Nicolas Malebranche

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Nicolas Malebranche

In 1664, Malebranche first read Descartes' Treatise on Man, an account of the physiology of the human body. Malebranche's biographer, Father Yves André reported that Malebranche was influenced by Descartes' book because it allowed him to view the natural world without Aristotelian scholasticism. Malebranche spent the next decade studying Cartesianism.

Philosophical career

In 1674–75, Malebranche published the two volumes of his first and most extensive philosophical work. Entitled Concerning the Search after Truth. In which is treated the nature of the human mind and the use that must be made of it to avoid error in the sciences (French: De la recherche de la vérité. Où l’on traite de la Nature de l’Esprit de l’homme, et de l’usage qu’il en doit faire pour éviter l’erreur dans les Sciences), the book laid the foundation for Malebranche's philosophical reputation and ideas. It dealt with the causes of human error and on how to avoid such mistakes. Most importantly, in the third book, which discussed pure understanding, he defended a claim that the ideas through which we perceive objects exist in God.

Malebranche's first critic was the Abbé Simon Foucher, who attacked the Search even before its second volume had been published. Malebranche replied in a short preface added to that second volume, and then, in the 1678 third edition, he added 50% to the already considerable size of the book with a sequence of (eventually) seventeen Elucidations. These responded to further criticisms, but they also expanded on the original arguments, and developed them in new ways. In the Tenth Elucidation, for instance, Malebranche introduced his theory of "intelligible extension", a single, archetypal idea of extension into which the ideas of all particular kinds of bodies could be jointly resolved. In others, Malebranche placed a greater emphasis than he had previously done on his occasionalist account of causation, and particularly on his contention that God acted for the most part through "general volitions" and only rarely, as in the case of miracles, through "particular volitions".

Malebranche expanded on this last point in 1680 when he published Treatise on Nature and Grace. Here, he made it explicit that the generality of the laws whereby God regulated His behaviour extended not only to His activity in the natural world but also applied to His gift of

Just as all human action (along with the action of any other creature) is entirely dependent on God, so too is all human cognition. Malebranche argued that human knowledge is dependent on divine understanding in a way analogous to that in which the motion of bodies is dependent on divine will. Like René Descartes, Malebranche held that humans attain knowledge through ideas – immaterial representations present to the mind. But whereas Descartes believed ideas are mental entities, Malebranche argued that all ideas exist only in God. These ideas, therefore, are uncreated and independent of finite minds. When we access them intellectually, we apprehend objective truth. Malebranche defined "truth" as a relation between ideas: since these ideas are in God, they are eternal and immutable, and consequently the only truths worthy of the name will themselves be eternal and immutable. Malebranche divided these relations between ideas into two categories: relations of magnitude and relations of quality or perfection. The former constitute "speculative" truths, such as those of geometry, while the latter constitute the "practical" truths of ethics. Ethical principles, for Malebranche, are therefore divine in their foundation, universal in their application, and to be discovered by intellectual contemplation, just as geometrical principles are.

With regard to this account of intellectual knowledge, Malebranche was more or less following

Malebranche was strongly influenced by Descartes but did not accept his philosophy uncritically. He is noted particularly for his view that we see all things in God and for his adoption of psycho-physical parallelism and 'occasionalism' to deal with the problem of interaction between mind and body. However, his attribution of epistemological and explanatory primacy to God leads to difficulties.

(1) If we see all things in God in the sense that He puts the ideas into our minds we can have no direct knowledge of the external world. We can appeal to clear and distinct ideas as a criterion for the veridicality of judgements about physical things, but it is God who is ultimately responsible for our ideas.

(2) If all things are under the direct control of God, subject to His will, what of human freedom? Malebranche's view that we have freedom to choose but only in relation to finite goods is not convincing, denying as it does the possibility of resistance of movement towards God as the universal good. (This may be a misrepresentation of Malebranche's view; see the first chapter of The Search for Truth, where he specifies that while we cannot but desire the good in general, we are free to apply that love to particulars, and can do so in a disordered fashion that leads to sin. His account is no different from St. Augustine's in this regard.)

(3) In so far as God is not to be identified with the archetypal eternal truths in his mind, Malebranche is not a pantheist. But, as in mediaeval philosophy, this gives rise to the problem of reconciling God's freedom with His supposed immutability.

Theodicy

Malebranche's theodicy is his solution to the problem of evil. Although he conceded that God had the power to create a more perfect world, free from all defects, such a world would have necessitated a greater complexity in divine ways. Thus, God produces the natural evils that follow from simple laws not because he wills those particular effects, but because he wills a world that best reflects his wisdom by achieving the best possible balance between the intrinsic perfection of the work and the simplicity and generality of its laws.

Malebranche's dualism

Whereas Malebranche followed

I am unable, when I turn to myself, to recognize any of my faculties or my capacities. The inner sensation which I have of myself informs me that I am, that I think, that I

sensory awareness, that I suffer, and so on; but it provides me with no knowledge whatever of what I am – of the nature of my thought, my sensations, my passions, or my pain – or of the mutual relations that obtain between all these things. ...I have no idea whatever of my soul.^[3]

This leads Theodore to declare that 'I am not my own light to myself'; the nature of our own minds is highly obscure. What is more, with regard to psycho-physical interaction, Malebranche argues that body could not act on mind, nor mind on body. The only active power (hence the only efficient cause of change in the world) is God. When I will that my arm should rise, my volition is the "occasion" or the "occasional cause" of the movement of my arm; the efficient cause of both my volition and the movement of my arm is God. Malebranche's doctrine, which could be found in contemporary commentaries on Aristotle, and which first appeared in certain Arab philosophers, is therefore called "occasionalism".[3]

Occasionalism

In general,

Malebranche also developed an original theory related to preformationism, postulating that each embryo probably contained even smaller embryos ad infinitum, like an idealized Matryoshka doll. According to Malebranche, "an infinite series of plants and animals were contained within the seed or the egg, but only naturalists with sufficient skill and experience could detect their presence" (Magner 158–9).^[4]

Legacy

Aside, perhaps, from John Norris (who, in any case, drew at least as much from Malebranche's own sources, primarily Saint Augustine, as he did from Malebranche himself), there are few if any philosophers who can be considered faithful followers of Malebranche in all matters. He was, however, held in widespread high regard within his own lifetime and for some time afterwards, and the influence of certain of his ideas can be discerned in the works of several important figures.

David Hume supported and drew upon Malebranche's negative arguments to show that no genuine causal connections could be conceived between distinct mundane entities. However, when it came to finding a positive replacement for such causal connections, he turned inwards to the workings of the human mind, instead of turning upwards to God. With regard to this second half of Malebranche's occasionalism, Hume wrote:

We are got into fairy land, long ere we have reached the last steps of our theory. ...Our line is too short to fathom such immense abysses.^[7]

Hume's

Locke withheld his "An Examination of P[ère] Malebranche's Opinion Of Seeing All Things In God" from publication, "because he looked upon it to be an opinion that would not spread but was like to die of itself, or at least to do no great harm."[9] Much as Locke predicted, Malebranche's reputation outside France (where he always enjoyed high esteem) did begin to diminish during the 18th century, and remained low thereafter. However, over the last three or four decades, Malebranche's work has drawn renewed and ever-increasing interest. Several of his works have been translated into English for the first time, as scholars have been reassessing his ideas. Many^[who?] have begun to argue that the originality and unity of his philosophical system merits him a place alongside such figures as Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz.

Bibliography

Works in English

• The Search after Truth and Elucidations, eds. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). First published, with Philosophical Commentary, by Ohio State University Press, 1980).
• Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, eds. Nicholas Jolley and David Scott. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). Supersedes 1923 translation by Morris Ginsberg.
• Treatise on Nature and Grace, tr. Patrick Riley. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992).
• Philosophical Selections, ed. Steven Nadler. (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992). Contains selections (some in alternative translations) from above three works.
• Treatise on Ethics, tr. Craig Walton. (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1993).
• Dialogue between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher on the Existence and Nature of God, tr. Dominick A. Iorio. (University Press of America, 1980).
• Correspondence with Dortous de Mairan, in Malebranche's First and Last Critics, tr. Richard A. Watson and Marjorie Grene. (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1995).

The Thomas Taylor translation of the Search (1694; second edition 1700) includes material not contained in the Lennon and Olscamp edition (which is based on the 1712 version of the text). It is bound with Malebranche's Defence against the Accusation of M. de la Ville, which has not been available in English at all since the seventeenth century. The Treatise of Nature and Grace is also included in the same volume. Rival translations of all three of these works were also published by Richard Sault in 1694–95. In addition, the Conversations chrétiennes were translated in 1695 as Christian Conferences... to which is added, Meditations on Humility and Repentance: this work has also been unavailable in English since the seventeenth century.

The standard edition of Malebranche's works in French is the Œuvres Complètes, ed. André Robinet, twenty volumes (Paris: J. Vrin, 1958–78).^[10]

See also

• List of Roman Catholic scientist-clerics

References