Occasionalism in Islamic philosophy and theology

Named after Imam Ash’ari (936 AD), a famous scholar on Islamic theology, the Ash’arite tradition was the first school to embrace occasionalism consistently. In Ash’arite cosmology, the universe can be analyzed in terms of two main categories: those of substance and those of accident. An accident can be simply regarded as a property and a substance is the thing to which properties are attributed. Substances are usually identified with indivisible particles (atom). Atoms are homogeneous, and the diversity in nature appears as a result of the heterogeneity of accidents inhered in these substance-atoms. Accidents are considered to be perishable by their nature. No accident can endure but perishes in the second-instant of its coming to be if God does not recreate it in its substance. This is the crucial point in support of occasionalism. Accidents cannot exist by themselves and the atoms which need accidents to exist cannot exist by themselves either. All atoms and accidents need the power of God in order to exist and subsist over time. In Ash’arite metaphysics, it is not the case that God can create anything. Some things do not fall under the extension of divine power. It is absurd that substances can exist without accidents and there is no rationality in saying that God can create a substance without accident. Logically contradictory cases are also excluded from the scope of divine power. In other words, to say that God can create round squares or logically contradictory cases is a category mistake like saying that number 2 is green. Numbers are not the things to which the color predicates apply. In other words, color-predicates have a certain range or extension of applicability which excludes numbers. On the other hand, the properties of “being odd” or “being even” apply to numbers, but not to material objects. Saying that this chair is even is another category mistake. So each predicate has a certain extension to which this predicate legitimately applies. Things or expressions which are not in the scope (extension) of a certain predicate lead to a category mistake if they are associated with this predicate. So the sentence “God cannot do something” includes a category mistake if that thing in question is a contradiction for instance, because contradictions are not within the scope of divine power. In brief, the general features of the Ash’arite cosmology present a discontinuous universe, which depends on God’s creative power to exist and subsist at each moment. Furthermore, it does not consider certain cases such as absurdities to be possible with respect to creation. Al-Kindi supports the Ash’arite picture of the universe by indicating the impossibility of a real causal link between natural objects. He points out that anything which is being affected or being acted upon cannot be a true agent. The true agent acts upon what is affected without itself being affected by any kind of effect. Everything in this universe is acted upon and affected by something else. So God is the only true agent. The rest are only metaphorically causes which do not have real causal powers. Later, al-Ghazali focused on the apparent causal relations between events and argues that the causal relation between any two events can be justified neither logically nor by experience. Let’s consider his following example where fire and a piece of cotton are found together and the cotton is burned. A piece of cotton and fire cannot have a logically necessary relation between themselves because we can think of one event without the other, which does not lead to any contradiction. Observation cannot justify that burning of the cotton is a necessarily causal effect of fire because we can observe only that fire and the burning of cotton appeared together, but not that fire caused the burning. This occasionalist metaphysics does not deny that human beings are free in their choices and will be responsible for what they do. The Ash’arites suggest the following formula with respect to human acts: human beings acquire their acts, while God creates these acts. Al-Maturidi later clarifies the nature of the acquisition of their act by human beings by considering human choice as the ground for this acquisition. The thesis that God is the only causal agent in the universe provoked discussion as to whether or not human choice is created by human beings. If human choice is created by human beings, then occasionalism is rejected because, in that case, humans will have causal power together with God. If God creates human choices, then human beings cannot be held responsible for their choices simply because they are not their choices. Sadr-us Sharia and later Taftazani offer an ingenious solution to this problem by denying that human choice falls under the scope of divine power. In their view, human choice is a relational and relative matter that appears between the inclination and the action. For instance, assume that I have a desire to drink water. I choose to drink it and then take a glass of water and perform the action. My choice is a relational matter between my desire to drink water and the act of drinking it. Relations are not things that have definite existence. Think of rightness and leftness. My pen is on the right side of my tea cup from a certain perspective and is on the left side from another perspective. Even though my pen and my tea cup have definite existence, the relations of rightness and leftness which appear between them do not have. These relations are relative matters and because of that they are not genuine objects to which divine power is applicable. In other words, human choice as a relational matter is not under the scope of divine power as round squares are not. As a result, it would be a category mistake to say that God could or could not create human choices. Let’s see how occasionalism is articulated in the West.

Malebranche’s occasionalism and the Cartesian tradition

Malebranche (d. 1715) is a follower of Descartes. He accepts the basic principles of the Cartesian philosophy and inherits the problems remained from Descartes. What is the exact nature of causality? How is the mind related to the body? These are some of the important questions the Cartesian philosophers tried to answer. Malebranche’s occasionalism is a reply to such problems as well as a result of his theological concerns. As far as his theological motivation is concerned, Malebranche concluded that a belief in secondary causality, namely ascribing causal power to beings other than God, leads to paganism. For Malebranche, if we are under the control of a power belonging to a natural being, then we should serve it because of the following principle of St. Augustine: whatever truly acts upon us, it is above us, and inferior things serve the superior things. As a result, he denies any causal efficacy in the created realm. Malebranche calls his doctrine “occasionalism” because God creates events, not arbitrarily but in a regular manner, where certain natural events are “occasions” for God’s creation of certain effects. What people ordinarily call “causes or natural powers” are in fact “occasional causes” in the sense that they are depicting the uniformity of God’s operation in the world and providing us with an ordered system of created nature. If we use al-Ghazali’s example, we can say that the existence of fire near a piece of cotton is the occasional cause for God’s burning of that cotton. Because of the emphasis on occasional causes, occasionalists do not rule out scientific activity-on the contrary, they encourage it. In their view, scientists are looking for the secret and hidden occasional causes and try to understand how God operates on earth. God is the only true cause having genuine causal power. According to Malebranche’s analysis of true causation, there must be a necessary link between a true cause and its effect. A necessary link holds only between the will of an infinitely perfect being and some effect. This is the reason why only God can be regarded as a true cause. In other words, any event or effect needs an absolute power to become existent. It is impossible for finite beings to cause anything at all. That is to say, the two types of finite beings of the Cartesian metaphysics, namely bodies and minds are causally inefficacious. Malebranche accepts Descartes’s characterization of bodies and minds. Bodies are essentially extended substances, minds are thinking substances. Bodies are by definition impotent because the idea of extension does not include the idea of power; there is no power belonging to the essence of bodies. Malebranche believed that observation or sense experience leads us to imagine a causal link between two interacting bodies such as when a billiard ball hits another one. He holds that reason corrects sensation and shows us the truth about the inefficacy of the balls in question by reflecting upon the concept of extension which excludes the concept of power or causal efficacy. Minds also are causally impotent. However, people have free will by which they are responsible for their acts. Malebranche abstains from ascribing causal power to the human will by saying “I do not know if that can be called power.” However, he does not offer a detailed account like that of Taftazani regarding the question as how people can be free without having causal powers of their own. Nevertheless, his occasionalism offers a good solution to the mind-body problem which bothered Descartes and many Cartesians. This problem is quite complicated because mind and body are postulated as two completely distinct substances having nothing in common. How then are they interacting, for instance, when we feel pain whenever we cut our hand or when we move a chair should we desire to do that? Malebranche resolves this problem by claiming that every state in mind and body is created by God in accordance with each other. It is God who creates the desire to drink water and again God who moves our arms without any intervention between mind and body and creates the action of drinking water. Simply speaking, the human’s role in this picture is choosing to actualize or ignore the intentions they have in their minds. Malebranche comes closer to the Ash’arites in his approach to the matter of absurdities. Contradictions and similar absurdities are not subject to divine power and will. This contention of Malebranche diverts him from Descartes’s path because Descartes allows that God could have changed logico-mathematical laws. Malebranche rejects this view and excludes logico-mathematical contradictions from the scope of divine power.

Conclusion

For many people, the idea that the universe is constantly created and controlled only by divine power is difficult to grasp. Many tend to believe in a more naturalistic explanation of the universe, where everything has its own power and role in the whole system. Nevertheless, it is easy to see how we sometimes can be mislead if we remember of our inability to perceive movie frames. The picture of the reality is more complicated than its appearance. There are very good reasons to adopt an occasionalistic explanation of the universe. It is interesting to see that this explanation is advocated by both Muslim and Christian philosophers. We see many parallel lines between Malebanche and the Muslim philosophers on this issue. There are sufficiently strong arguments both from East and West showing that occasionalism is well justified, and has satisfying implications in terms of human responsibility and scientific activity.

Even though Kant has very original insights that opened new gateways in the history of philosophy, his so-called “critical philosophy” is not devoid of defects. This article aims to present Kant’s account of causation and critically evaluate it.

Kant’s famous remark about his awe for “the starry heavens above me, and the moral law within me,” which is written in his gravestone, shows his orientation in philosophy. While he was interested in explaining the features of the universe and the nature of our theoretical knowledge, he did not ignore the practical aspect of our life that concerns with how to act in the right way. That is to say, ethics and natural science were main disciplines Kant tried to understand. However, this paper examines his analysis of theoretical knowledge and the natural science by focusing on his account of causality.

An introduction to Kant’s “critical philosophy”

Before Kant, there were two important traditions in modern philosophy: rationalism and empiricism. On the one hand, the rationalists assumed that we could obtain knowledge of the world by trusting in the power of our minds. Kant considered them to be dogmatic in the sense that they dogmatically assumed this idea without examining the nature and limits of our minds so as to see whether we can really achieve this goal or not. On the other hand, the empiricists usually distrusted the power of the mind in its attempt to know the world, and in its most extreme case, in Hume, it led to skepticism. In response to these two approaches, Kant suggested to examine critically the nature and limits of the mind and see to what degree we can have knowledge at all. This is called “critical philosophy.”

For Kant, our minds are not passive receivers of representations like mirrors. A normal flat mirror reflects the image from an object as if it is the same except in a two-dimensional way. It was a common attitude among philosophers before Kant to treat the mind like a mirror. The mirror does not change the form of the object. Likewise, the mind does not affect or change the form of the objects, it just receives them. However, Kant changed the whole picture. He treated minds as active filters. Whatever is reflected on it is shaped in a certain way. On this view, the mind is like a concave or convex mirror, or colormatic glasses but it is not like a flat mirror.

According to Kant, the mind has three faculties with different functions. These faculties are sensibility, understanding and reason. Through sensibility we get the raw material of experience. This material is structured and shaped by space and time which are not outside the mind but are the pure forms of the faculty of sensibility. What we get through this faculty is called “intuition.”

The faculty of understanding provides us with concepts, especially with “the pure concepts,” or categories, of which there are twelve in total, and are used in organizing the intuition. In brief, what is reflected on the mind as coming from the world is structured by the a priori forms of intuiton (space and time) to which the twelve categories of mind are applied.

Kant’s postulation of the mind as an active factor in obtaining knowledge is considered to be “the copernican revolution” in philosophy. Kant has a formula which depicts his system very well: “Thoughts without content are empty, intuitons without concepts are blind.” In order to have understanding, we should both have intuition and concepts. These two conditions should be fulfilled for a genuine and reliable understanding. First, concepts without intuiton do not give us understanding; we can just think about them and never be sure whether they are something about real or not. According to Kant, concepts such as soul, God, and free will are ideas to which no intuition corresponds. Second, if there were no ordering role of the mind, all the information we got from the world would be chaotic. For instance, we would not be able to identify a certain individual as a human being, an animal of a different sort or even as an object, because we lacked an ability to order and classify the information. Therefore, according to Kant, the world appears to us differently from as it is in itself due to the ordering character of the mind.

Kant calls the world as it appears to us “phenomena” and the world in itself “noumena.” The latter is beyond the limits of the legitimate realm of theoretical knowledge. We cannot understand it, and we cannot theoretically know anything about it: we can only think about it. Ideas such as those of God and free will are directed toward the nounemal realm. They belong to the faculty of reason and have a regulative role in ordering and unifying our experience. However, they are empty according to Kant. That is to say, there is no corresponding intuition to them in our experience. Thus, we cannot decide whether they really exist or not by theoretical knowledge. This conclusion of Kant’s critical philosophy may suggest an agnostic position towards God, (actually it led many people to become agnostics) according to which human beings can neither affirm nor deny the existence of God. However, Kant thought that he found a reason for believing in God in another domain, namely in practical reason and knowledge. Nevertheless, Kant’s attempt to show the illegitemacy of theoretical knowledge regarding neumena undermines itself. This can be seen especially in his analysis of causality.

Synthetic a priori truths

Kant takes mathematical science and natural science for granted. He accepts them as successful sciences and tries to understand the conditions under which they are possible. His conclusion is that these sciences can be grounded only on “synthetic a priori judgments.” There are two important conceptual distinctions here: the analytic-synthetic and the a priori-a posteriori. The former is a semantic distinction, the latter is epistemological. A statement is analytic if its predicate-concept is included in the subject-concept, otherwise it is synthetic. The proposition that all black cats are black or that bachelors are unmarried is analytic. A black cat is black, the predicate is embedded in the subject here. And bachelors are by definition unmarried because a bachelor is a single male. However, the color of my cat is not included in its definition. A priori judgments are known independently of experience whereas a posteriori ones are known by appealing to experience as a justification. We know that everything is identical to itself without any experience. But we need some experiential evidence to affirm the statement that the Morning Star is identical with the Evening Star. It was a scientific discovery that those stars were actually the same, namely Venus.

For Kant, all analytic judgments are a priori. He also claims that there are synthetic a priori statements. This is a bit unusual because we normally know synthetic statements by experience. How can we know a statement a priori if its predicate is not included in the subject? Kant explains the possibility of such judgements by appealing to the mind’s role in shaping experience. According to him, by applying the categories to intuition, we put what is in our minds into our experiences. So, “we can cognize of things a priori only what we ourselves have put into them.” In other words, the categories shape the experience and we know that aspect of experience a priori since it belongs to us. The conceptual distinctions presented so far enable us to understand Kant’s account of causality better.

Causality

From a historical point of view, Kant’s account of causality was a response to Hume’s scepticism about causation. Let us first see what Hume said about this issue. Hume points out that we only observe correlated events in nature, and that there are some regular correlations and some irregular ones. For instance, we always observe that lightning precedes thunder. On the basis such regular correlations, we infer that the events in question are also causally related. That is to say, lightning causes thunder. However, according to Hume, we never observe causation between events. What is observed is just that two events are correlated in a regular manner. Causation is what our mind is inclined to infer when faced with such regularities. Causal links are produced by the human mind as subjective mental operations. So, there is no objective causality between events: it is our subjective interpretation of the regularity between them.

If we consider the fact that electrical charges are regarded as the common causal factor behind lightning and thunder by contemporary scientists, we can appreciate what Hume said. We do not observe causal links. Perhaps, sometime in the future, scientists will propose another physical factor as the cause for thunder, lightning and maybe for electical charges. Since we do not observe causal links, we can never be sure about what causes what. Hume extends this skepticism so far that nothing really causes anything else. There is no objective causation; there are just correlations in our experience. In other words, he also denies the objectivity of the universal causal principle, namely that every effect or event must have a cause.

As a response, Kant distinguishes two different levels in analysing causation. On the one hand, he tries to prove the objectivity of the universal principle of causality. Kant is aware of the difficulty of proving it on the basis of experience. Such a universal principle cannot be based on experience. Kant considers this univeral principle as a synthetic a priori truth. It is valid for anything we experience because all our experience is shaped by the category of causality. He formulates this principle in the following way: everything that happens presupposes that which it follows in accordance with a rule.

According to Kant, the phenomena consisting in irreversible sequences indicate the causal order. As an example of irreversible sequence, he mentions the sequence when we look at a ship moving down the river. In this case, what we apprehend is an objective process. And its order cannot be arranged otherwise than in this very succession. So, when we watch the ship’s departure, the order in which our visual states occur is not up to us. As a conclusion, Kant argues that in irrevesible cases, the apprehension of one perception which occurs necessarily succeeds that of the other which preceded according to a rule called “the law of the connection of cause and effect.”

On the other hand, Kant’s analysis of irreversible sequences does not suggest anything about particular causal relations. A particular sequence of irreversible representations does not enable us to identify the cause of the event in question: it only indicates that the event in question must have a cause (in the sense that some other event precedes it), even if we do not know what this cause is. Kant expresses this point by saying that “Everything in nature, as well in the inanimate as in the animated world, happens or is done according to rules, though we do not always know them….”

While there are some ambigious passages indicating as if Kant has identified some necessary causal links between particular events (such as that the sunshine caused the warmth of a stone), those passages should be interpreted under the light of this general statement here. The reason simply is that Kant aims to exemplify his view of causation in such contexts rather than identifying some particular causal links.

A fundamental problem with Kant’s analysis of causality

As we have seen, Kant treats the universal principle of causality as a synthetic a priori truth. In doing so, he limits causal ascriptions to the phenomenal realm because it is the phenomenal realm not the noumenal realm, which is shaped by our minds. So, according to Kant causal talk about noumena, things in themselves, is not legitimate and does not give us theoretical knowledge.

However, the question that should be answered in this regard is if the human mind interacts with noumena. If so, how does it interact? In some passages, Kant seems to consider noumena to be an empty and limiting concept. We cannot know anything about this realm (even whether or not noumenal objects such as free will, soul and God exist), therefore it is just a heuristic device indicating what is beyond our theoretical knowledge. Thus, we cannot say anything about the relationship between the mind and noumena, because noumena are beyond our understanding. Otherwise, anything we say can only be an illegitimate speculation.

Nevertheless, such passages do not represent Kant’s whole philosophical outlook. As a fundamental aspect of his critical philosophy, Kant assumes that our experience is shaped by us but not totally created by us. There is an external element to experience that is independent of us. He must accept that there are noumenal objects even though we do not know what they are. They are not just conceptual tools formulated to define the phenomenal realm. In fact, there are several passages in which Kant explicitly ascribes causal efficiency to the noumenal realm.

For instance, when Kant distances himself from the idealist philosophers who claim that everything we perceive is mind-dependent and there is no objective reality outside the mind, he claims that “there are bodies without us, that is, things which, though quite unknown to us as to what they are in themselves” and that we know them “by their representations which their influence on our sensibility procures us.”

As another example, this time regarding the free will of human beings, Kant thinks that human beings are free with respect to the noumenal realm but under causal determination with respect to phenomenal realm. When he tries to account for moral responsibility, he presents the free will as having its own causal power to be able to appropriate particular human actions. The following is an explicit remark: “The will is a kind of causality of living beings so far as they are rational.”

As it is clearly seen, Kant is forced to accept that the realm of things in themselves (noumena) causes the realm of appearances (phenomena) and this is exactly what undermines the very foundation of his critical project as limiting theoretical knowledge to phenomena.

Conclusion

Kant certainly has an insight in making a distinction between phenomena and noumena; however, his way of distinguishing these two realms undermines his own critical philosophy. There is a similar distinction made by Muslim theologians between dhahir (phenomena) and batin (noumena). In their case, categories of causality and existence for instance are legitimately applicable to noumenal realm, but they argue that we do not know how they are applicable. According to them, for instance, we know that God exists but we do not know how He exists. His existence is quite different from our existence. As Descartes says: “A finite mind cannot grasp [adequately] God, who is infinite. But that does not prevent [the finite thinker] having a perception of God, just as one can touch a mountain without being able to put one’s arms around it.” As a conclusion, Kant’s distinction between phenomena and noumena should be improved so that it enables us to ascribe existence and causality to the noumenal realm even in a minimal sense.