Malebranche
Andrew Pyle, Malebranche (New York: Routledge, 2003)
Dwelt from eternity, dwelt then in thee,
Bright effluence of bright essence increate!– Milton, Paradise Lost
Nicolas MALEBRANCHE (1638-1715) represents a smooth philosophical transition between the thought of René Descartes (1596-1650) and David Hume (1711-1776). From Descartes, Malebranche appropriated the notion that anything necessarily exists which meets the criteria of clarity and distinctness. Such criteria were employed for the purpose of economy, streamlining the post-Renaissance philosophical universe closer to the proportions of Hume’s balanced cosmos, a world of natural beliefs, efficacious ideas, experiential souls, and blind, regular causation. Malebranche attempted to unite humanist-historical studies with natural-mathematical studies, scripture and philosophy, through a centralized, panoramic, illuminationist worldview, ambitiously affirming the interdependence of faith and reason.
Scholastics generally believed secondary causes within the causal order were responsible for becoming, while divine action sustained everything in being. Descartes economized this approach by stipulating that God’s concursus with created beings was exhausted by God’s conservation of matter. In the context of Descartes’ substantial-modal metaphysics, this introduced thorny difficulties in interpreting physical motion. Since modes as modes cannot be directly transferred from one substance to another, finding a home for secondary causes began to look problematic. If we consider that it isn’t obvious that we can perceive mundane particulars having active powers through clear and distinct ideas, our problem, on its own Cartesian terms, is exacerbated. The sun wouldn’t be able to act upon the mind not because of where it is, but because of what it is.
One way of addressing such concerns is through accepting their premises. Dead, inert, de-Aristotelianized particulars give us no clear and distinct idea that they are ultimately self-moving. Malebranche himself made no sharp distinction between logical and metaphysical necessity, which meant true causes are necessarily connected with their effects. But without any clear and distinct idea of any such connection available to us, an observer only has the capacity to merely believe causal powers of particulars. In contrast, we can apprehend that a necessary connection must exist between the will of an omnipotent being and its effects. So Malebranche discarded secondary causes, denying that created beings have any independent causal powers of their own, and asserted created beings each provide an occasion for divine action according to self-imposed rules. Hence, occasionalism. This isn’t as if one thing causes another, such as a mental event causing a physical event, only through God’s arbitrary help. Rather, the cause serves as the occasion of the effect — both cause and effect occurring together — as God’s initial act of creation organizationally and continuously sustains everything else through its becoming. The moment of creation does not pass.
Of Aristotle‘s classification of four causes, final causes make a natural fit for formal causes, just as efficient causes make a natural fit for material causes. Directedness conceptually fits with design, functionality, and organization, just as what determines a determinable conceptually fits with that which can be determined. Malebranche revolutionized the nature of formal and final causes, pushing Cartesian philosophy even further away from its scholastic roots. Ideas annex all of the conceptual work once performed by formal causes, while God creatively takes immediate charge of all directedness we find in the cosmos. The Cartesian revolution from essential/natural teleology to external/instrumental teleology is thereby solidified.
Like Descartes, ideas in Malebranche are loci of understanding operating as vehicles of intelligibility; to think truthfully, we must think through available clear and distinct ideas. Departing from Descartes, ideas here are completely distinct from modes of our own souls. Modes are mutable, particular, and contingent; ideas are immutable, universal, and necessary. Consider that in the thought of Francisco Suárez (1548-1617), there are as many formal unities as there are things. Malebranche stretched this framework by concluding a thing is a copy of its idea, ideas being nothing else than archetypes in the mind of God. God contains the quidditatively specific informational pattern of the world, which accounts for its intentionality.
As the story continues, we perceive extension adverbially, regions of space-time cloaked with sensation. While the world has finite and divisible extension, God represents the world perfectly through ideal extension. Intelligible extension resides in the divine intellect, while finite things exist through the divine will. Malebranche insists that intelligible extension contains intelligible parts but not real spatial parts. I suspect Malebranche might mean that intelligible extension is composed of conceptual parts, but not fundamentally composed of conceptual parts, like Leibniz’s refusal to ultimately equate plurality with numerical distinctness; this depends on how tight of a nexus Malebranche held between the intelligibility of matter and the intelligibility of mathematics. He’s clearly moving in the anti-scholastic direction of mathematics as fundamentally independent of matter, something that might consist in relations between ideas alone, though I’m not persuaded he travels the entire distance.
While it may seem like we have built an intellectual framework in which physical things superfluously “dangle” from their ideas, Malebranche’s doctrine is not idealism, since God’s creative will still requires particulars individuated by their “thisness” if it is not to be aimless. Yet, if we can only think objectively through mind-independent ideas, then even lively sensations have no representational content. We could only have a confused and obscure knowledge of our own soul; intentionality no longer marks the mental. We could know that we exist, but not what we exist as. We know the mind as subject, but not as substance; raw, immediate experience provides certainty, but no insight. So our knowledge of the soul becomes experiential, not rational. In Descartes, there was what can be called occasional causation, which shouldn’t be confused with occasionalism. Cartesian brain-states, for instance, have triggering roles. Connected in part to a divinely pre-programmed innate repertoire of the soul, stimuli lawfully elicit ideas without any reason fundamentally perspicuous to us. In contrast, for Malebranche, talk of powers and faculties, even for our own souls, became pseudo-explanations. The substantial union between mind and body remained completely unintelligible. Unaided introspection no longer revealed any necessary connections between things; such certainty was now for God alone. Whether any particular law holds was a contingent matter, and we had no epistemic access to God’s will. When understanding the world, we must make educated guesses by forming hypotheses and testing them.
Malebranche synthesized Augustine and Descartes in what he called the “Vision in God.” Augustine’s Vision in God was only for the truths of pure intellection. Malebranche extended it to changeable things known through perception, perception now including both a sensory and an ideational component. Objectivity is secured through an illuminationist epistemology: we believe truthfully through the epistemic access given to us by God to the archetypes used in the sustained creation of the world. The human mind is an illuminated light, not an illuminating light; we arrive at error when we assent or dissent before we are in a position to truthfully do so. Human knowledge becomes similar to revelation; attention becomes similar to prayer. The Vision in God is not a Fregean third realm of inert propositions, for it stands as something like a productive blueprint, an order existing eternally in the divine intellect; one knows necessarily what one can make. Not a Jansenist, Malebranche believed God, because of his perfections, rules by wisdom, not will; as a corollary, God must act economically by means of general laws rather than special modifications. This leaves the world with imperfections, though it placed miracles within an order of grace.
The Vision in God purportedly secured the objectivity of knowledge against Pyrrhonist suggestions that we’re too integrated with life to achieve impartial perspectives. Malebranche enumerated candidates for the nature of ideas into four categories, identified by whether they might be innate or empirical, as well as active or receptive. From this enumeration, Malebranche made an elimination argument, rejecting all four possibilities. But on the assumption that we do have knowledge through ideas, we needed to explain how such knowledge can be possible, given the shortcomings Malebranche believed he found in Aristotle, Descartes, Plato, and Arnauld. His solution was to externalize rational insight; clear and distinct ideas are God’s ideas, and the Vision in God allows us to participate in the divine intellect. This also explains the capacity to think of an endless number of things throughout space and time, and our public epistemic access to a unique order.
Malebranche’s philosophy had several theological advantages. Unlike Aristotelian philosophy, Cartesians had an elegant account of the immortality of the soul. And, a world without natural powers prevents any slipping into pagan naturalism. Malebranche’s God wills that all men be saved, while leaving us dependent upon God’s grace. God, acting in reliable, predictable ways, is impartial, distributing grace like the rain. Malebranche concluded Antoine Arnauld (1612-1694) fell into Calvinism, since the denial that God wills all men be saved supposedly is at odds with God’s benevolence, but Arnauld complained Malebranche denied God’s omnipotence by willing all men be saved while not allowing this end to be achieved. Arnauld would accuse Malebranche of Pelagianism, as if we could achieve salvation through merit alone. Malebranche’s anti-Pelagianism seemed completely contingent, as if we could achieve salvation based upon merit alone, but always required grace in fact. But Malebranche accepted original sin, denying the soul genuine powers of its own, believing reason alone could not suffice to enable us to will the good and do it. We can sense grace without consenting to grace; the assent of the soul would be a special kind of rest that isn’t productive of anything.
If the soul has no liberty of indifference, its strongest motive always prevails. There is no quietism in Malebranche; genuine self-love is needed to approach one’s salvation with fear and trembling. The human will is indeterminately directed toward the good; evil is a privation, a disorder within second-order acts embedded in the will toward particular, determinate objects. This jointly opened the road to a Humean philosophy. If we can’t restrain ourselves, then our behavior results from an involuntary, uncontrollable necessity, along with our natural judgments about the external world.
