It was not until age sixteen that Nicolas Malebranche entered the college de la Marche of the University of Paris. He received the master of arts degree there in 1656 after having attended the lectures of the renowned Peripatetic M. Rouillard.
Gallery of Nicolas Malebranche
Sorbonne, Paris, Ile-de-France, France
Nicolas Malebranche's piety inclined him toward the priesthood, and for three years he studied theology at the Sorbonne. It seems, however, that he was no more satisfied with this instruction than he had been with commentaries on Aristotle.
Career
Gallery of Nicolas Malebranche
1713
Paris, France
Nicolas Malebranche's engraving by Gerard Edelinck after a portrait by J.-B. Santerre made in 1713.
Gallery of Nicolas Malebranche
Nicolas Malebranche's engraving.
Gallery of Nicolas Malebranche
Nicolas Malebranche's engraving.
Gallery of Nicolas Malebranche
Nicolas Malebranche's portrait.
Gallery of Nicolas Malebranche
Nicolas Malebranche
Gallery of Nicolas Malebranche
Nicolas Malebranche's engraving.
Achievements
Membership
French Academy of Sciences
Nicolas Malebranche was a member of the French Academy of Sciences.
It was not until age sixteen that Nicolas Malebranche entered the college de la Marche of the University of Paris. He received the master of arts degree there in 1656 after having attended the lectures of the renowned Peripatetic M. Rouillard.
Nicolas Malebranche's piety inclined him toward the priesthood, and for three years he studied theology at the Sorbonne. It seems, however, that he was no more satisfied with this instruction than he had been with commentaries on Aristotle.
The Search after Truth: With Elucidations of The Search after Truth
(Malebranche is now recognized as a major figure in the hi...)
Malebranche is now recognized as a major figure in the history of philosophy, occupying a crucial place in the Rationalist tradition of Descartes, Spinoza, and Leibniz. The Search after Truth is his first, longest and most important work; this volume also presents the Elucidations that accompanied its third edition, the result of comments that Malebranche solicited on the original work and an important repository of his theories of ideas and causation. Together, the two texts constitute the complete expression of his mature thought and are written in his subtle, argumentative and thoroughly readable style.
(Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) was the most important Fr...)
Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715) was the most important French philosopher between Descartes and Rousseau. His Treatise on Nature and Grace, first published in 1680, is one of the most celebrated and controversial works of seventeenth-century philosophical theology. This major text, last translated into English in 1695, is here made available to a new generation of readers in an entirely new translation, with a substantial scholarly introduction. The central argument, that God governs the realms of nature and of grace by simple, constant, and uniform "general wills," not through "particular providence," had fundamental repercussions within the contemporary debates on the nature of divine grace and of salvation, contradicting the claims of the Calvinists and Jansenists that God wills the individual salvation of an elected few. Hailed as a work of genius by Bayle and Leibniz, the Treatise was to have a profound and far-reaching influence on the development of eighteenth-century thought.
(Written seven years after publication of his Search after...)
Written seven years after publication of his Search after Truth, Malebranche's Treatise on Ethics develops a detailed, `experimental' science of ethics in two parts; the ethics of virtue and the ethics of duty. Part One distinguishes six sources of motivation: sense perceptions, passions, imagination, and `inner feelings' of love as-respect, as-goodwill and as-esteem. He examines how each is to be evaluated. This is interwoven with an Aristotelian analysis of act and habit, and voluntary vs. involuntary acts, and practical reasoning. This part concludes with two basic virtues; `the strength of the mind' and `freedom of the mind'. Part Two explores our duties to ourselves, to others, to our sovereign, and to God. The translator's introduction discusses the place of Malebranche's ethics within his larger system, his borrowings and innovations, and his impact on later philosophers.
(Malebranche's Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion is...)
Malebranche's Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion is in many ways the best introduction to his thought, and provides the most systematic exposition of his philosophy as a whole. In it, he presents clear and comprehensive statements of his two best-known contributions to metaphysics and epistemology, namely, the doctrines of occasionalism and vision in God; he also states his views on such central issues as self-knowledge, the existence of the external world and the problem of theodicy. His skilful handling of the dialogue form enables the reader to see how he responds to objections made to his earlier work The Search after Truth. This edition presents a translation of the text which is clear, readable and more accurate than any of its predecessors, together with an introduction that analyses Malebranche's central teachings and explains the importance of the Dialogues in the context of seventeenth-century philosophy.
(These substantial selections from The Search after Truth,...)
These substantial selections from The Search after Truth, Elucidations of the Search after Truth, Dialogues on Metaphysics, and Treatise on Nature and Grace, provide the student of modern philosophy with both a broad view of Malebranche's philosophical system and a detailed picture of his most important doctrines. Malebranche's occasionalism, his theory of knowledge and the 'vision in God', and his writings on theodicy and freedom are solidly represented. These substantial selections from The Search after Truth, Elucidations of the Search after Truth, Dialogues on Metaphysics, and Treatise on Nature and Grace, provide the student of modern philosophy with both a broad view of Malebranche's philosophical system and a detailed picture of his most important doctrines. Malebranche's occasionalism, his theory of knowledge and the 'vision in God', and his writings on theodicy and freedom are solidly represented.
Nicolas Malebranche was a French Oratorian priest and philosopher. He was one of the major figures in post-René Descartes Cartesianism.
Background
Nicolas Malebranche was born on August 6, 1638, in Paris, Ile-de-France, France as the youngest child of Nicolas Malebranche, secretary to King Louis XIII of France, and Catherine de Lauzon, sister of Jean de Lauson, a Governor of New France. He was born with a delicate constitution. Through his father, a royal counsellor, he was linked to the rural bourgeoisie. His mother, Catherine de Lauson, belonged to the minor nobility.
Education
Nicolas Malebranche's family’s modest wealth allowed him to pursue a special program of studies adapted to his physical disability. It was not until age sixteen that he entered the college de la Marche of the University of Paris. He received the master of arts degree there in 1656 after having attended the lectures of the renowned Peripatetic M. Rouillard. His piety inclined him toward the priesthood, and for three years he studied theology at the Sorbonne. It seems, however, that he was no more satisfied with this instruction than he had been with commentaries on Aristotle.
Malebranche entered the Congregation of the Oratory on 20 January 1660, no doubt attracted by its reputation for liberty and culture in the service of the inner life. The impression he made on his new teachers was not altogether favorable. Although he was judged to be suited for the religious life and endowed with the virtues required in communal life, his was considered an “undistinguished intellect.” The explanation of this judgment may well be that, during his four years of Oratorian training, Malebranche does not seem to have been sympathetic to the newest elements of the curriculum: an interest in history and erudition, and a passion for positive theology founded on the critical study of the Scriptures. Malebranche was taught by the leaders of this tendency, Richard Simon and Charles Lecointe, but did not adopt their views. However that may be, he did become acquainted at the Oratory with the ideas of St. Augustine and Plato. At the Oratory, Malebranche studied ecclesiastical history, linguistics, and the Bible, and with his fellow students, he also immersed himself in the work of St. Augustine. Though judged to be merely a mediocre student, he was ordained a priest on September 14, 1664.
The same year he was ordained, Malebranche happened in a Paris bookstall upon a posthumous edition of Descartes's Traité de l'homme (Treatise on Man), which provides a sketch of a mechanistic account of the physiology of the human body. Malebranche's early biographer, Father Yves M. André, reports that he was so "ecstatic" on reading this account that he experienced "such violent palpitations of the heart that he was obliged to leave his book at frequent intervals, and to interrupt his reading of it in order to breathe more easily" (André 1970, pp. 11-12). Though André does not indicate why Malebranche was so moved, one can speculate that he had discovered in this text a way to investigate the natural world without relying on Aristotelian scholasticism. In any case, after his encounter with L'homme Malebranche devoted himself to a decade-long study of the Cartesian method and its results in mathematics and natural philosophy.
The principal fruit of this study was a two-volume work bearing the title De la recherche de la vérité. Où l'on traitte de la nature de l'esprit de l'homme, et de l'usage qu'il en doit faire pour eviter l'erreur dans les sciences (The Search after Truth, first published 1674-1675), 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. It is primarily this text that provides the basis for Malebranche's reputation in the early modern period. As its full title indicates, the Recherche focuses on the principal sources of human error and on the method for avoiding those errors and for finding the truth. The first five books enumerate the various errors deriving from the senses, - imagination, pure understanding, inclinations, and passions, respectively - and a sixth book is devoted to the Cartesian method of avoiding such errors through attention to clear and distinct ideas. The centerpiece of the third book, on pure understanding, is a defense of the claim that the ideas through which one perceives bodies exist in God. Tucked away in the final book, on method, is a critique of "the most dangerous error of the ancients," namely, the Aristotelian position that there are secondary causes in nature distinct from God.
The first volume of the Recherche, containing the first three books, was published in 1674 and drew an immediate response in 1675 from Simon Foucher, the canon of Sainte Chapelle of Dijon. Foucher was an "academic skeptic" who attacked the assumption that ideas in one can represent objects distinct from oneself (see Foucher 1969). The Cartesian Benedictine Robert Desgabets replied to Foucher by insisting that the Cartesian rule that clear and distinct ideas are true presupposes that one's thoughts correspond to real external objects. In brief prefaces added to various editions of the second volume of the Recherche, Malebranche chastised both thinkers for failing to read the work they were discussing, noting in particular that he had explicitly argued in the Recherche that the ideas one perceives exist in God rather than in oneself.
Malebranche solicited written responses to the Recherche modeled on the sets of objections published with Descartes's Meditations. Perhaps put off by Malebranche's harsh treatment of Foucher and Desgabets, his critics offered instead only informal objections channeled through mutual friends. In 1678 Malebranche appended to the Recherche a set of sixteen Eclaircissements, or clarifications, that respond to these objections. Among the more important objections addressed are those that concern Malebranche's assertion that one has a freedom to "consent" to certain motives for action (Eclaircissement I), his claim that reason does not yield a demonstrative argument for the existence of the material world (Eclaircissement VI), his doctrine of the vision of ideas in God (Eclaircissement X), his conclusion that one knows one's own soul through a confused consciousness rather than through a clear idea of its nature (Eclaircissement XI), and his occasionalist thesis that God is the only true cause (Eclaircissement XV). In the 1678 edition there is a final Eclaircissement that defends the importance "not only for knowledge of nature but also for knowledge of religion and morals" of the view, only hinted at in the text of the Recherche itself, that God acts for the most part through "general volitions" (volontez générales), and that He acts though "particular volitions" (volontez particulières) only in the exceptional case of miracles.
Malebranche developed his theory of divine action in his 1680 Traité de la nature et de la grâce (Treatise on Nature and Grace). He published this work over the objections of the Jansenist theologian and Cartesian philosopher Antoine Arnauld, who was disturbed by what he saw as Malebranche's denial of the claim in the Scriptures and Catholic tradition that God attends to particular details in matters of grace. Arnauld responded to the publication of Nature et de la grâce by publishing a response to Malebranche, and the ensuing battle between these two individuals became one of the major intellectual events of the day. Arnauld's opening salvo was the 1683 Des vraies et des fausses idées (On True and False Ideas), which attacks not Nature et de la grâce but the Recherche (see Arnauld 1990). His strategy here is to undermine Malebranche's influence in theological matters by revealing the inadequacy of his philosophical views. In particular, Arnauld attacks Malebranche's assumption that ideas are "representative beings" distinct from one's perceptions, offering instead the position, which he plausibly ascribes to Descartes, that ideas are simply aspects of the perceptual modifications of one's soul. This argument reflects a sympathy for Descartes's views that dates back to Arnauld's set of comments on the Meditations.
The same year that Arnauld presented his initial critique, Malebranche published the Méditations chretiennes et métaphysiques (Christian and Metaphysical Meditations), where "the Word" (i.e., the Second Person of the Trinity) offers a summary of Malebranche's system that highlights the central role that God plays in both metaphysics and morality. This work was in some ways a follow up to his 1677 Conversations chrétiennes (Christian Conversations). In this earlier text Malebranche presents a defense of the Christian religion that emphasizes the Augustinian theme of one's dependence on God for knowledge and happiness. In 1684 Malebranche further develop his views in moral philosophy in the Traité de morale (Treatise on Ethics), in which he argues that moral virtue requires a love of the "immutable order" that God reveals to those who seek to know it.
Also in 1684 Malebranche responded to Arnauld's Idées, and after a further exchange on the topic of the nature of ideas the debate turned to the religious issues of divine providence, grace, and miracles. The battle became increasingly bitter, and as a result of a campaign on the part of Arnauld and his supporters, Malebranche's Nature et de la grâce was put on the Catholic Index librorum prohibitorum (Index of Prohibited Books) in 1690 (the Recherche was added in 1709). The Malebranche-Arnauld polemic continued even after Arnauld's death in 1694, with the posthumous publication of two letters from Arnauld in 1699 and of Malebranche's responses to those letters in 1704.
In 1688 Malebranche published his Entretiens sur la métaphysique et la religion (Dialogues on Metaphysics and on Religion), a concise summary of his main metaphysical doctrines of the vision in God and occasionalism that also addresses the problem of evil. In 1696 he appended to this text the Entretiens sur la mort (Dialogues on Death), which he composed after a life-threatening illness.
In 1692 Malebranche published a short study, the Lois de la communication des mouvements (Laws of the Communication of Motions), in which he endorses Descartes's law of the conservation of the quantity of motion but offers rules governing collision that, unlike Descartes's own rules, involve no appeal to a force in bodies to remain at rest. In correspondence with Malebranche, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz emphasized difficulties with Descartes's conservation law and that correspondence led Malebranche to insert into a 1700 edition of the Lois the claim that experience reveals the falsity of this law.
In 1693 Malebranche responded to the criticisms of the Recherche in the 1690 Systême de philosophie (System of Philosophy) by the French Cartesian Pierre-Sylvain Régis. Régis defended an account of ideas similar to the one that Arnauld had defended against Malebranche during the 1680s, and Arnauld used the Régis-Malebranche exchange as an occasion to return to the issue of ideas during the last year of his life (on this exchange, see Schmaltz 2002, chapter 5). Despite their dispute, Malebranche and Régis were both appointed as honorary members of the French Académie des sciences when it was reorganized in 1699. Malebranche presented an inaugural lecture to the Académie that defends against Descartes an account of color in terms of the frequency of vibrations of light. In later published versions of the lecture Malebranche revised his discussion to take into account the theory of the nature of color in the work of the great English natural philosopher Sir Isaac Newton.
In 1699 Malebranche published Traité de l'amour de Dieu (Treatise on the Love of God), along with Trois lettres à Lamy (Three Letters to Lamy), in which he rejects the claim of the Benedictine François Lamy (not to be confused with his Cartesian contemporary, the Oratorian Bernard Lamy) that passages from the Traité de morale and other texts support the quietist position, that moral action derives from a disinterested "pure love of God." This rejection of Lamy's quietism provided the basis for Malebranche's reconciliation with the French cleric and establishment figure Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet. Bossuet had earlier enlisted the aid of François de Salignac de la Mothe Fénelon in writing against Malebranche's occasionalism and his appeals to God's "general will," but later became a bitter enemy of Fénelon's quietism.
With the support of the apostolic vicar in China, Malebranche published in 1708 Entretien d'un philosophe chrétien et d'un philosophe chinois, sur l'existence et la nature de Dieu (Dialogue between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher on the Existence and Nature of God). In this text, Chinese philosophy is closely allied with the monism found in the early modern Dutch thinker, Benedict (Baruch) de Spinoza.
A sixth and last edition of the Recherche appeared in 1712, and in 1715 Malebranche published his final work, Réflexions sur la prémotion physique (Reflections on Physical Premotion), in which he responded to the claim of the abbé Laurent-François Boursier that occasionalism leads naturally to the Thomistic position that God determines one's actions by means of a "physical premotion." In his response, Malebranche defended the claim, present from the first edition of the Recherche, that one's free actions involve a "consent" that God does not determine.
In a section of the third book of the Recherche devoted to "the nature of ideas," Malebranche argues for his famous doctrine of the vision in God. More precisely, the thesis in this section is that one sees external objects by means of ideas in God. The argument for this thesis begins with the claim at the beginning of this section that "everyone agrees that we do not perceive objects external to us by themselves" since it can hardly be the case that "the soul should leave the body to stroll about the heavens to see the objects present there".
Malebranche's description of his own opinion goes beyond what can be found in the original edition of the Recherche. However, his description of the other alternatives is drawn directly from this text. In particular, Malebranche argues that there are only four alternatives to the conclusion that one sees bodies through ideas in God: (1) bodies transmit resembling species to the soul; (2) one's soul has the power to produce ideas when triggered by nonresembling bodily impression; (3) ideas are created with the soul or produced in it successively by God; and (4) one's soul sees both the essence and the existence of bodies by considering its own perfections. Malebranche tells Arnauld that because this list constitutes "an exact division … of all the ways in which we can see objects" and because each of the alternative accounts yields "manifest contradictions," his argument from elimination serves to demonstrate the doctrine of the vision in God.
It is difficult to determine from the Recherche the precise source of the enumeration. However, Desmond Connell (1967) establishes that Malebranche's argument was drawn from the account of angelic knowledge in the work of the sixteenth-century Spanish scholastic Francisco Suárez. Particularly crucial for Malebranche's enumeration is Suárez's claim that angels must know material objects through species that God adds to their mind given that God alone can know them through His own substance. In light of this claim, one can take Malebranche's first three hypotheses to cover the various ways in which one can perceive bodies through immaterial species "superadded" to one's soul, and his fourth hypothesis to cover the possibility that one perceives bodies in the perfections of one's soul. In arguing against the last hypothesis Malebranche notes that because a finite being can see in itself neither the infinite nor an infinite number of beings (as Suárez argues in the case of angels), and because one, in fact, perceives both the infinite and infinity in external objects, it must be that one sees these objects by means of perfections contained in the only being that can possess an infinity of ideas, namely, God Himself.
Malebranche takes the conclusion here to confirm the view in "an infinity of passages" in Augustine that "we see God" in knowing eternal truths. This appeal to the Augustinian theory of divine illumination provides the basis for an argument for the vision in God that bypasses the unusual enumeration in the Recherche. This more direct argument is introduced in Eclaircissement X, where Malebranche urges that the ideas one perceives must exist in an "immutable and necessary Reason" because they are themselves immutable and necessary. Malebranche emphasizes that the Augustinian view that eternal truths derive from uncreated features of the divine intellect conflicts directly with the voluntarist conclusion in Descartes that these truths derive rather from God's free and indifferent will. Particularly in his exchanges with Arnauld, Malebranche attempts to present his doctrine of the vision in God as a natural consequence of Descartes's account of ideas. However, Malebranche's own Augustinian argument serves to show that Descartes could not have accepted this doctrine. Moreover, such an argument reveals the most fundamental reason for Malebranche's rejection of Arnauld's Cartesian identification of ideas with one's own perceptions. Because Malebranche identified these ideas with necessary and immutable essences, and because he held that these ideas derive their necessity and immutability from the divine intellect, he concludes that Arnauld's position can lead only to a radical subjectivism that renders impossible any sort of a priori knowledge of the material world.
A final feature of Malebranche's doctrine of the vision in God is connected to the notion in his writings of the "efficacious idea" (idée efficace). Malebranche emphasizes his Augustinian position that one can be instructed as to the nature of bodies only through a union with God. However, he puts a new spin on this position when he notes that the union with God involves an "affecting" or "touching" of one's mind by God's idea of extension.
Already in the 1688 Entretiens sur la métaphysique Malebranche suggests that the union with God can be explicated in terms of a causal relation between God's ideas and one's mind. After 1695 he develops this suggestion by introducing the notion of "pure" or nonsensory intellectual perceptions that are produced by God's efficacious idea of extension. Still, he also stresses in this later period that such an idea is the causal source of one's sensations. One advantage of this extension of the doctrine of efficacious ideas to sensations is that it yields a fairly clear explanation of Malebranche's claim to Arnauld that an idea is "intelligible extension rendered sensible by color or light." Before 1695 Malebranche explained how intelligible extension is so rendered by appealing somewhat obscurely to the view that the soul "attaches" colors to a nonsensory idea. However, the theory of efficacious ideas allows him to say that this idea is rendered sensible by causing in one the appropriate sensations of light and color. The claim that one sees ideas in God is thus transformed into the claim that one's soul has intellectual and sensory perceptions that yield an understanding of the truth concerning bodies in virtue of their causal relation to God's idea of extension. One scholar concludes that while Malebranche starts with the vision in God, he ends with a vision by God.
The theocentrism that is evident in Malebranche's doctrines of the vision in God and occasionalism would lead one to expect that God plays a central role in his moral theory. This expectation is borne out by his remarks in the Traité de morale. Indeed, Malebranche's two doctrines are prominent in this work. The vision in God is reflected in the insistence that moral duties are dictated by "relations of perfection" revealed in God's wisdom. As in the case of necessary truths concerning body, so in the case of moral truths Malebranche unequivocally rejects Cartesian voluntarism. The doctrine of occasionalism is reflected in Malebranche's insistence that God is one's greatest good because He alone can cause one's happiness. This point indicates that Malebranche takes moral action to require a consideration not only of abstract relations of perfection but also of the happiness of the self.
Malebranche starts from the Augustinian position that morality concerns the proper ordering of one's love. Given the importance of human freedom for his theodicy, it is not surprising that Malebranche insists that the love required for moral action involve the free exercise of the will. In his view, the "good will" is one that freely strives to be guided in action by objective relations of perfection that hold among the various objects of love. God is the most perfect being and hence the most worthy of one's love, whereas human beings are more perfect than mere material beings and thus more worthy of one's love. When the intensity of one's love matches the order among perfections, one has a right love that provides the basis for virtue, that is, a habitual inclination to love objects according to their perfections.
Malebranche holds that because of original sin, one is inclined not to right love directed by one's perception of relations of perfection in God's wisdom, but to a disordered love directed by bodily pleasures deriving from the soul-body union. This is the counterpart to the disordered inclination of one's will to make judgments about the nature of the material world that are based on sensations deriving from the union. For Malebranche, a corrective to both of these disorders of the will is to attend to clear ideas that exist in God.
Malebranche sometimes suggested that disordered love of bodily pleasure derives from self-love. Encouraged by this suggestion, one of his followers, François Lamy, claimed that his position leads to the quietist view in Fénelon that moral conduct requires a "pure love of God" that involves no concern for the self or its pleasure. This position, which Lamy himself endorsed, was later condemned by the Catholic Church, due in large part to a campaign against Fénelon directed by his critic, Bossuet. But Malebranche insisted that such a position directly conflicts with his own view that pleasure itself is a good that is required as a motive for action. When critics such as Arnauld and Régis charged that this view results in hedonism, Malebranche responded that it is only ordered pleasures that bring the greatest good. This response is reflected in Malebranche's claim to Lamy that a disordered love of self is to be contrasted not with pure love of God, but with an ordered love that seeks happiness in the contemplation of the greatest good, God. In emphasizing the need for this sort of love of God, Malebranche was returning to his view in the preface to the Recherche that it is through a union with God that the mind "receives its life, its light, and its entire felicity."
Views
Malebranche proposes that the erroneous belief of the Aristotelians as well as of Augustine that sensible qualities exist in bodies has its source in a misuse of "natural judgments" that help in the conservation of the human body. Here, he is following Descartes's account in the Sixth Meditation of the "teachings of nature," and in particular the claim there that the purpose of sensations is not to teach one about the nature of bodies but simply to inform one of what is beneficial or harmful to the human composite. Just as Descartes urged that erroneous beliefs about the nature of body can be avoided by attending to the clear and distinct perceptions of the intellect, so Malebranche counsels that one avoid error by attending to what the clear idea of matter reveals to one about the nature of body. As noted earlier, Malebranche has Augustinian reasons for saying that the idea that so instructs one exists in God. The conclusion that the idea that instructs one is an idea of extension derives from Descartes's discoveries.
Malebranche emphasizes that the clear idea of extension must be distinguished from one's confused sensations. One point he wants to make is that the idea exists in God while the sensations are only modifications of one's mind. However, his emphasis that this idea is "pure" or nonsensory indicates that one's experience of the material world has an intellectual component. His late doctrine of the efficacious idea involved the position that one has pure intellectual perceptions produced by God's intellectual idea of extension. But his mature position that this idea is also the cause of one's sensations allows for the claim that one's most basic sensory contact with the material world has an intellectual component.
Malebranche's doctrine of the vision in God also conflicts with Descartes's doctrine of the creation of the eternal truths. However, there are further departures from orthodox Cartesianism that are linked to two qualifications of this doctrine. The first qualification is that God's idea of extension can reveal only the nature of bodies and not their existence. This qualification is not explicit in the initial edition of the Recherche, which says only that the existence of properties of bodies external to one is "very difficult to prove". Malebranche urges that the idea of extension does reveal the possible existence of the material world and that Descartes has shown that one has a probable argument for its actual existence deriving from one's natural propensity to believe that there are bodies. However, he concedes in this text that neither he nor Descartes can provide an argument from reason that demonstrates "with evidence" or "with geometric rigor" that this belief is true. His claim is that any conclusive argument must appeal to faith in the veracity of the report in the Scriptures that God has created the heavens and the earth.
Malebranche accepts the Cartesian commonplace that consciousness reveals immediately the existence of the soul. He allows that one knows the nature of one's soul to consist in thought; moreover, he embraces the Cartesian conclusion that the soul as a thinking substance is distinct from the body as an extended substance. Still, he insists that one knows that the soul is distinct from the body not by means of any direct insight into the nature of thought, but by seeing that thought is not contained in the idea of matter. Malebranche claims that one's lack of access to a clear idea of the soul is evident because one does not have knowledge of thought that matches one's knowledge of the mathematical features of bodies.
Malebranche notes that whereas the intellectual idea allows the various modes of extension to be related in a precise manner, there is no clear scale on which one can order one's sensations of different shades of the same color, not to mention one's sensations of sensible qualities of different kinds. Malebranche takes the confusion in the sensations to reveal a confusion in one's perception of the nature of the soul. He adds that Cartesians can discern that sensible qualities are modifications of an immaterial soul only by seeing that they are "not clearly contained in the idea we have of matter".
Malebranche is known for his occasionalism, that is, his doctrine that God is the only causal agent and that creatures are merely "occasional causes" that prompt divine action. On the old textbook account, occasionalism was an ad hoc response to the purported problem in Descartes of how substances as distinct in nature as mind and body can causally interact. Malebranche was driven by this problem with Cartesian dualism to propose that it is God who brings it about that one's sensations and volitions are correlated with motions in one's body.
Malebranche offers a based on Descartes's suggestion in the Third Meditation that God conserves the world by continuously creating it. The argument begins with the claim that God must create bodies in some particular place and in determinate relations of distance to other bodies. If God conserves a body by creating it in the same place from moment to moment, that body remains at rest, and if He conserves it by creating it in different places from moment to moment, it is in motion. One cannot even create motion in one's own body. Rather, it is God who must produce it on the occasion of volitional states. Moreover, it is not motions in one's brain that cause one's sensory states, but God who produces them on the occasion of the presence of such motions.
Malebranche denies that one has a clear knowledge of the nature of the soul. No consideration of the soul could therefore reveal that it can exist only with a determinate set of modes. Indeed, Malebranche allows for the view that God creates souls with an indeterminate inclination toward "the good in general." Even so, he insists that God must be the cause of "everything real" in one's soul on the grounds that such real effects can be produced only by the power of creation. In this way the argument from continuous creation converges on the conclusion, which Malebranche claims to find in Augustine, that all creatures depend entirely on God.
Malebranche offers Cartesian grounds for thinking that the purpose of one's sensations is not to reveal the true nature of the material world, but to indicate what is helpful or harmful to one's body. Malebranche holds that one's attribution of causal powers to bodies manifests in particular an attachment to the body that is an effect of original sin. Because of this attachment, one takes objects in the material world to be a cause of one's happiness rather than God.
The presence of various evils in the world is problematic for any theist who claims that this world was created by a God who has infinite power, knowledge, and goodness. However, the problem is particularly acute for an occasionalist, such as Malebranche, who holds that God is the only true cause of effects in nature. Malebranche offers a theodicy that addresses the problem of evil by stressing that in the "order of nature" God acts for the most part through His general will. In Nature et de la grâce he starts by admitting that God could have acted by particular volitions to prevent natural evils such as malformed offspring (a fitting example given his own malformed spine), and thus could have produced a more perfect world than He actually did create. However, he urges that God could have done so only by departing from simple laws, thereby sacrificing the simplicity and uniformity of action that is a supreme mark of His wisdom. 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 possessing the most effects governed by the fewest laws.
Malebranche insists that God's general will is operative not only in the order of nature but also in the "order of grace." However, he notes that the production of effects in the latter order also involves human action that is free in the strong sense of not being determined by anything external to the agent. His appeal to this sort of freedom is in fact central to his solution to the problem of moral evil, that is, the compatibility of sin with God's goodness. According to Malebranche God is not responsible for sinful action since such action derives not from Him but from sinful agents.
Malebranche also insists that it is obvious by "inner sensation" that one is genuinely free. However, there is some question whether this introspective report is compatible with Malebranche's occasionalist claim that God is the only real cause. As indicated earlier, Malebranche does hold that God alone is the cause of one's indeterminate inclination to love the good in general. However, he insists that one is free to "consent" to the stopping of that inclination at a particular object other than God. Such consent results in an "absolute and intrinsic" love of that object that is sinful given that this love is worthy only of God. The consent is free because one is always able to suspend consent and to search for objects more worthy of one's love. Malebranche claims that one's freedom to consent or suspend consent does not conflict with occasionalism since these acts produce no "real" or "physical" change in one's mind. Sometimes he suggests that consent is nothing real because it involves merely resting with a particular good. One problem with this suggestion is that it makes it difficult to understand how taking the opposite course of suspending consent could also involve the production of nothing real. However, Malebranche sometimes indicates that both consent and suspense produce nothing real merely in the sense that they create neither new thoughts nor an increase in inclination. He also indicates that though God determines one's "natural love" for particular objects, he leaves undetermined our "free love" for such objects.
Membership
Congregation of the Oratory of Jesus and Mary Immaculate
,
France
French Academy of Sciences
,
France
Personality
Although Nicolas Malebranche was judged to be suited for the religious life and endowed with the virtues required in communal life, he was considered an “undistinguished intellect.”
Physical Characteristics:
As in the case of Descartes and Blaise Pascal, Malebranche was born in frail health. His particular afflictions were a severe malformation of the spine and weak lungs.
Connections
As a catholic priest, Nicolas Malebranche was never married and had no children.
Nicolas Malebranche: Freedom in an Occasionalist World
This book offers a detailed evaluation of Malebranche's efforts to provide a plausible account of human intellectual and moral agency in the context of his commitment to an infinitely perfect being possessing all causal power.