O'Connor and Malebranche

In August I received a comment on an old post that I think I completely missed at the time, by Ben. But it's an interesting comment worth answering. The comment was:

I realize you wrote this entry a while ago, but I'd like to hear your thoughts on a possible further point of contact between O'Connor and Malebranche.

O'Connor's best-known story, "A Good Man Is Hard To Find," ends with the Grandmother's murder at the hands of the Misfit, who then offers the following comment on her life:

"She would of been a good woman," the Misfit said, "if it had been somebody there to shoot her every minute of her life."

The image of constant, presumably divine intervention here gives the passage a sort of occasionalist flavor to my ear. But if occasionalism is principally a metaphysical rather than an ethical doctrine, perhaps I'm off base. Any thoughts?

I don't know if there is a connection; but occasionalism as found in Malebranche is, in fact, as much an ethical doctrine as a metaphysical doctrine. (I discussed some of the ethical aspects here.) But the sort of thing that Ben seems interested here is perhaps more closely connected with Malebranche's doctrine of the interior teacher: The Divine Word, as interior Teacher (Malebranche adapst Augustine here), teaches us constantly by light and sentiment -- the latter being reprimands and exhortations of conscience. Perhaps there might be a connection there (certainly the notion of conscience and moral intelligence is a common theme in O'Connor).

Incidentally, with regard to the original Hulga and Malebranche, I find that students of O'Connor tend not to think that she was deliberately engaging in irony there. Of course, students of O'Connor tend not to realize that there is any irony in the situation. A typical instance seems to be Ralph C. Wood:

This is an apt, if pretentious, allusion for Hulga the Heideggerian to make, for Malebranche stands in the Cartesian tradition that runs from Hume and Berkeley through Kant and Heidegger. Malebranche held that we do not, in fact, see by our own light but by what he called "vision in God." He was obsessed with the Cartesian problem of human knowledge about objects outside themselves. Together with Descartes, he argued that knowledge of the world does not come from either sensation or imagination but from clear and distinct ideas perceived by the understanding. Yet unlike his master -- and much closer to Spinoza -- Malebranche held that "created things are in themselves causally inefficacious and that God is the sole true cause of change in the universe" (Willis Doney, "Malebranche, Nicholas," in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. V, ed. Paul Edwards [New York: Macmillan, 1967], p. 140). Malebranche's denial of the mind's ability to perceive truth through the natural order of things, together with his denial of secondary causes and thus of real human freedom, would make Hulga an ideal disciple of so unsacramental a thinker.

[Ralph C. Wood, Flannery O'Connor and the Christ-Haunted South (Grand Rapids, Michigan: Eerdmans, 2005), p. 201n.]

There are a number of confusions here (I wasn't aware that the Cartesian tradition ran from Berkeley to Heidegger, which is a new twist on the history of philosophy). But whereas I would suggest that Hulga's taste for Malebranche is highly ironic -- Malebranche is explicitly and aggressively Catholic, and his ontologism is an odd contrast to Hulga's nihilism -- Woods treats them as well-matched. I think there are two questions raised by this:

(1) What is the real function of Malebranche in "Good Country People" and, if there are any Malebranchean links elsewhere, in other stories?
(2) What did O'Connor actually know about Malebranche?

With regard to (2) I find Wood's interpretation rather implausible; surely O'Connor would have heard enough of Malebranche to know that he was both a Catholic and an ontologist -- she knows enough that she has Hulga quote Malebranche's favorite quotation from Augustine. Perhaps she didn't recognize that it was Augustinian? So that's perhaps a third question:

(3) Did O'Connor recognize the original Augustinian implications of the statement, "We are not our own light" or did she interpret in another way?

There is, related to this, another irony that I did not mention in the first post: namely, that Hulga's entire problem throughout the story is that she acts as if she were her own light. This confidence in her own intellect is what allows her to be deceived by Pointer.

O'Connor's use of, and knowledge of, Malebranche is certainly a worthwhile research project, if there's anyone out there interested in doing it.

Bits and Pieces

I don't normally Google myself, for three reasons: (1) There are a lot of Brandon Watsons; (2) mostly what returns about me are things I myself have written; (3) it's generally a bit silly to do searches for oneself. But I noticed that I got a few searches recently for "brandon watson" philosophy, and in a fit of curiosity waded through several pages of the obvious stuff and all the other Brandon Watsons, and did come across a few surprises, things I didn't know about or else had completely forgotten about.

#1: I once TA'd for a Philosophy of Literature course. One of the students whose papers I marked went on to publish a later version of the essay in the University of Toronto's undergraduate philosophy journal, Noesis. I must have missed the edition it came out in, or else had forgotten about it entirely. It's actually quite an interesting paper, taking Borges as a test case for the question of whether form and content can be completely separated in philosophy. It's actually quite an interesting paper. I'm thanked in the footnotes for my comments on the original. I do vaguely remember the essay, but don't recall at all my comments.

#2: I'm an objection in a footnote in Klaas Kraay's excellent paper Can God Choose a World at Random? (PDF) for comments I wrote here. I'd read the earlier paper, of course, but hadn't realized that Klaas thought the point worth responding to, since it's rather far from being a knock-down response to the particular point in question, and doesn't, I think, induce any serious problems for most of Klaas's argument. I do agree that most theists who hold that God can choose randomly would reject the idea that God is either a physical randomizing device or a nonphysical randomizing procedure; but I would have to see the argument for the claim that these are the only two possible classes of randomizer.

#3: In August of last year my other weblog was mentioned in Sundries, a newsletter on the 18th century.

#4: It's not really significant, but this post at Lawrence Solum's "Legal Theory Blog" appears to be the first mention of me in the blogosphere, a little less than a year before I even knew that the blogosphere existed. (It's a listing of papers at the Hume Conference in 2003.)

Hume's Dialogues as Philosophy of Science

Here is an old argument of mine that Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion should, despite the title, be read more as a work in the philosophy of science than in the philosophy of religion. It lacks one of the things it needs, namely, a discussion of the weaknesses of taking the Dialogues chiefly as a work in philosophy of religion (there are several). But I still think, by and large, it's on the right track.

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In essence, all the following arguments are based on recognizing that the primary topic of the Dialogues is the intelligibility of the world. In particular, it looks at this position, The order of the world is analogous to rational design, and determines how far and to what degree it can be held.

I. External reasons

A. Historical: Given the historical context of the Dialogues, reading them as a work of philosophy of science makes good sense. My argument is this:

The Dialogues are on the subject of natural religion.

One of the types of questions that were understood to fall within the field of natural religion at the time was the question of the ultimate foundations of the scientific enterprise. One finds this in (just to name a few):

Robert Boyle (on final causes)
Isaac Newton (in the Optics)
Richard Bentley (in his Boyle Lectures against atheism)
Nicholas Malebranche (Search 2.1.4, LO 98-100)

Discussions of these issues have strong resonances with points found in the Dialogues: e.g., final causes, Newton's Rule 1 (on the use of simplicity in science: Nature does nothing in vain), some of the arguments of people like Bentley and Malebranche against the Epicurean hypothesis (which was understood to argue that all things come about by chance rather than by divine providence).

Therefore it is reasonable to view the natural religion of the Dialogues as a ground on which questions about the ultimate foundations of the scientific enterprise are asked and certain answers to these questions (e.g., the design considerations of all four thinkers above) examined.

B. (More) Contemporary: The Dialogues discuss a subject which have been shown since its time to be of interest to those interested in the basic foundations of the entire scientific enterprise, and therefore reading them as philosophy of science can contribute to a perennial philosophical interest.

Some examples of people who, in looking at scientific work, have been interested in the topics covered by the Dialogue are:

Paley, Herschel & Whewell. British natural religion in the 19th century has obviously connections with the topics of the Dialogues. Note in particular that Herschel and Whewell are the 19th century's greatest philosophers of science; and that their design considerations are in many ways closely related to their work in the philosophy and history of science.

Kant. His work both on the conditions of the possibility of science and on the design argument necessarily bring him to topics discussed in the Dialogues.

Darwin, Huxley, et al. A number of issues touched on by the Dialogues have been essential to determining the status--and proper procedure--of biology. This goes back to Harvey and Boyle, although not exclusively to them, and is derived especially through Paley, whose texts were standard biological fare for a good portion of the 19th century. Darwin in part built his theory in conscious opposition to Paley (it has recently been recognized in a number of works on Darwin how heavily he was influenced, both positively and negatively, by Paley, and how significant the problem of animal suffering played in his thought). Huxley (in part) draws directly from the Dialogues, and he influences, in various ways, much of the 20th century.

Planck & Einstein. The scientific realism of both of these is related to thoughts pertaining to the topic of the Dialogue (in both cases generally influence by Kant). Einstein has some of the pithiest sayings along these lines, but the best formulation is probably in Planck's Scientific Autobiography.

Therefore discussing the Dialogues as philosophy of science can potentially contribute even to contemporary discussions, since its topics have a bearing on issues that have been discussed since Hume's time.

C. Scholarly: Let's level a moment. While there are exceptions, most scholarly work on the Dialogues has been, to be quite honest, mediocre at best. We find that treating the Dialogues as 'philosophy of religion' has led to preciously little fruitful research, little growth in our understanding of Hume, and interminable disputes about the same topics (e.g., Philo's 'change of mind' in Part XII, etc.). At the very least, a change of perspective should provide a breath of fresh air. Even if we are wrong, we will have learned something new. But I think we will find that reading the Dialogues as philosophy of science allows us to see and explore things in the Dialogues that have been simply overlooked. Further, it enables us to ignore those silly people who think that the Dialogues are the Absolute Apologetics of Atheism, conclusively refuting all theistic arguments, and to treat it in a more realistic fashion as a philosophical work treating of issues of interest to 'philosophy of religion' for a very limited, but still vital and important, purpose.

II. Internal Reasons

A. From Hume's Corpus Generally: Reading the Dialogues as philosophy of science fits well with some of what Hume says elsewhere. Most importantly, it explains why Hume considered natural religion to be a legitimate field of philosophical inquiry, for all that he dislikes its tendency to excess. I argue thus:

The justification given by Pamphilus in the Preface to the Dialogues is based on natural religion's capacity to satisfy curiosity.

Hume always associates the motive of curiosity with valuable and legitimate (although not always perfect) inquiry: in science (History), in Hume's own philosophical work (Treatise 1.4.7), and elsewhere (Treatise 2.3.10).

Therefore it is reasonable to think that Hume considers natural religion to have some genuine value. What could that be?

One of the other works in which Hume discusses issues relevant to the Dialogue is The Natural History of Religion. There Hume associates design considerations with the rise of monotheism, with which he considers it to be associated. One of the fundamental notions of NHR is that of the 'frame of nature': what distinguishes true religion from superstition is that the former is based on 'enquiries into the frame of nature', consideration of natural laws, and is motivated by curiosity or love of truth (Sect. II). Now, NHR is an extremely difficult work to interpret, and there is no fully convincing interpretation of it available, in part because it is irony-laden: Hume says things he certainly doesn't mean, and other things that he might not mean. There is, however, some reason for taking seriously certain elements of what Hume says here--namely, that design considerations become a live issue when, motivated by curiosity, we make 'enquiries into the frame of nature.' NHR, after all, is not one long piece of irony; it has a serious purpose, namely, to describe the natural history of religion. Associating design-monotheism with curiosity and inquiry is essential to the success of Hume's account. Therefore, it does not seem reasonable to regard this characterization as ironic, especially since there is nothing here nor anywhere else in Hume to suggest that we should treat it as ironic.

Therefore it is reasonable to place the value of natural religion in its involving 'enquiries into the frame of nature' motivated by curiosity.

Reading the Dialogues in the way I have suggested would make them in reality concerned with 'enquiries into the frame of nature' motivated by curiosity.

Therefore it is reasonable to read the Dialogues as philosophy of science.

B. From the Dialogues Particularly: There are a number of evidences internal to the Dialogues themselves that Hume regarded them as discussing matters of importance to scientific inquiry.

Cleanthes in Part I links the fortunes of natural religion with the sort of inquiry done in Newton’s Optics and the works of Copernicus and Galileo. Philo’s skepticism, as Cleanthes sees it, "is fatal to knowledge, not to religion." This issue is explored by much of the Dialogues. See Beryl Logan's article, "Science and Skepticism" in Hume Studies.

The discussion of Part II is thick with examples of successful and failed scientific reasoning, and ends with Galileo and Copernicus again, this time discussed by Philo.

In Part III Cleanthes continues the discussion of scientific reasoning & confounds Philo.

Demea at the end of Part III shifts the discussion again to what the experimental inference tells us of the nature of God. This is the topic of discussion in Part IV, but here again Philo still discusses scientific reasoning, focusing on its limits. This continues to be the case as Philo presses his case over the next several parts.

In Part XII Philo takes the trouble to reconcile his approach with the simplicity considerations involved in the choice of (again) the Copernican system by people like Copernicus and Galileo, as well as with the Newton-approved maxim, Nature does nothing in vain.

Therefore there is reason to believe that a major concern of the Dialogues is the nature and limitations of scientific reasoning itself: How far can the experiment inference actually carry us?

Therefore we seem to have good reason to focus at least as much, and perhaps more, on the philosophy of science issues, than on the philosophy of religion issues.

Metaphysical Links

Some metaphysical links:

* Clayton discusses whether the Kalam argument is consistent with divine omniscience.

* Tanasije sketches out an argument for the claim that there is a reason for everything.

* I've already linked to it, but I'll do so again: Kenny has a paper up on the semantics of sense perception in Berkeley.

* At Houyhnhnm Land, I note two contemporary comments on Lady Mary Shepherd. The first is a complimentary one by Thomas Noon Talfourd, in which he says that she "is a thinker of as much honesty as of courage". The second is a disparaging one by Harriet Martineau, where she says that Lady Mary "wasted her fine analytical powers on things unknowable or purely imaginary," which tells us, perhaps, more about Martineau's view of metaphysics than about Lady Mary Shepherd, so Martineau's attack on her puts her in the company of almost all the great minds of the time. Of course, anyone who has read Martineau knows that she's disparaging of almost everyone but herself. But Martineau has a delightful bit of gossip about Lady Mary that I'd not come across before; and while she interprets it as reflecting badly on Shepherd, I, of course, interpret it as yet one more reason to think that Shepherd's awesome.

* Alexander Pruss has put up his lecture notes on the cosmological argument.

* Michael Ruse has made some revisions to his SEP article on creationism. Re-reading it, I'm struck by how un-encyclopedia-like it is. It's interesting, of course; Ruse usually is interesting even when he's wrong, and I have strong sympathies in his direction on this subject (although I think he goes wrong in a number of places). But the article's approach to the subject is polemical, not at all suitable for a reference text. (One is struck by this throughout; Laudan's arguments that falsifiability is a poor criterion for demarcation are dismissed as "quibbles", for instance.) It's more like what one could hope to find in a good intellectual magazine than what one would want if you were looking for a good, sober introduction to the philosophical issues involved in creationism. Nonetheless, it is actually an enjoyable read.

* Carnivalesque 32, an early modern edition, is up at "Serendipities." While not strictly metaphysical in topic, some of the links you'll find there are. For instance, there's a post on Fontanelle's discussion of the plurality of worlds. But metaphysics or not, it's a good carnival, with a lovely common-place book theme.

And a reminder to myself to locate and read the following book:

James Henderson, Early Mathematical Economics: William Whewell and the British Case

Christine de Pisan on Her Husband

Daniel Mitsui recently had up a translation of one of Christine de Pisan's poems:

Ballad 26 ~ to her deceased husband

Marriage is a sweet thing,
I can prove it by my own example,
God indeed gave to me
A good and sensible husband.
Thank God for being willing
To save him for me, for I have truly
Experienced his great goodness:
Indeed the sweet heart loves me well.

The first night of our marriage,
I could already feel
His great goodness, for he never did to me
Any outrage which would have harmed me,
But, before it was time to get up,
He kissed me, I think, one hundred times,
Without asking for any other base reward:
Indeed the sweet heart loves me well.

And he said, with such tender words:
God made me live for you,
Sweet friend, and I think that he had me raised
For your personal use.
He did not stop raving like that
The whole night,
Without being any more immoderate:
Indeed the sweet heart loves me well.

Prince, he makes me mad for love,
When he says that he is all mine;
He will make me die of sweetness;
Indeed the sweetheart loves me well.

[Oevres poétiques de Christine de Pisan, Paris, Firmin Didot, 1891]

Christine's husband died rather young, and although he seems to have had many good qualities, a good head for money does not seem to have been one of them. She was left with a good number of bills and had to learn quickly both how to deal with creditors and how to bring in dollars, which she did by writing.

Sutherland on Hume on Design

Stewart Sutherland has an interview on Hume's Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion at "philosophy bites". He doesn't get across how much Hume's arguments there depend on certain crucial claims made by Cleanthes -- e.g., that there is no argument relevant to the subject except the analogical inference from design -- but this is a difficult topic to express clearly and accurately in a brief space, and he does very well.

Supporting Science in the Classroom

I had almost forgotten to mention anything about the ScienceBlogs DonorsChoose drive, which is raising money for science materials in classrooms. With just a few days left, both Bora and Janet could use a little help meeting their challenges. Click the links and look at each of the projects they're trying to make money for. If one looks good to you, contribute something to it!