Occasionalism (Philosophy)

Occasionalism (from the Latin occasio, «occasion») — a philosophical doctrine that explained the interaction of soul and body through the intervention of God, that is, that resolved the problem of the interaction between the extended and thinking substances and developed the dualism of Cartesianism.

The main representatives of this philosophical current in the Holy Roman Empire were the Frenchman Géraud de Cordemoy (1626−84), the German Johann Clauberg (1622−65), and the Dutchman Arnold Geulincx (1624−69). The doctrine of occasionalism was brought to its logical conclusion by the Frenchman Nicolas Malebranche (1638−1715), who formulated the thesis of the impossibility of a body's influence not only on the soul, but also on other bodies.

Occasionalism, according to the theory of the Dutch philosopher Arnold Geulincx, a professor at Leiden, consisted in the following: there is no connection between spiritual and material substance, but God, through His direct intervention, acts upon us such that, in response to a bodily phenomenon — an irritation — a mental phenomenon arises — a sensation; and conversely, in response to a mental phenomenon — an act of will — a bodily movement arises. Thus, irritations, on the one hand, and our volitions, on the other, serve merely as occasions (occasiones) of these various processes; the cause, however, is God. The moral task, according to Geulincx, consisted in obedience to reason and devotion to God.

At the foundation of Descartes's philosophy lies an extremely sharp division of the world into two kinds of substance — extended (material) and thinking (spiritual). Basing himself on the concept of mechanism, Descartes went against Aristotle's theory, denying the existence of a vegetative and animal soul. Animal and human bodies are mere mechanisms, «self-moving machines». All the functions of the organism arise from matter; they can be explained by the particular arrangement of the organs, the flow of blood, and the movement of the «bodily spirits», in the same way that the running of a clock is explained by the arrangement of gears and springs. But man is a thinking being, in whom the material and spiritual principles are joined, and the soul can somehow intervene in the workings of the material mechanism. But how can an unextended soul impart motion? To resolve this difficulty, Descartes proposes the hypothesis of a special organ in the brain, called the «pineal gland», in which the soul is located. This organ works like a valve, in which the slightest oscillations of the soul cause a change in the motion of the «bodily spirits».

This explanation, on the whole, did not solve the problem and did not satisfy Descartes's followers. Several paths toward a solution emerged, one of which was occasionalism. Its basic idea consists in the presence of an intermediary between the two substances, that intermediary being God.

Malebranche held that the soul cannot generate ideas by itself, nor can it derive them from the material world. Thus, all things are knowable only in God, and human souls are connected to God as the seat of the universal spirit. There is no necessary connection between body and soul; they are entirely different substances and therefore cannot interact. The soul can only conceive of its own body. Therefore, the actions of the soul upon the body, as well as the actions of the body upon the soul, require an intermediary. If a person, say, wants to move his hand, God perceives the wish of the thinking soul and moves the material hand through space.

You can neither move a finger nor utter even a syllable; alas, if God does not come to your aid, you will make only vain efforts and conceive impotent desires... you will be motionless and dead, unless God is willing to reconcile His will with yours, His ever-effective will with your ever-powerless one. Malebranche, «Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion» (1688)

Conversely, if a person pricks his finger, the sensation of pain is instilled in his soul not by the object that made the puncture in the body, but by God. Likewise, material bodies cannot act on one another by themselves. Malebranche did not venture to answer the question of why God wishes to join souls to bodies. He proposed accepting this fact as an objective given, believing that neither philosophy nor even religion could provide a final answer. Thus, Malebranche anticipates Hume's empiricism, eliminating objective causal connection and reducing it to nothing but divine will.

The doctrine first gained currency in the Islamic theological schools of Iraq, especially in Basra. The ninth-century theologian Abu al-Hasan al-Ash'ari maintained that there is no secondary causation in the created world. The world is sustained and governed through the direct intervention of divine primary causation. Thus, the world exists in a constant state of re-creation by God. In Arabic this was known as kasb.

The most famous proponent of the Ash'arite occasionalist doctrine was Abu Hamid Muhammad ibn Muhammad al-Ghazali, an eleventh-century theologian who lived in Baghdad. In his work «The Incoherence of the Philosophers», al-Ghazali began a philosophical critique of the early Islamic philosophers influenced by Neoplatonism, such as al-Farabi and Ibn Sina. In response to the philosophers' claim that the created order is governed by secondary efficient causes (God, so to speak, being the First and Final Cause in an ontological and logical sense), al-Ghazali argues that what we observe as regularity in nature, presumably based on some natural law, is in fact a kind of constant and continuous regularity. There is no independent necessity of change and becoming other than what God has predetermined. To posit independent causation apart from the knowledge and action of God is to deprive Him of true agency and to diminish His attribute of power. In his famous example, he argued that upon the contact of fire and cotton, the cotton burns not because of the heat of the fire, but through the direct intervention of God, and he supported this claim with logic. In the twelfth century, the Islamic theologian Fakhr al-Din al-Razi set out similar theories of occasionalism in his writings.

Since God is generally regarded as rational rather than arbitrary, his behavior — consisting in events usually occurring in the same sequence (that is, what appears to us as efficient causation) — can be understood as a natural manifestation of that principle of reason which we then describe as the laws of nature. However, strictly speaking, these are not laws of nature but laws by which God chooses to govern His own behavior (His autonomy in the strict sense) — in other words, His rational will. This, however, is not an essential element of the occasionalist approach, and occasionalism can include positions in which God's behavior (and, consequently, that of the world) is regarded as ultimately incomprehensible, thereby upholding the essential transcendence of God. On this understanding, seeming anomalies, such as miracles, are in fact not anomalies at all: it is simply God behaving in a manner that seems unusual to us. Given his transcendent freedom, he is not bound even by his own nature. Miracles, as violations of the rational structure of the universe, can occur because God's relations with the world are not mediated by rational principles.

In a 1978 article in the journal Studia Islamica, Lenn Goodman asks «Did al-Ghazali deny causality?» and shows that al-Ghazali did not deny the existence of observable, «worldly» causation. According to Goodman's analysis, al-Ghazali does not claim that there is never any connection between an observed cause and an observed effect: rather, al-Ghazali claims that there is no necessary connection between an observed cause and its effect.

One of the reasons for the emergence of this theory is the dualist belief that mind and matter are so different in their essence that one cannot affect the other. Thus, a person's mind cannot be the true cause of the movement of his hand, just as a physical wound cannot be the true cause of mental suffering. In other words, the mental cannot cause the physical, and vice versa. In addition, occasionalists generally hold that the physical also cannot cause the physical, since no necessary connection can be established between physical causes and effects. The will of God is held to be necessary.

However, this doctrine is most often associated with certain seventeenth-century philosophers of the Cartesian school. In Descartes's own writings there are hints of an occasionalist point of view, but these can largely be explained by alternative interpretations. However, many of his later followers quite explicitly held an occasionalist position. In one form or another, this doctrine is found in the writings of: Johann Clauberg, Claude Clerselier, Géraud de Cordemoy, Arnold Geulincx, Louis de La Forge, François Lamy, and (foremost among them) Nicolas Malebranche.

The negative argument of the occasionalists, who maintained that no necessary connections could be found between ordinary events, was anticipated by certain arguments of Nicholas of Autrecourt in the fourteenth century and was later taken up by David Hume in the eighteenth century. Hume, however, stopped short of the positive side of the theory, in which God was invoked to replace such connections, complaining that «our line is too short to fathom such immense depths». Instead, Hume held that the only place necessary connections could be found was in the subjective association of ideas within the mind itself. George Berkeley was likewise inspired by the occasionalists and agreed with them that no efficient power could be attributed to bodies. For Berkeley, bodies existed only as ideas in perceiving minds, and all such ideas, as he put it, were «visibly inactive». Berkeley, however, disagreed with the occasionalists by continuing to endow created minds with efficient power. Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz agreed with the occasionalists that there could be no efficient causal connection between distinct created substances, but he did not believe it followed from this that there was no efficient power in the created world at all. On the contrary, every simple substance possessed the capacity to produce changes within itself. The illusion of transient efficient causation, in Leibniz's view, arose from the pre-established harmony between the changes produced immanently within the various substances. Leibniz means that if God did not exist, «there would be nothing real in possibilities, not only nothing existing, but nothing possible».

In 1993, Karen Harding, a chemistry professor at Pierce College, published an article, «Causation Then and Now: Al-Ghazali and Quantum Theory», in which she described several «remarkable» similarities between al-Ghazali's concept of occasionalism and the widely accepted Copenhagen interpretation of quantum mechanics. She stated: «In both cases, contrary to common sense, objects are treated as possessing no inherent properties and no independent existence. For an object to exist, it must be created either by God (al-Ghazali) or by the observer (the Copenhagen interpretation)». She also stated:

Furthermore, the world is not entirely predictable. According to al-Ghazali, God is able to do whatever He pleases, whenever He pleases. On the whole, the world functions predictably, but a miraculous event can occur at any moment. For a miracle to occur, it is sufficient that God not follow His «custom». The quantum world is very similar. Lead balls fall when released because the probability of such behavior is very high. However, it is entirely possible that a lead ball might «miraculously» rise rather than fall when released. Although the probability of such an event is very small, it is nonetheless still possible.

Continuing the work of the philosopher Graham Harman on occasionalism in the context of object-oriented ontology, Simon Weir in 2020 proposed an alternative view of the relationship between quantum theory and occasionalism, one opposed to the Copenhagen interpretation, in which virtual particles act as one of many kinds of mediating sensual objects. ^{[ 1}