BIOGRAPHY
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Nicolas Malebranche was born in Paris in 1638, where his father was secretary to Louis XIII. He was a deformed and sickly child, and was tutored at home until he knew enough to study philosophy at the Collège de la Marche, and then theology at the Sorbonne. Rather than become a priest, in 1660 he joined the monastic order of the Oratory, which had been founded by the Florentine priest, St. Philip Neri, in 1575.
After desultory attempts at becoming an expert, first in church history, and then in Biblical criticism, in 1664 he happened upon Descartes’ Treatise on the Human Being. He was so taken by it, that he devoted himself wholeheartedly to the study of Cartesian philosophy. Ten years later, he came out with his first and most famous book, the Research into the Truth. Although he diverged from Descartes in a number of important respects, he was generally accepted throughout Europe as the leading exponent of the Cartesian school throughout the rest of his lifetime.
Like Descartes, he also had a keen interest in maths and science; but he didn’t make any significant contribution to their advance. There are some unpleasant stories about his treatment of animals (including vivisection), which he justified on the grounds that animals are only machines, and cannot feel pain.
He died in 1715, at the age of 77. According to another story, his death was hastened by a heated discussion about metaphysics with Bishop Berkeley.
The most distinctive features of Malebranche’s philosophy are the doctrines that: (a) we see all things in God; (b) God is the only cause; and (c) God causes events in the human body ‘on the occasion’ of mental events, and vice versa.
At the time, he was considered a far more important philosopher than his approximate contemporaries, Spinoza, Leibniz, and Locke. It is a measure of his importance that he was criticised by all the major philosophers of the late 17th and early 18th centuries. In most cases, the criticisms were stimulated by a sense that Malebranche’s views were too close for comfort. His philosophy was a microcosm of late 17th-century debate. On one issue or another, other philosophers sensed that their positions pointed towards Malebranchianism, and they felt themselves compelled to distance themselves from his extreme views. For example:
Leibniz’s universal harmony is similar to Malebranche’s occasionalism, and he frequently emphasises the differences between the two systems (e.g. in the New System).
Locke attacked Malebranche in a paper entitled An Examination of Père Malebranche’s Opinion of Seeing All Things in God (1706).
Berkeley more or less held that we see all things in God, and he explicitly tried to distance himself from Malebranche in Principles of Human Knowledge, §§53, 68ff, and 82ff.
Hume’s denial of causal interaction between physical objects owed much to Malebranche, and he too wanted to hide his debt. In the Treatise, p.148, he commends Malebranche for rejecting powers in physical objects, but criticises him for allowing that God exercises power, on the grounds that we no more have an impression of God’s power than we do of physical powers. Cf. p.249, and Enquiries, §57n. In §4, Hume makes the remarkably bad prophesy that, as philosophers, Aristotle, Malebranche, and Locke will be forgotten, when Cicero, La Bruyère, and Addison are still remembered: ‘But the glory of Malebranche is confined to his own nation, and to his own age.’ In fact there was a brief flurry of Malebranchianism in England, including John Norris of Bemerton (1657–1712), whom Locke attacked. Jean de la Bruyère (1645–1696) was famous for a book called Characters. Joseph Addison (1672–1719) was a famous essayist, and one of the founders of the Spectator.
Other figures who were in correspondence with Leibniz, also had running battles with Malebranche — in particular, Antoine Arnauld (1612–1694), Simon Foucher (1644–1697), and Pierre Bayle (1647–1706).
It is remarkable how neglected a philosopher Malebranche has been. For the past three centuries, scholarship on Malebranche has been virtually the exclusive province of the French, for whom he is a national hero second only to Descartes himself (and perhaps deservedly so).
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