Nicolas Malebranche
Nicolas Malebranche CO (/mælˈbrɒnʃ/ mal-BRONSH, French: [nikɔla malbʁɑ̃ʃ];[1] 6 August 1638 – 13 October 1715) was a French Oratorian[2] Catholic priest and rationalist philosopher. In his works, he sought to synthesize the thought of St. Augustine and Descartes, in order to demonstrate the active role of God in every aspect of the world. Malebranche is best known for his doctrines of vision in God, occasionalism and ontologism.
Nicolas Malebranche
6 August 1638
13 October 1715 (aged 77)
Synthesis of the philosophies of St. Augustine and Descartes, occasionalism, ontologism, theodicy, vision in God, intelligible extension
Biography[edit]
Early years[edit]
Malebranche was born in Paris in 1638, 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. Because of a malformed spine, Malebranche received his elementary education from a private tutor. He left home at the age of sixteen to pursue a course of philosophy at the Collège de la Marche, and subsequently to study theology at the Collège de Sorbonne, both colleges from the University of Paris. He eventually left the Sorbonne, having rejected scholasticism, and entered the Oratory in 1660. There, he devoted himself to ecclesiastical history, linguistics, the Bible, and the works of Saint Augustine. Malebranche was ordained a priest in 1664.
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[edit]
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 grace to human beings. The book was attacked by fellow Cartesian philosopher Antoine Arnauld, and, although Arnauld's initial concerns were theological ones, the bitter dispute which ensued very quickly branched out into most other areas of their respective systems. Over the next few years, the two men wrote enough polemics against one another to fill four volumes of Malebranche's collected works and three of Arnauld's. Arnauld's supporters managed to persuade the Roman Catholic Church to place Nature and Grace on its Index of Prohibited Books in 1690, and it was followed there by the Search nineteen years later. (Ironically, the Index already contained several works by the Jansenist Arnauld himself.) Other critics with whom Malebranche entered into significant discussion include another fellow Cartesian, Pierre Sylvain Regis, as well as Dortous de Mairan. De Mairan was sympathetic to the views of Baruch Spinoza, and felt that he had found similar views in his reading of Malebranche: Malebranche assiduously resisted such an association.
Philosophy[edit]
Vision in God[edit]
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 Saint Augustine. His great innovation was to explain how these same divine ideas could also serve as the immediate objects of human minds in sensual perception. The problem there is that the divine ideas are universal, whereas all perception seems to be of particulars. Malebranche's solution was to suggest that, whereas the mind's intellectual conception of these ideas is pure and direct, its sensual perception of them will be modified by "sensations". These sensations, unlike the ideas, are indeed proper to individual created minds, and subsist as modes thereof. The idea will represent only the geometrical or mechanical properties of bodies (size, shape, motion), while the sensation will consist in colour or some other sensible quality. The latter will limit the mind's apprehension of the former in such a manner as to make it represent a particular individual to that mind. To a different mind, one with a different sensation, the same idea could represent a different individual of the same general kind. In the Dialogues On Metaphysics And Religion (dialogue 1), Malebranche added that the same basic structure can also account for (the mental as opposed to the physiological element in) imagination, in this case where the idea only "lightly touches" the mind.
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[edit]
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[edit]
Whereas Malebranche followed Augustine in his description of intellectual knowledge, in his approach to mind–body problems he began as a follower of Descartes. But in contrast to Descartes, who considered it possible to form a clear and distinct idea of the mind, Malebranche argues in the Dialogues on Metaphysics, a dialogue between Theodore and Aristes, that we do not have a complete conception of the powers of the mind, and thus no clear conception of the nature of the mind.
Scientific contributions[edit]
Although better known for his philosophical work, Malebranche made some notable contributions to physics, working within a broadly Cartesian framework but nevertheless prepared to depart from Descartes where necessary. In 1699, he delivered an address to the Académie Royale des Sciences on the nature of light and color, wherein he argued that different colors resulted out of different frequencies in the pressure vibrations of subtle matter, much as different musical tones derived from different frequencies in the vibrations of air. His theory was presented as a corrective to Descartes' view, rather than a refutation thereof, but it has important parallels with the rival optical theory of Isaac Newton. Newton had already developed his position some thirty years earlier, but Malebranche probably would not have been aware of it until it was finally published in the Opticks of 1704, or, more likely, in its Latin translation of 1706. When Malebranche revised his 1699 paper for inclusion as the Sixteenth Elucidation of the 1712 edition of The Search After Truth, he inserted a number of references to "Newton's excellent work".
In addition, Malebranche wrote on the laws of motion, a topic he discussed extensively with Leibniz. He also wrote on mathematics and, although he made no major mathematical discoveries of his own, he was instrumental in introducing and disseminating the contributions of Descartes and Leibniz in France. Malebranche introduced l'Hôpital to Johann Bernoulli, with the ultimate result being the publication of the first textbook in infinitesimal calculus.
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]
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]
