Arnauld, Antoine

« dualism has laid the surest foundation for the immortality of the soul.

3 The Arnauld-Malebranche debate In 1680, Arnauld came across the manuscript of Malebranche's Traité de la nature et de la grace (Treatise on Nature and Grace) , which was in the process of being printed.

He was so astounded by what he read there that, unable to halt its publication, he decided to publicly refute Malebranche's entire system.

His ultimate target wasMalebranche's views on grace and on God's general modus operandi.

But he chose to begin his attack byundermining what he took to be the philosophical foundations of Malebranche's theology.

Thus, in 1683 he publishedDes vraies et des fausses idées , an attack on Malebranche's theory of ideas as presented in his most important philosophical work, De la recherche de la vérité (1674-5) (see Malebranche, N.

§§2 , 3, 6).

Malebranche had argued that ideas, the immaterial representations present to the mind in perception and knowledge, are not themselvesmodes of our thought, as sensations are, but are the very archetypes or essences of things in God's mind, to whichwe have access through a kind of divine illumination or union with God.

Like most seventeenth-century philosophers,Arnauld believed that representative ideas play an essential role in human cognition.

His objection was to thinking ofideas as image-objects in their own right, independent of the mind and mediating its access to the external world.Malebranche's view, he alleged, is a result of the same confusions that gave rise to the Aristotelians' 'sensiblespecies'.

As children, we wrongly assume that the images or reflections through which we sometimes see things notactually before the eyes are themselves objects, and later come to suppose that it is through similar image-objectsthat the mind thinks of things in their absence.

But philosophers have realized that even in ordinary sense-perception the material bodies before the eyes are not immediately present to the soul.

They conclude that insense-perception what is directly perceived are representative beings rather than bodies themselves.

This line ofreasoning, Arnauld argues, treats the soul as if it were material, assuming that the way the senses work and theway the mind works are analogous.

More importantly, a theory that makes ideas into mind-independent entitiesmediating cognition of the world has the absurd consequence that we never know or perceive that world: all weever perceive are ideas.

The mind is surrounded by a 'palace of ideas' that keeps it from the world of things thatGod intended it to know.

Malebranche 'transports us to unknown lands… where a man sees, instead of the mentoward whom he turns his eyes, only intelligible men; instead of the sun and the stars which God has created, onlyan intelligible sun and intelligible stars' ( Arnauld 1683 : 227-8).

Even Malebranche must reject such extreme Pyrrhonism (see Pyrrho ; Pyrrhonism ).

Arnauld goes on to argue that the ideas that function in human perception and knowledge are not 'representative beings distinct from the mind's perceptions', but just are those perceptions: 'Itake the idea of an object and the perception of an object to be the same thing' ( 1683 : 198).

To have an idea of a thing just is to perceive or think of that thing; it is not to have some proxy object standing before the mind.

Theidea is a mental act or operation which, through its 'form' (a term borrowed from Descartes, who defines an idea asthe forma cogitationis), is directed at some object but which is not itself the object of perception.

One can thuscharacterize a thought through its object (for example, as the idea of the sun) by attending to its form, or one canconsider it simply as an act or mode of the mind: I have said that I take the perception and the idea to be thesame thing.

Nevertheless, it must be remarked that this thing, although single, stands in two relations: one to thesoul which it modifies, the other to the thing perceived, in so far as it exists objectively in the soul.

The wordperception more directly indicates the first relation; the word idea, the latter.

(Arnauld 1683: 198) There is still a sense in which we perceive material objects only mediately or indirectly, since we perceive a thing through the formof the perceptual act (that is, through the idea of the thing).

But it does not follow from this that we perceivethings indirectly in the strong and unacceptable sense of 'indirect' entailed by Malebranche's account.

In Arnauld'seyes, then, his debate with Malebranche over the nature of ideas pitted something like a direct realist account ofperceptual acquaintance with Malebranche's representationalist or indirect realist account.

But the debate is also arich source for early modern theories of intentionality (see Intentionality ).

Arnauld claims that it is not his intention to do away with all representative beings, since he grants that the mind's modifications are themselvesrepresentative of objects.

This, in fact, is how his act-ideas achieve their relatedness to objects (the secondrelation in which every idea stands).

Every perception is the perception of something because it has arepresentational content (what Arnauld, again following Descartes, calls its 'objective reality') and thus isrepresentative of some object: 'The perceptions that our soul has of objects are necessarily representative of theseobjects' ( Arnauld 1684 : 381).

This representative character is an intrinsic feature of the perceptual act and is what gives the act its intentionality, or directedness-towards-an-object.

And for Arnauld this is true for every mentalevent - not just clear and distinct perceptions, but also sensations and passions.

Malebranche, by contrast, claimsthat only intellections have intentionality, and their intentionality is explained by the real presence to the mind ofsome distinct object which the mind apprehends - that is, a divine idea - and not by some features intrinsic to themental operation itself.

Arnauld also directed his considerable critical skills to the doctrine of the vision in God.

Muchof his concern was focused on Malebranche's claim that our ideas of extended beings, or the idea of extension itself(what Malebranche calls the 'infinite intelligible extension') are in God.

He suspected that this was tantamount toplacing extension itself really or 'formally' in God and thus making God extended or material, and that Malebranche'sdoctrine harboured a latent Spinozism or Gassendism (see Spinoza, B.

de §4 ; Gassendi, P.

§4 ).

Arnauld accused Malebranche of distorting the thought of both Descartes and Augustine - whom Arnauld and Malebranche alike tookas their mentors - and even of propounding anti-Cartesian, anti-Augustinian and anti-Christian views.

The clashover representative ideas - which continued until Arnauld's death - was only supposed to be a preliminary, however,for the real issue: God's manner of acting in the realms of nature and grace.

Malebranche, in his theodicy, hadargued that evil and sin occur because God acts only by what he calls 'general volitions' - volitions that carry outgeneral and simple laws.

God would like to forestall evil and to save every human being, but actually to do so wouldrequire a great number of ad hoc, particular volitions and would demand that God should violate the principles of hisown nature, which determines him to carry out his plans by the wisest and most simple means.

So God must allowimperfections in the world and the damnation of many (see Malebranche, N.

§5 ).

Arnauld objected strongly to this model of God's activity.

He accused Malebranche of undermining God's omnipotence and of treating God's agency nodifferently from human agency.

He insists that, on Malebranche's account, God is like some distant king who only. »