Título breve del escenario de exposición: (Ref.: 7) Uso en agentes limpiadores, Uso por el consumidor

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Extension is not a manner of being, but a being. It is not an abstract, it contains its parts as a white canvas contains the drawings which will be traced upon it. This relationship between extension and its parts cannot be elucidated by a reference to analytical geometry, as Leon Brunschvicg thought to be the case:

Malebranche envisages analytical geometry only in its relationship to space. . . . the concrete representation of space supposes the reality of the idea which is without parts, without extension, which is a relationship such as the equation of a circle.1

Laporte, in L'Etendue intelligible chez Malebranche,2 observes cor-

rectly that Malebranche never draws examples from analytical geometry3

There is nothing in common between intelligible numbers, which are "all. . . mutually commensurable,"4 and intelligible extension, whose parts are not

always such.5 In fact, Malebranche undertakes a direct analysis of extension,

just as Leibniz openly attacked analysis situs. Malebranche confronts the notion of spatiality head on.

What relationships are there between intelligible extension and created extension?

50 FIFTH LECTURE

In the Search (first edition), we see in God the ideas of all bodies. The theory is modified in Elucidation Ten: human experience of extension is in fact subject to perspectival variations, and one cannot accept that God per- ceives individual bodies himself. But Malebranche does not renounce placing in God the ideal foundation for particularities. "It is therefore certain that one sees bodies only in general and intelligible extension, made perceptible and particular by color."6 The word "general" is ambiguous: it is not a matter of the

relationship of potency to act; rather extension contains the internal seeds of every being.

Intelligible extension is "the idea of created extension." There is in fact only one extension (created) and one idea of extension (intelligible). Percep- tible extension is itself connected to the source without which it would be inconceivable: there is an inner genesis of exteriority, at the end of a move- ment which establishes the relationship of the parts among themselves.

Here Malebranche returns to his analysis of knowledge: in order to have light, I must have a representative (in scientific language) being facing me, otherwise my soul would be dispersed and at the mercy of its various states. This necessitates a being whose entire essence is to offer itself to knowledge and which refers back to reality, because the human soul does not, by itself, have this agility and this transparence which alone would render it capable of knowing.

Intelligible extension is neither on the side of the subject (it is not a fact of knowledge) nor on the side of the object (it is not an In Itself): it is the conceptual nucleus by which real extension opens up to consciousness. Thus it can be explained that while there is only one extension, there is nonetheless an intelligible extension, that is to say a mode of being which is only the transition from consciousness of extension to effective extension. Intelligible extension is not an aspect of divine psychology, which would render it a thing or a kind of thing.

Descartes, in a letter to More, writes: "I call extended only what is imag- inable as having parts distinct from one another" ["ita illud solum quod est imaginabile, ut habens partes extra partes, . . . dico esse extensum"].7This

certainly represents a good description of this conceptual nucleus which consists of continuity and possible division. Malebranche, in turn, con- siders this nucleus and describes it as an object composed of intelligible parts and including "outsides and distances."8 However, he affirms as early

as the Responses to Arnauld that "the intelligible segment of a circle is smaller than the same circle and occupies neither more nor less space since it occupies no place."9 Is this a compromise? In no way: Malebranche con-

ceives of an extension which extends itself—a spatializing space—but which remains a space because the subject has already spatialized itself. This is the attitude of a philosophy for which there is ideality of space, but without any reduction of extension to what is not itself.

Perceptible Extension and Intelligible Extension 51

Having failed to understand this, Laporte fell into several errors: (1) He wonders, "how can we understand that something immaterial and unextended could represent matter, or could be used by God as a model for creating it?"10 Now it is precisely because it is merely representative that

intelligible extension can represent effective extension. Laporte does not distinguish between the unextended in the sense of psychological interi- ority and the unextended in the sense of ideality: the former inextension is opposed to the thought of extension whereas the latter makes it possible.

(2) He writes,

In this case, the known object, in that it is known by pure knowledge, is the idea of an entirely nude extension, colorless, invisible: in short, the idea of empty space, or more precisely (the notion of the void being as chimerical for Malebranche as it was for Descartes) the idea of air

and in this regard he quotes, in a footnote, a fragment of the Response to

R4gis, chap. II, § 3: "Since air is invisible, this idea does not modify my soul

with some color nor with some sensible perception in order to represent it, but with a pure perception."11 However, this does not signify that the intel-

ligible is merely attenuated sensibility. This purity is entirely relative. (3) From Malebranche's having written that intelligible extension is "the immediate object of the mind when it thinks about bodies which do not exist,"12 Laporte deduces that intelligible extension is nothing more than

imaginary extension, that it is "part of what makes up these images, of which contemporary psychology often still makes one of the ingredients of the psy-

chic world as opposed to the physical world,"13 and that it only resides in our

consciousness. This is an error because Malebranche does not think con- sciousness is closed: its meanings are not its own. Here again Laporte mis- takes the example for a definition and believes them to be interchangeable. Malebranche, precisely because he is a classic philosopher, escapes from realism by means of illusion (dream, hallucination, the error of amputees), but this is not to say that ideality is illusion. Psychological immanence is here only a transition toward transcendental immanence.

The real difficulty would be this: "Does there exist a way to include in the idea of extension the total reality of extension?" Malebranche writes,

[God] possesses everything which is real and perfect in creatures, without any imperfection, without any limitation. My hand is not my arm. It is real, but it contains, so to speak, the negation of my arm and of all the rest of ' the universe.14

Now in God such negations have no place, and Malebranche, who knows this well, adds, "But in God there is no nothingness."15 How, then, can the

52 FIFTH LECTURE

divine Word represent extension? Malebranche does not respond except by a categorical refusal:

That if I am asked to explain clearly how the divine Word contains bodies in an intelligible way, or how it is possible that the divine substance, although perfectly simple, is representative of creatures or participatable by creatures, I will respond that it is a property of the infinite which appears incomprehensible to me, and I will leave it at that.16

In other words, is the constitutive nothingness of creatures a simple pri- vation of being? If nothingness is nothing, we are on the path which leads to Spinoza. Otherwise it can be asked whether God remains God, since he does not have in him this real nothingness. Now the Correspondance avec

Mairan maintains the reality of the reciprocal exteriority of the parts of

extension. A "cubic foot of extension," whether there is something around it or not, will remain what it is. Since it is the negation of all others, it will maintain its existence:

What makes one cubic foot different from all others is its own being, its existence. Whether there are beings of the same or a different nature, if this is possible, or whether there is nothing which surrounds it, it will always be what it is.17

To Mairan, who objects that if ball A were a substance, "it would be infinite, for who would limit it?" Malebranche responds: "Nothing, I will reply. Because nothing is required to limit it."18 Therefore Malebranche chooses

resolutely to say that the alleged nothingness of things is not nothing; since they are not God, things must have their existence in themselves.

Going back to a perceptible extension, instinct, natural judgment: all these themes assume a "connection with existence" outside clear and dis- tinct thought.

sixmuiciura

Causality in the Relationships