The Pimlico History of Western Philosophy by Richard H Popkin

Author:Richard H Popkin
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Random House

NICOLAS MALEBRANCHE

Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715) was born in Paris into a large and well-connected family. His father was a counselor to Louis XIV. Malebranche, a gentle, pious, and ascetic person, studied philosophy at the Collège de La Marche and then theology at the Sorbonne. In 1660, he entered the Oratory, a religious order founded in 1611 by Cardinal Pierre de Bérulle (1575–1629). Bérulle, heavily influenced by Saint Augustine, did not, however, establish the Oratory in order to create a particular school of philosophy or theology, although he had himself befriended the young Descartes in 1628. Instead, the order was dedicated to preaching. As political and theological difficulties multiplied in the 1660s, the order sought to avoid being labeled either Jansenist or Cartesian. Members of the order could freely discuss controverted questions, but teaching was sharply constrained and the order seems not to have been immersed in Cartesianism. It now seems likely that Malebranche did not encounter the writings of Descartes until 1664, the year of his ordination to the priesthood. Entirely disenchanted with the disputation method of the Scholastics, which he felt yielded heat but little light, Malebranche came upon Descartes’s Treatise on Man, and it revolutionized his thinking.

In 1674, the first three books of Malebranche’s Search after Truth were published, followed by the second three in 1675 and, in 1678, the seventeen Clarifications on sections in the Search that had caused particular difficulties. In these books, we discover a philosopher much indebted to Saint Augustine, whose ideas about God, human psychology and sin, knowledge, and predestination permeated seventeenth-century theological thought. Like Descartes, Augustine takes a form of the principle “cogito ergo sum” to be impervious to sceptical attack. More immediately relevant to Malebranche’s position is Augustine’s insistence that the objects of real knowledge are not derived from sense experience. Thus, mathematical truths are given their ontological home in God. An essential element in Malebranche’s own philosophy, like Augustine’s, is that the proper object of human knowledge is, following Plato, a real and independent entity.

Where Descartes uses innate ideas to provide a secure basis for the objects of knowledge, a basis in no way dependent on sense experience, Malebranche argues that innate ideas constitute an inefficient way to ground our knowledge. Rather than requiring that each human instantiate the same set of fundamental principles, Malebranche argues that “we see all things in God.” Instead of multiplying sets of innate principles by the number of humans, Malebranche holds that we each have access to the single set of eternal ideas—namely, those that are the constituents of eternal truths. In this way, Malebranche seeks to avoid what he feels is an excessively mentalist and subjective aspect of Descartes’s doctrine. Malebranche believed that Descartes had drawn a radical and ontological distinction between concepts (such as mathematical ideas) and sensations (which he takes to be strictly mental). Malebranche takes himself to be separating out Cartesian concepts and placing them in God while sensations remain “in” our several minds. Malebranche thought he could make sense of

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