Nicolas Malebranche
Nicolas Malebranche (August 6, 1638 – October 13, 1715) was a French philosopher of the Cartesian school.
Life
The youngest child of Nicolas Malebranche, secretary to King Louis XIII of France, and Catherine de Lauzon, sister of a viceroy of Canada, was born in Paris. Suffering from a malformed spine and weak lungs, he received his elementary education at home, under the guidance of his mother. At 16, he left home to study at the College de la Marche, and subsequently to study theology at the Sorbonne. At the time, the curriculum of the Sorbonne was largely scholastic (centered around the works of Aristotle), which Malebranche found highly dissatisfying. In light of that experience, he joined the congregation of the Oratoire de France in 1660, having rejected an offer of a canonry at Notre-Dame. The Oratory had been founded by the Augustinian cardinal Pierre Bérulle in 1611. It was during his time there that Malebranche became immersed in the works of St. Augustine, which would deeply impact his mature philosophy. In addition, Malebranche studied ecclesiastical history, Hebrew and the Bible, but generally failed to impress his teachers. He was ordained a priest on September 14, 1664.
It was also in 1664 that Malebranche directly encountered Descartes’ work for the first time. While walking down the rue St. Jacques, he came across a posthumous edition of Descartes’ ‘’Treatise on Man’’ (‘’L’homme’’) in a bookstall. According to an early biography by Father Yves André, Malebranche was so ecstatic as he began looking at the pages that he was forced to stop reading in order to recover his breath. The following ten years of his life were spent in deep study of Cartesian philosophy, methodology, mathematics and natural philosophy.
In 1674 Malebranche published the first three books of what is probably his major work, ‘’The Search After Truth’’ (‘’De la recherche de la vérité’’), with the final three books appearing the following year. The treatise presents an extended criticism of scholastic philosophy and presents two of Malebranche’s three central doctrines: the vision in God and occasionalism. It also contains much of the material for the third doctrine, the theodicy.
Over the course of his career, Malebranche defended his system against a number of objectors, but the criticisms which were to draw to most attention came from Antoine Arnauld, whose initial approval of the work turned into some of the sharpest criticism with which Malebranche was presented. The criticism began with the publication of Arnauld’s ‘’Des vraies et des fausses idèes’’ in 1683 and ultimately resulted in both the ‘’Treatise’’ and the ‘’Search’’ being placed on the Catholic ‘’Index librorum prohibitorum’’ in 1690 and 1709 (respectively). Malebranche resolutely defended himself in writing, and the debate even continued after Arnauld’s death in 1694, due to the posthumous publication of two of Arnauld’s letters.
By the mid-1680’s, Malebranche was established as one of the major philosophical figures of the time, and corresponded with such high-profile intellectuals as Leibniz and the physicist Pierre-Sylvain Régis. He was elected to the Académie Royale des Sciences in 1699. Up until his death in 1715 at the Oratory in Paris, he continued to develop and defend his system.
Though the more extravagant metaphysical aspects of Malebranche’s views entertained an (at most) limited following, many of his arguments profoundly influenced such anti-rationalist thinkers as Berkeley and Hume.
‘’The Search’’ went through six editions in Malebranche’s lifetime, during which he added a significant amount of material in response to objections which from Cartesians and scholastics alike. Over the next forty years, Malebranche developed the philosophical ideas presented in the ‘’Search’’ in a number of works, beginning with the ‘’Conversations chrétiennes’’ in 1677 (a dialogue emphasizing our dependence on God for both knowledge and happiness), ‘’Traité de la nature et da la grace’’ in 1680 (which offered a more detailed account of Malebranche’s views of theodicy and divine activity), and the ‘’Méditations chretiennes et métaphysiques’’ in 1683 (where the system is presented with an emphasis on the centrality of God in both metaphysics and morality). The 1688 ‘’Entretiens sur la métaphysique et la religion’’ (often translated as ‘’Dialogues on Metaphysics’’) is perhaps the most accessible presentation of the system, consisting 14 dialogues presenting a more mature version of Malebranche’s doctrines of vision in God, occasionalism and theodicy. In addition to his philosophical and theological work, Malebranche published on a variety of topics in mathmatics and natural philosophy. The current edition of his work includes 20 volumes.
Philosophy
In general, Malebranche’s philosophy aims to bring together the Augustinian theme of our dependence on God with the metaphysics and framework of Cartesian philosophy, and to straightforwardly reject Aristotelian philosophy. His criticisms of the scholastic tradition are sometimes primarily philosophical, and at other times primarily theological. His positive views, on the other hand, are typically brought under three headings: the vision in God, occasionalism and the theodicy. Though Malebranche's philosophy certainly extends beyond these doctrines, they are nevertheless the parts of his thought that proved most influential.
Vision in God
The doctrine known as 'vision in God' gives a metaphysical and epistemological account of our non-sensory knowledge. Malebranche retained Descartes' view that knowledge is accomplished via certain spiritual entities called 'ideas' (so that we do not immediately relate to the objects which we perceive and about which we think), and that these entities can only exist in an intellect. Malebranche also continued to employ Descartes' notion of a clear and distinct idea - that is, an idea which presents a truth which we cannot be affirm when we consider it.
For his part, Descartes held that the intellect in which the ideas exist is our own, human intellects. That is, our ideas are modifications of the thinking substances that we are (see the Third Meditation). This entails, for instance, that the idea I have of triangles would go out of existence were I to go out of existence. With respect to clear and distinct ideas, he held that we can rely on the truth of these ideas because (1) we cannot but assent to them and (2) God, who created us, is not a deceiver, which entails (3) that those ideas cannot be false, for only a deceiver would create creatures who inevitably assent to ideas that may be false.
Malebranche parted company with Descartes on both points. On his view, ideas (distinguished from mere perceptions) only exist in the divine intellect. Moreoever, it is because the ideas are in the divine intellect that they cannot be false, for they are God's own ideas of the world. It is by God's will that we come to see these ideas. Our knowledge is thus shown to depend on God twice over: not only are the ideas by which we know themselves dependent on God for their existence, but those ideas are only accessible to us via God's willing that it be so.
Malebranche's motivations and arguments for this view are varied and often quite subtle (see Chapter 6 of Part 2 of Book three of The Search for a summary). The resulting dependence of our knowledge on God, he argued, fit well with the Bible's descriptions of God's role in our coming to know truth. In a different vein, Malebranche argues that our ability to have ideas of any object can only be the result of our being closely related to a being sufficiently powerful to have ideas of all objects. Similarly, Malebranche was impressed by our ability, as finite beings, to know general and necessary truths - something that could be explained if that knowledge was merely our seeing the ideas in an omnipotent and omniscient being.
Occasionalism
Occasionalism is a metaphysical doctrine which asserts that God is the only true causal agent in the universe.
Theodicy
Malebranche's theodicy, or resolution of the apparent conflict between the presence of evil in the world and the supreme goodness and power of that world's creator, is distinctive in that it grants that God could indeed have created a more perfect world.
ReferencesISBN links support NWE through referral fees
- A full account by Mrs Norman Smith of his theory of vision, in which he unquestionably anticipated and in some respects surpassed the subsequent work of Berkeley, will be found in the British Journal of Psychology (Jan. 1905).
- H Joly, in the series Les Grands philosophes (Paris, 1901)
- Laprune, La Philosophie de Malebranche (1870)
- M Novaro, De Philosophie des Nicolaus Malebranche (1893)
External links
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy:
This article incorporates text from the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, a publication now in the public domain.
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