney Penner
Suárez and Malebranche on Necessary Causes – Texts Handout
July 15, 2015
8. Mumford and Anjum, Getting Causes from Powers, 57:
If A necessitates B, then: if A plus φ, for any φ, then B.
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9. Suárez, DM 19.1.1:
But the qualification ‘if all the things required for operating are
present’ is added because what needs to be presupposed is a cause
that is sufficient, proximately ready, and with all the conditions
required for acting. For if any of these are missing, then the action will not follow—not, indeed, as a result of an indifference or
indeterminacy in the cause, but as a result of the failure of some
co-cause or of some power or of a condition necessary for operating.
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Additur vero illa condition, si omnia necessaria adsint, quia
supponenda est causa sufficiens, et proxime apta, et cum omnibus conditionibus ad agendum requisitis. Nam, si aliquid
horum desit, non sequetur actio, non quidem ex indifferentia vel indeterminatione causae, sed ex defectu alicuius concausae, vel ex defectu virtutis, aut conditionis necessariae ad
operandum.
10. John Stuart Mill, A System of Logic 3.5.3:
The cause, then, philosophically speaking, is the sum total of the conditions positive and negative taken together; the whole of the contingencies of every description, which being realized, the consequent invariably follows.
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11. Suárez, DM 19.1.14 (Freddoso’s translation; italics added by Ott; bolding in Latin added by me):
For if God had decided on his own part to grant his concurrence
Nam si Deus statuisset dare concursum quantum est ex se,
and had left all the other required conditions intact, then he would 26R et alias conditiones requisitas integras relinquere, non posset
have been unable to prevent the action. For it involves a contradicillam actionem impedire: quia implicat tollere id quod nattion to remove that which is natural in the absence of any contrary 28R urale est absque ulla contraria efficientia, vel saltem absque
efficient causality, or at least without withholding the assistance or
denegatione auxilii seu efficientiae necessariae ex parte Dei.
efficient causality that is required on God’s part.
12. Suárez, DM 19.1.14:
For how can a natural action be impeded if no impediment is
posited? Or what other impediment can be conceived if none of
the impediments previously mentioned intervene? Thus, once the
stated presupposition, as was explained, has been made, the action arises with such a strong necessity that it cannot be impeded
without removing some part of the presupposition.
13. Suárez, DM 19.10.2:
Now, however, even if God acts freely, we assume that God is prepared to concur with secondary causes and that he grants his concurrence by a fixed law . . . For philosophy does not consider the
miracles that God can perform in this way . . .
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Quomodo enim potest naturalis actio impediri nullo posito impedimento? Aut quod aliud impedimentum intelligi
potest, si nullum ex praedictis intervenit? Itaque dicta suppositione facta, ut declarata est, tanta necessitate suboritur
actio, ut impediri non possit nisi tollendo aliqua ex parte suppositione.
Nunc autem, etsi Deus agat libere, supponimus esse paratum
ad concurrendum cum causis secundis, et definita lege praebere suum concursum . . . Nam miracula quae in hoc Deus
facere potest, Philosophia non considerat . . .