Philosophy of Nicolas Malebranche
French Philosopher, Theologian, Developer of Cartesian Thought
Feb 25, 2009
Nicolas Malebranche (1638-1715), was a French philosopher, theologian and chief developer of Cartesian thought. His philosophy "Doctrine of Occasionalism" is defined in his principal work, The Search after Truth.
Cartesian Thought
In Cartesian thought, the mind and the body are two distinct kinds. And in Cartesian ontology there are only three kinds of substance: mind, matter, and God.
Descartes's Mind-Body Conflict
René Descartes's 'cogito' claims that the mind must be distinct from corporal things, which leads to the issue of causal interaction. It is a human awareness that the mind and body interact, for example, when the body hurts, one feels pain under normal circumstance. Then if Descartes is correct in his assertion that the body and mind are distinct, what then happens to the causal connection between the two?
Malebranche's Occasionalism Doctrine
According to Malebranche, the solution Descartes's causal problem could be resolved by his occasionalism doctrine: that all causal power comes from God. His solution was heavily based on his theological beliefs.
He claimed that individual minds have no power to cause anything in the physical world, that they are limitations of the one universal mind of God. Likewise, physical objects have no power to cause movements in other physical objects, since to cause something to happen is to know how to bring that happening about.
Melabranche philosophy: The only causal power is God.
The Search after Truth (1674) by Malebranche
This book, The Search after Truth, outlines the Malebranche's doctrine of occasionalism --- his view that God is the true cause of events, which includes the actions of our bodies and our minds. Malebranche concluded that "it is our soul's connection to God that allows us to see the perfect ideas that are the archetypes of imperfect created beings, the one that gives us insight into their nature, but only if God wills it." (Stokes's Philosophy, the Great Thinkers, 2007)
Effect of Occasionalism Doctrine
Although the doctrine of occasionalism solved the problem of mind-body interaction for the Cartesian philosophers, it was not popular with the other great thinkers. Eventually, philosophers preferred to dissolve the mind-body causal problem by rejecting the duality of the mind and the body, which was primarily the principle of his colleague, Benedict de Spinoza, who argued that the mind and body are just different ways of conceiving the same reality, be it God or Nature.
Sources:
Biographical Dictionary, edited by Una Mcgovern, Chambers, 2002
Philosophy, the Great Thinkers, by Philip Stokes, Capella, 2007
 |
