Nicolas Malebranche
1638-1715 · Rationalism · Prominent
Malebranche was an Oratorian priest who took Descartes's two substances and removed all the power from both of them. A true cause is one whose effect the mind sees to follow necessarily, and no creature answers to that description, so he thought it a contradiction to maintain that all the angels and demons together could move a bit of straw. God alone acts, and what we call causes are only the occasions on which He does. Keeping the world in being is not a different act from making it, so the chair is created where it stands at every instant. We do not see bodies either, but their ideas in God, and we think at all by His light rather than our own.
Signature
The position Malebranche is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Ground of Being
- strongly leans Transcendence
- Agency
- Occasionalism
Positions on the 8 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- mildly leans Purposeful (67 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Mind
- strongly leans Beyond Brain (96 on a 0–100 scale from Brain Only to Beyond Brain)
- Universals
- strongly leans Realism (5 on a 0–100 scale from Realism to Nominalism)
- Identity
- leans Unchanging (25 on a 0–100 scale from Unchanging to Changing)
- Meaning
- strongly leans Inherent (96 on a 0–100 scale from Constructed to Inherent)
- Ground of Being
- strongly leans Transcendence (91 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- strongly leans Objective (96 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Ethics
- leans Means (80 on a 0–100 scale from Ends to Means)
12 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Malebranche refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Trinitarian Monotheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Union with God
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Moral Realism
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Perception
- Indirect Realism
What do we directly perceive? - Knowledge
- Grounded in God
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Natural Law
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Agency
- Occasionalism
What is the nature of human agency and freedom? - Beginning of Things
- Continuous Creation
What is the origin of reality? - Death
- Judgement
What happens at death? - Role of Emotion
- Obstacle to Reason
What is the proper role of emotion? - Human Nature
- Redeemably Corrupted
What is human nature? - Primary Bond
- The Divine
What is your primary bond and loyalty?