Malebranche Nicolas (1638–1715), French philosopher and theologian, an important but unorthodox proponent of Cartesian philosophy. Malebranche was a priest of the Oratory, a religious order founded in 1611 by Cardinal Bérulle, who was favorably inclined toward Descartes. Malebranche himself became a Cartesian after reading Descartes’s physiological Treatise on Man in 1664, although he ultimately introduced crucial modifications into Cartesian ontology, epistemology, and physics.
Malebranche’s most important philosophical work is The Search After Truth (1674), in which he presents his two most famous doctrines: the vision in God and occasionalism. He agrees with Descartes and other philosophers that ideas, or immaterial representations present to the mind, play an essential role in knowledge and perception. But whereas Descartes’s ideas are mental entities, or modifications of the soul, Malebranche argues that the ideas that function in human cognition are in God – they just are the essences and ideal archetypes that exist in the divine understanding. As such, they are eternal and independent of finite minds, and make possible the clear and distinct apprehension of objective, neccessary truth. Malebranche presents the vision in God as the proper Augustinian view, albeit modified in the light of Descartes’s epistemological distinction between understanding and sensation. The theory explains both our apprehension of universals and mathematical and moral principles, as well as the conceptual element that, he argues, necessarily informs our perceptual acquaintance with the world. Like Descartes’s theory of ideas, Malebranche’s doctrine is at least partly motivated by an antiskepticism, since God’s ideas cannot fail to reveal either eternal truths or the essences of things in the world created by God. The vision in God, however, quickly became the object of criticism by Locke, Arnauld, Foucher, and others, who thought it led to a visionary and skeptical idealism, with the mind forever enclosed by a veil of divine ideas. Malebranche is also the best-known proponent of occasionalism, the doctrine that finite created beings have no causal efficacy and that God alone is a true causal agent. Starting from Cartesian premises about matter, motion, and causation – according to which the essence of body consists in extension alone, motion is a mode of body, and a causal relation is a logically necessary relation between cause and effect – Malebranche argues that bodies and minds cannot be genuine causes of either physical events or mental states. Extended bodies, he claims, are essentially inert and passive, and thus cannot possess any motive force or power to cause and sustain motion. Moreover, there is no necessary connection between any mental state (e.g. a volition) or physical event and the bodily motions that usually follow it. Such necessity is found only between the will of an omnipotent being and its effects. Thus, all phenomena are directly and immediately brought about by God, although he always acts in a lawlike way and on the proper occasion. Malebranche’s theory of ideas and his occasionalism, as presented in the Search and the later Dialogues on Metaphysics (1688), were influential in the development of Berkeley’s thought; and his arguments for the causal theory foreshadow many of the considerations regarding causation and induction later presented by Hume. In addition to these innovations in Cartesian metaphysics and epistemology, Malebranche also modified elements of Descartes’s physics, most notably in his account of the hardness of bodies and of the laws of motion. In his other major work, the Treatise on Nature and Grace (1680), Malebranche presents a theodicy, an explanation of how God’s wisdom, goodness, and power are to be reconciled with the apparent imperfections and evils in the world. In his account, elements of which Leibniz borrows, Malebranche claims that God could have created a more perfect world, one without the defects that plague this world, but that this would have involved greater complexity in the divine ways. God always acts in the simplest way possible, and only by means of lawlike general volitions; God never acts by ‘particular’ or ad hoc volitions. But this means that while on any particular occasion God could intervene and forestall an apparent evil that is about to occur by the ordinary courses of the laws of nature (e.g. a drought), God would not do so, for this would compromise the simplicity of God’s means. The perfection or goodness of the world per se is thus relativized to the simplicity of the laws of that world (or, which is the same thing, to the generality of the divine volitions that, on the occasionalist view, govern it). Taken together, the laws and the phenomena of the world form a whole that is most worthy of God’s nature – in fact, the best combination possible. Malebranche then extends this analysis to explain the apparent injustice in the distribution of grace among humankind. It is just this extension that initiated Arnauld’s attack and drew Malebranche into a long philosophical and theological debate that would last until the end of the century.
See also ARNAULD , BERKELEY , OCCASION – ALIS. S.N.