malebranche's doctrine of freedom / consent and the incompleteness of god's volitions

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This article was downloaded by: [University of Birmingham] On: 15 November 2014, At: 15:05 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK British Journal for the History of Philosophy Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbjh20 MALEBRANCHE'S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM / CONSENT AND THE INCOMPLETENESS OF GOD'S VOLITIONS Andrew Pessin Published online: 14 Oct 2010. To cite this article: Andrew Pessin (2000) MALEBRANCHE'S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM / CONSENT AND THE INCOMPLETENESS OF GOD'S VOLITIONS, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, 8:1, 21-53, DOI: 10.1080/096087800360210 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/096087800360210 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all the information (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform. However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make no representations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, or suitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressed in this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not the views of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content should not be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sources of information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions, claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilities whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content. This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub- licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly

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Page 1: MALEBRANCHE'S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM / CONSENT AND THE INCOMPLETENESS OF GOD'S VOLITIONS

This article was downloaded by: [University of Birmingham]On: 15 November 2014, At: 15:05Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH,UK

British Journal for the History ofPhilosophyPublication details, including instructions for authorsand subscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbjh20

MALEBRANCHE'S DOCTRINE OFFREEDOM / CONSENT AND THEINCOMPLETENESS OF GOD'SVOLITIONSAndrew PessinPublished online: 14 Oct 2010.

To cite this article: Andrew Pessin (2000) MALEBRANCHE'S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM /CONSENT AND THE INCOMPLETENESS OF GOD'S VOLITIONS, British Journal for the Historyof Philosophy, 8:1, 21-53, DOI: 10.1080/096087800360210

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/096087800360210

PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE

Taylor & Francis makes every effort to ensure the accuracy of all theinformation (the “Content”) contained in the publications on our platform.However, Taylor & Francis, our agents, and our licensors make norepresentations or warranties whatsoever as to the accuracy, completeness, orsuitability for any purpose of the Content. Any opinions and views expressedin this publication are the opinions and views of the authors, and are not theviews of or endorsed by Taylor & Francis. The accuracy of the Content shouldnot be relied upon and should be independently verified with primary sourcesof information. Taylor and Francis shall not be liable for any losses, actions,claims, proceedings, demands, costs, expenses, damages, and other liabilitieswhatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connectionwith, in relation to or arising out of the use of the Content.

This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes.Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly

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forbidden. Terms & Conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions

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1 Even that attention has focused only on Malebranche’s distinction between ‘particular’ and‘general’ volitions and ignored (as I’ll argue) the much wider relevance of the notion. (Cf.Black (1997), Clarke (1995), and Nadler (1993).)

2 In forthcoming papers I also interpret other Malebranchean doctrines in the light of God’svolitional incompleteness: ‘Malebranche’s Natural Theodicy’ (Religious Studies) ‘Male-branche’s Doctrine of Continuous Creation’ (Canadian Journal of Philosophy) and ‘Male-branche’s Distinction Between Particular and General Volitions’ (Journal of the History ofPhilosophy).

MALEBRANCHE’S DOCTRINE OFFREEDOM/CONSENT AND THE INCOMPLETENESS

OF GOD’S VOLITIONS

Andrew Pessin

‘God needs no instruments to act’, Malebranche writes in Search 6.2.3; ‘itsuf�ces that He wills in order that a thing be, because it is a contradictionthat He should will and that what He wills should not happen. Therefore,His power is His will’ (450). After nearly identical language in Treatise 1.12,Malebranche writes that ‘[God’s] wills are necessarily ef�cacious . . . [H]ispower differs not at all from [H]is will’ (116). God’s causal power, here,clearly traces only to His volitions – not merely to the fact that He wills, butspeci�cally to the content of His volitions (‘ “what” He wills’). Yet despitethe obviously key role the ordinary notion of volitional content plays forMalebranche, recent writers have paid surprisingly little attention either toit or its exegetical implications.1 I hope to rectify this situation here. Theplan of this paper is this: �rst, to borrow current work in the philosophy ofmind to sketch the notion of an incomplete volition, i.e. one whose contentis ‘incomplete’ in a sense to be explained; second, to show that Malebrancheclearly allows and uses something like this notion; third, to apply the notionto Malebranche’s doctrine of human freedom.2 In so doing, I believe, wecan understand this doctrine in a new way, and one which: (i) is clearly con-sistent with his texts, and (ii) unlike other interpretations makes coherentsense out of the con�icting streams in his heroic attempt to reconcile hisoccasionalism – the doctrine that no �nite substances have genuine causalpowers – with our freedom; fourth, Contrast my interpretation with thoseof two recent writers: Sleigh et al. (1998) and Schmaltz (1996); and Fifth,Summarize the major results.

ARTICLE

British Journal for the History of Philosophy ISSN 0960-8788 © 2000 Taylor & Francis Ltd

British Journal for the History of Philosophy 8(1) 2000: 21–53

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INCOMPLETE VOLITIONS

Like more commonly discussed beliefs and desires, volitions are intentionalstates: mental states with representational (or intentional) content.3 Thestandard form of reporting that an agent a is in a volitional state is ‘a willsthat p’, where p is a proposition expressing the content of the state. Here isa very rough partial de�nition of incomplete volitional content: The contentp of a volition is ‘incomplete’ if, were the volition to be exercised success-fully, more would be true as a result of that exercise than is representedexplicitly within p.4 For example: (a) suppose Smith wills that he stands up;his actual standing up involves many speci�c physical details that aren’texplicitly contained in his volitional content; or (b) suppose he wills that heassembles a turkey sandwich on rye. Entirely unbeknownst to him, this ob-ject he creates also has various other features: For example, it is the onlysandwich within three miles. Since exercising that volition resulted in some-thing which was not contained within p, Smith’s volitional content (hencevolition) was incomplete.5

There are at least four factors responsible for the incompleteness of ourvolitions. These include ‘empirical’ factors such as:

1 our own psychological or epistemic limits (that we either do not or cannotrepresent to ourselves anything very completely), as well as

2 the fact that we can and do use the world’s features as our ‘instruments’.We learn, for example, that a volition with a rather incomplete content

22 ANDREW PESSIN

3 Throughout I’ll be concerned only with what Malebranche calls ‘practical volitions’, those‘God has when He wills to act’ (Search 6.2.3, p. 450). Cf. also:

1 Quand on dit que toutes les volontez de Dieu sont ef�caces, on l’entend des volontez pra-tiques. Car Dieu veut des choses qu’il ne fait point: parce que quoi qu’il y ait quelqueraison de les vouloir, il n’y en a pas assez pour les vouloir faire.

1 (Recueil, p. 655)

1 I’ll assume that all volitions are conscious, an assumption Malebranche seems to share.1 The nature of intentional states and their contents has been especially �ercely debated

over the past two decades. For a general overview of the debate on intentional content, seeGoldberg & Pessin (1997), ch. 2. For many key primary texts in the debate, see Pessin &Goldberg (1996).

4 Alternatively, a content p is incomplete if the truth of p entails logically or nomically thetruth of at least one other distinct proposition q. By ‘p nomically entails q’ I mean that pconjoined with true propositions expressing the laws of nature and/or other initial conditionslogically entails q (where q is distinct from any of the propositions in that conjunction). Incases where the agent makes certain kinds of errors, this alternative de�nition might beadapted accordingly. Both de�nitions may be adapted to apply to the contents of intentionalstates in general.

5 Note that on this rough de�nition, perhaps all of our ordinary volitional contents (hencevolitions) will count as incomplete, and for many different reasons. That consequence is just�ne: My thesis in this paper is just that the ordinary notion of volitional content has import-ant rami�cations for the interpretation of Malebranche.

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like I get up results in all the complex material movements involved ingetting up, so our contents don’t need to be more complete.

More importantly for us, however, the incompleteness of our volitional con-tents also results from a pair of ‘philosophical’ factors, concerning the waycontents in general are commonly individuated:

3 Consider Saul Kripke’s famous recent work on the nature of propernames.6 Brie�y, Kripke argued that a speaker’s identifying knowledge ofan individual plays no crucial role in the meaning of that individual’sname. Generalizing this result to intentional states, we might say this: Anagent may have a concept of a particular person (or entity) such as Aris-totle – or be in an intentional state whose content includes Aristotle –without having any particular beliefs about Aristotle. Any volitionformed with such a content would clearly be incomplete.

4 Borrowing Frege’s well-known example, consider, �nally, the followingsentences reporting beliefs:

(4(i)i Smith believes that the morning star appears in the morning.(4(ii) Smith believes that the evening star appears in the morning.

On their ordinary (de dicto) readings, we may suppose: (i) is true and (ii) isfalse. But now it turns out, of course, that the morning star, Venus, is alsothe evening star; the terms ‘the morning star’ and ‘the evening star’ are infact co-extensive. Nevertheless, since these terms differ in meaning (or‘intension’), there’s no guarantee that they can simply be substituted foreach other within sentences reporting intentional states – for sometimesthat substitution changes the truth value of the sentence. Ours is one suchcase: (i) is true while (ii) is false, yet the only difference between them is thesubstitution of one term for another co-extensive one.

One lesson typically drawn here: The individuation of intentional statesis sensitive to more than just what objects (for example) those states ‘refer’to. We see this in the fact that: (i) and (ii) differ in truth value: The bestexplanation for this difference is that they report distinct beliefs – and thesebeliefs are distinct despite their ‘actually’ picking out the very same object(Venus) and ascribing to that object the very same property (appearing inthe morning)!

Given the common view that intentional states are individuated by theircontents, these beliefs’ distinctness may be traced precisely to their differing

MALEBRANCHE’S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM/CONSENT 23

6 The main primary source here is Kripke (1980). Here I’ll be extremely brief because �rst,while his work has in�uenced many, it is not universally accepted, second, this isn’t theproper context to present or evaluate the relevant dialectic, and third, there simply isn’t ade-quate space to work out the many complexities involved in applying his work to our issues.Given these quali�cations, my use of Kripke in this paper is meant to be more illustrativethan conclusive.

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in content. So our next question would be: What else (if not denotation) isthe individuation of intentional states (i.e. contents) sensitive to? Answer:The way in which the agent represents or describes the relevant objects toherself. Or, to put it differently, it is sensitive not simply to objects, but ratherto objects-under-descriptions (or objects-conceived-a-certain-way). Changethe description of the object, and you change the content in question: Thebelief that the morning star appears in the morning is distinct in content(hence distinct) from the belief that the evening star appears in the morningbecause, though the very same object is involved, it is involved under differ-ent descriptions. Indeed that difference in description seems to be the onlydifference between the beliefs! Similarly, that Smith represents or describesVenus as the morning star, but not as the evening star, is precisely whataccounts for the truth of (i) and the falseness of (ii).

In short: Smith’s two beliefs are ‘about’ the same state of affairs, in thatthey ascribe the same property to the same object. Yet the beliefs them-selves are distinct, differ in content, because they describe that state ofaffairs differently. This allows our intentional contents to be incomplete inthis way: We may will or desire or believe in effect that a certain state ofaffairs s comes about or obtains, but do so only under one (or more), andnot all, of s’s applicable descriptions.7

Sometimes this kind of incompleteness can come about due to our igno-rance: Smith doesn’t realize that his beliefs concern the very same state ofaffairs. Or it might be due to our being ef�cient, or even lazy: It often paysto represent states of affairs concisely and with minimal information. Orconsider a different sort of a case: a caring doctor deciding whether to, say,immediately amputate a limb without anesthetic or risk her patient’s death.The desire to save the patient’s life is clearly distinct from the desire to causehim great pain. Yet in this context the two coincide, since causing him enor-mous pain is just the way to save his life: ‘Causing him great pain’ and‘saving his life’, as well as ‘amputating his limb’, are different descriptionsof the same single amputation event e. The doctor knows this all too well.Yet still, she may desire (or will) that e comes about under one or more ofits descriptions, and not under all of them, even in full knowledge that alldescriptions apply.8

Another way to put this important point: On our ordinary individuationof contents, we need not include within our volitional contents (say) eventhe foreseen consequences of our acting on our volitions. The doctor wills

24 ANDREW PESSIN

7 This accords with the de�nitions of incompleteness as follows. Let p and q represent contentsentences ‘about’ the same states of affairs but differing in meaning (intension). The differ-ence in meaning entails that q is not explicitly ‘contained’ in the content of p; yet were p tobe true (or the relevant volition successfully exercised), q would also be true. Hence thecontent expressed by p is incomplete.

8 Here, for ease of exposition, I’ve assumed the Davidsonian approach to individuatingevents, but nothing rides on that assumption. (See essays 6–8 in Davidson (1980)).

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that this life be saved, fully foresees that in saving this life great pain will becaused, yet does not will that great pain be caused.

Summary. In this section, then, I’ve sketched the notion of an incompletevolition (i.e. one with an incomplete content), and explored four factorsresponsible for that incompleteness. The most important of these is the last:It’s possible to represent certain states of affairs under one description (orconception) but not under other applicable ones.

INCOMPLETE VOLITIONS AND MALEBRANCHE’S GOD

Can (or does) Malebranche’s God have incomplete volitions? Let’s seewhether any of the factors mentioned above is relevant.

Factor (2) is clearly least promising: Malebranche’s occasionalism rulesout God’s use of ‘instruments’. But what about factor (1)? Well, since Godis omniscient, He foresees everything that every action entails. But all thisdirectly means is that, unlike us, God is capable of making His volitionscomplete. Does it also entail that God’s volitions must be or are complete?Not on its own: Just because God can foresee everything, that doesn’t yetmean, as we’ve seen, that He must include what He foresees within thecontent of his volitions. On the other hand, since Malebranche also deniescausal power to anything but God, it would seem that only what Godspecifically wills could ever come to pass, since otherwise we’d need anon-divine causal explanation for the existence of something He didn’twill. If He foresees it, then it will come to pass; but if it will come to pass,it must be that He wills it; in which case everything He foresees is indeedincluded in the content of His volitions. So far, then, occasionalism andGod’s omniscience would seem inconsistent with the incompleteness ofHis volitions.

The story gets more complicated, however, as we get to factors (3) and(4). We saw, for example, that it is possible for us to will that a certain stateof affairs obtains without willing it under all of its applicable descriptions,including foreseen ones. May Malebranche’s God do the same?

I believe that the answer is yes.9 But this answer must also be consistentwith occasionalism: No incomplete volition of God’s can result in the exist-ence of anything, not explicitly represented in the content of the volition,which itself requires a causal explanation, for we must not be required togrant causal power to anything non-divine. But note: This constraint maybe satis�ed if, in effect, the fact that relevant further descriptions apply to

MALEBRANCHE’S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM/CONSENT 25

9 Indeed, it would probably be wasteful of God – hence inconsistent with His nature – to exer-cise multiple distinct volitions to bring about a single state of affairs. If so, then perhaps Godis logically required to have incomplete volitions. (Cf. Elucidations 15, p. 679, where Male-branche in a different context makes approving reference to Occam’s razor.)

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the relevant state of affairs (beyond those individuating the volitionalcontent) does not itself require a causal explanation.

To see how this all works out, let’s turn to Malebranche. In Dialogues 7.7–9, Aristes claims that the essential dependence of �nite

creatures on God can be accommodated by simply allowing that God coulddestroy such creatures any time He wants, by willing their non-existence.Theodore replies as follows:

An in�nitely wise God can will nothing that is not, as it were, worthy of beingwilled; He can love nothing that is not lovable. Now nothingness containsnothing lovable. Hence it cannot be the object of divine volition . . . ThereforeGod cannot positively will the annihilation of the universe. It is only creatureswho . . . can take nothingness for the object of their volitions.

(Dialogues 7.7–9, 114; cf. also Méditations Chrétiennes 49–50)

Since God cannot positively annihilate creatures, Theodore concludes, theiressential dependence on Him must be accommodated by their being unableto subsist on their own. Rather, God positively wills the existence of eachobject He wants to exist at every time, and should the time come for theobject no longer to exist, God would, rather than will its annihilation, simplystop willing its existence:

. . . [It] is the will of God that gives existence to bodies and to all creatures . . .and when this same [sustaining] volition ceases . . . . it is necessary that bodiescease to exist . . . . God can annihilate [creatures] as He pleases. But this isbecause He ceases willing what He was free to will.

(Dialogues 7.6–9, 111–14; cf. also Search 6.2.9, 517)

These passages, now, are evidence that Malebranche would accept thedistinction between (for example) the following two volitional contents con-cerning objects a, b, c, and o:

(iii) a, b, and c exist(iv) o does not exist

We see this because Malebranche admits above that, although God cannot,creatures can indeed have volitions with a content such as that of: (iv) henceit is a perfectly legitimate content. Meanwhile everyone, it seems, couldhave a volition with the content of (iii), so it too is a perfectly legitimatecontent. So if both (iii) and (iv) are legitimate contents, yet God can willone but not the other, then they must also be distinct contents. Since inten-tional states are individuated by their contents, volitions formed by willingthose contents will themselves be of distinct volition types.

Now suppose God were to will that from t1–t3, a, b, c, and o exist, andwill that at t4 a, b, and c exist. God obviously foresees the complete outcomeof this latter volition, that at t4 o does not exist. Yet it is not the case that

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He wills this outcome, for God has no volition whose content is that o doesnot exist. Put back in Malebranche’s language, God’s volitions result in theannihilation of o between t3 and t4, God knows that His volitions will resultin that annihilation, yet God in fact does not will that annihilation. It seemsto me, therefore, that we have evidence that Malebranche’s God could infact exercise an incomplete volition, such that He would not will a foreseenconsequence of His volition(s).

But would this violate the occasionalism constraint? Well, is there some-thing which God did not will in this case but which requires causal expla-nation? It’s clear that (iii) and (iv) express distinct propositions; in general,bringing about the truth of (iii) is clearly a distinct goal from bringing aboutthe truth of (iv). Nevertheless, in the particular world we are imagining,there is a very important relationship between these goals: They may beachieved by one and the same activity, or by bringing about one and thesame (compound) state of affairs. From God’s only bringing about the exist-ence of a, b, and c, it follows that o does not exist. Or, to put this differently,in this case the state of affairs that a, b, and c exist would itself be truly (ifnot completely) described by ‘o does not exist’.

So, there is only one compound state of affairs in question, even if it hasmultiple descriptions. God is fully causally responsible for this state ofaffairs; since the world consists just in this state of affairs, there is nothingleft over requiring further causal explanation. God made this state of affairsobtain under one particular description (even while foreseeing the applica-bility of others); hence He created it via an incomplete volition. We, how-ever, may describe this state of affairs in any of those many other ways.These descriptions are perfectly true and applicable to this state of affairs.But their being so does not involve the obtaining of any further states ofaffairs, hence does not require any further causal explanation, hence pre-serves occasionalism. Or so, I suggest, Malebranche seems to believe.10

All this suggests that Malebranche’s God could use incomplete volitions;it doesn’t yet show that He does use them, since it’s not certain whether Godever in fact ceases willing the existence of creatures.11 For while Male-branche recognizes that individual bodies come and go, and indeed oftenspeaks of the creation and/or annihilation of individual bodies, his ultimateposition appears to be that, in the ordinary course of nature, the genuine

MALEBRANCHE’S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM/CONSENT 27

10 Very dif�cult metaphysical questions arise here. Is a state of affairs’ being describable by de-scription (iv) itself a (meta-) state of affairs? Is ‘being true’ a genuine property? If it is, woulda certain description’s being true itself be a state of affairs, hence requiring further causalexplanation? What sort of ontological status do descriptions themselves have? What, forexample, is their relationship to Ideas? Etc. Addressing these questions would be relevantto assessing the overall correctness of Malebranche’s theory. In this paper I am just tryingto provide a way of understanding what he is asserting.

11 I thank an anonymous reviewer for this journal for making this point.

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substance of these objects, that is, their matter, is not annihilated, just recon-�gured.12

Even if, however, we restrict ourselves to ‘recon�guration’, there’s reasonto think that Malebranche’s God is in fact using incomplete volitions. InMalebranche’s discussion of God’s continuous conservation of the world,for example, he argues that the motion of every body b amounts to God’swilling b to exist ‘successively in different places’ (Dialogues 7.11, p. 117).Since this is true for even the smallest bodies, it’s clear that for Malebranchethe existence and state of motion – i.e. con�guration – of all matter at alltimes is explicitly and positively willed by God. But now (say) ‘this chair’exists at time t in so far as God wills that there be at t a certain overall con-�guration of matter. So when God ‘annihilates’ chairs (for example through�re), He does not positively will either their, or their constitutive con�gu-ration’s, destruction; He merely wills that there be at t+1 a new con�gura-tion of matter, at t+2 yet another, and so on. So God brings about, andforesees, the regularly occurring destruction of material con�gurations, i.e.individual bodies, yet never positively wills it. In short, He exercises incom-plete volitions.13

Summary. In this section I’ve tried to show not only that Malebranche’sGod is capable of having incomplete volitions, but also that Malebrancheseems fairly clearly to accept and use that fact, and does so in such a way asto be consistent with occasionalism. Let’s now see how to interpret Male-branche’s doctrine of freedom/consent in the light of God’s volitionalincompleteness.

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12 For detailed discussion, see Schmaltz (1996), pp. 173–80. Examples where Malebranchespeaks of the creation/annihilation of individual bodies: God conserves the existence of ‘thischair’ (Dialogues 7.10, 115); ‘. . .a piece of wax changes into �re and smoke. . .’ (Search 1.1.1,4); ‘If a piece of wax were annihilated’ (Search 4.2.4, 273); ‘wood thrown into a �re ceasesto be’ (Search 4.11.2, 316).

13 Malebranche’s writings offer many other examples of divine volitional incompleteness, ofdifferent varieties: Search 6.2.9, 514ff. (God needn’t will that a body be at rest, merely ceaseto will that it move); Elucidations 1, 557 (God used no positive volition to produce our con-cupiscence); Treatise, Illustration 1.16, 211 (God can’t will to make sinners more guilty orcriminal, but knowingly gives graces which make them so); Treatise, Illustration 1.17, 212(God needn’t will that lands be sterile, or hearts be hardened, just refrain from willing rain,or grace, to fall); Recueil 655 (God wills to move the arm of the assassin, but doesn’t will theassassination). For cases of human volitional incompleteness: Search 3.1.4.1, 211–12, Eluci-dations 1, 556, and Ethics 2.4, 158 (Even sinners love God, though not under that descrip-tion, in their desire to be happy), Search 6.2.3, 449 (We will to move our arms, as a result ofwhich animal spirits which don’t �gure into our volitions begin �owing). In addition to voli-tional incompleteness, there’s evidence that Malebranche makes use of perceptual incom-pleteness as well. For example, in seeing ideas in God we don’t see God’s substanceabsolutely, ‘but only as relative to creatures and to the degree that they can participate in it’(Search 3.2.6, 231), i.e. we see it under one description and not some other; cf. Cook (1998).Similarly, I think Malebranche’s insistence that we do see bodies, albeit indirectly – in con-trast to simply seeing ideas and not at all bodies – is best interpreted as an example of per-ception with an incomplete content; cf. Cook (1991).

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MALEBRANCHE’S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM/CONSENT

Here is the plan for this section:

1 Introduce the problem.2 Sketch Malebranche’s basic solution to the problem, along with six

exegetical constraints, and suggest how to apply God’s volitional incom-pleteness to our exegesis.

3 Reject one possible interpretation of his solution, in which God does notwill our particular inclinations.

4 Defend a second interpretation, in which our act of (non) consent is iden-tical to the sequence of states of affairs which God creates (although notunder any morally relevant descriptions).

5 Argue that my interpretation is consistent with our exegetical constraints.

1 One of the things that God wills is our own existence, which He continu-ously creates or conserves: ‘If the world subsists, it is because God continuesto will its existence. Thus, the conservation of creatures is, on the part ofGod, nothing but their continued creation’ (Dialogues 7.7, 112). But now,when God creates a thing, it would seem He does so determinately, with allits features; if so, then causal responsibility for all its features should restsolely with God, leaving nothing over for creatures to contribute. Male-branche explicitly accepts this when it comes to bodies. The problem, asmany have noted, is this: What’s true for bodies would seem also to be truefor minds or souls.14 But if God is fully causally responsible both for theexistence of minds and for all their modes or features or states (sensations,thoughts, volitions, etc.), then it’s hard to understand how any mind couldcount either as free or self-determining in any meaningful sense. There’sjust nothing left over for them to do.

The worrisome implications here, for our current purposes, are primarilymoral. If we are not meaningfully free, how can Malebranche maintain themoral value and evaluability of human beings and their ‘actions’? If God isthe cause of our states and actions, how can He be released from blame forour evils and sins? Malebranche clearly needs an adequate notion offreedom here. The problem is in reconciling any such notion with his oc-casionalism.

Malebranche worked hard to solve this problem. The result was many

MALEBRANCHE’S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM/CONSENT 29

14 For example, see Loeb (1981) p. 207, Schmaltz (1996) pp. 218ff, and Nadler (1998) 221ff.Schmaltz also discusses Boursier (1713), who makes the same point. Lennon (1980) discussesthe general point made both by Cordemoy and in an anonymous 1672 work that the sameconsiderations supporting the impotence of bodies apply to minds (810). (Henceforth I willjust speak of ‘minds’; I assume for our purposes no important distinction between ‘minds’,‘souls’, ‘spirits’, etc.)

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rather opaque passages, throughout his life, re�ecting many con�icting ten-dencies. The occasionalism led him to hold that God causes or createseverything ‘real’ in us and that we are causally impotent; the need for ourfreedom led him to hold that, nevertheless, there are indeed features of our-selves for which we, in some sense, are responsible. It’s no surprise thatsome commentators, as we’ll see, think that Malebranche is actually offer-ing distinct theories in different places! In this section and the next,however, I will argue that the notion of God’s volitional incompletenessallows us at least to make sense of much of this material, and to do so in away in which Malebranche comes out as holding just a single, coherenttheory.

2 Let’s begin with the basics. Malebranche designates:

By the word ‘will’, or capacity the soul has of loving different goods, the impres-sion or natural impulse that carries us toward general and indeterminate good;and by ‘freedom’, I mean nothing else but the power that the mind has of turningthis impression toward objects that please us so that our natural inclinations aremade to settle upon some particular object.

(Search 1.1.2, 5)

In Elucidations 1, he argues that we know we are free (that we have thispower) �rst, because our inner sensation, which ‘never deceives us’, clearlyreveals it to us. We simply feel, in many though not all cases, that ourimpressions or impulses or inclinations towards particular goods are notinvincible, that we can direct them elsewhere (p. 552);15 second, becausereason persuades us: If the impressions God gives us were invincible thenit wouldn’t be up to us what we do, and God would be the cause of our sins(pp. 552–3); and third, because religion requires it (pp. 553–4).16

Central to Malebranche’s conception of our freedom is his doctrine ofconsent: We exercise our freedom by consenting, or suspending our consent,to particular (apparent) goods. The main idea is fairly simple. God createsor sustains us with all our modes, including our inclinations. These latterinclude our inclination towards the good ‘in general’, which is our desire ‘to

30 ANDREW PESSIN

15 Malebranche later hedges here. In Elucidations 15, for example, he acknowledges (in effect)that it isn’t always obvious just how to interpret what inner sensation is telling us, and goesso far as to concede that in some cases ‘inner sensation is not infallible’ (p. 670). (Below I’lloffer a speci�c interpretation of the dictates of inner sensation.)

16 See also Elucidations 15, p. 669, and Recueil 164. Though we know that we are free, Male-branche admits that our idea or knowledge of this freedom is not very clear:

12 Since we do not know our soul through a clear idea . . . it is in vain that we attempt todiscover what in us terminates the action that God impresses in us, or what it is in usthat lets itself be overcome by an impulse that is not invincible . . .

(Elucidations 1, p. 554)

12 This admitted unclarity is perhaps at the root of the dif�culty in Malebranche exegesis.

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possess all goods; [our soul] never wants to limit its love’ (Treatise 3.1.7, p.172). As we’ll explore in a bit, this inclination does two kinds of work, ormay be construed in at least two ways,

(v)i as our tendency to be drawn to any particular thing we perceive asgood, and/or

(vi) as our having an inclination towards continuing or maximizing ourexperience of good even when we’re currently inclined towards someparticular good.17

To sin on this picture is to ‘rest in’ or ‘consent’ to a given particular good g,and not continue one’s search for greater (or the greatest) goods, eventhough our inclination towards g is not invincible.18 Not to sin here wouldbe to ‘suspend’ one’s consent to g and continue the search for greater (orthe greatest) goods. Occasionalism is preserved in either case, Malebrancheclaims, since God does all the true causing in so far as He causes all of ourrelevant modes: the non-invincible inclination towards g to which we merelyconsent or the inclination towards the good in general on the basis of whichwe suspend our consent.

We may express the heart of Malebranche’s theory, I think, by the follow-ing related claims, which re�ect various statements from throughout hiscareer.

2a God alone produces all that’s real in us, although the inclinations Hecreates in us are not invincible and He is not the author of our sins.

MALEBRANCHE’S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM/CONSENT 31

17 For (v):

12 If the mind does not see or taste some particular good, the movement of the soul re-mains indeterminate; it tends towards the good in general. But this movement receivesa particular determination as soon as the mind has the idea or the feeling of some par-ticular good. For the soul being incessantly pushed towards indeterminate good, itmust move as soon as the good appears to it.

(Treatise 3.1.5, pp. 171–2)

12 For (vi):

12 Now when the good which is presented to the mind and to the senses does not �ll upthese two faculties, when it is recognized under the idea of a particular good, of a goodwhich does not enclose all goods at all, and when it is relished through a feeling whichdoes not �ll up the whole capacity of the soul, it can still desire the sight and the enjoy-ment of some other good . . . . [The soul] can, through the movement which Godimprints ceaselessly in it to carry it towards good in general . . . halt its course towardsany good that may be.

(Treatise 3.1.6, p. 172)

12 Also: ‘. . . [T]hrough the impression God gives him for the good in general he can think aboutgoods other than the one he is enjoying . . . . [We] make use of our impression toward the goodin general to love something other than what we are actually loving’ (Elucidations1, pp. 548–9).

18 As Lennon (1980) puts it, it is not so much a positive action as a failure to do what’s right,viz. exploit the non-invincibility and continue searching (pp. 766–7).

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We do or create nothing real. We produce no new modi�cations. Sinis nothing.19

2b Our free acts are (or involve) moral (not ‘physical’ or real) aspects ofthe soul.20

2c Our consenting (to God-created inclinations) is an immanent act that

32 ANDREW PESSIN

19 Here then is what the sinner does. He stops, he rests, he does not follow God’s impression[towards universal or general good] – he does nothing, for sin is nothing . . . . Our consentor inactivity upon perceiving a particular good is nothing real or positive on our part

(Elucidations 1, p. 548).12 ‘God is in no way the author of sin, and . . . man in no way gives himself new modi�cations’

(p. 549). Also:

12 [God] produces and preserves in us whatever is real and positive in the particular deter-minations of our soul’s impulse, viz. our ideas and sensations. For this is what naturallydetermines our impulse for the good in general toward particular goods, though not ina way that is invincible, because we have an impulse to carry on farther. Consequently,all that we do when we sin is not to do all that we nonetheless have the power of doingas a result of the natural impression we have toward Him who contains all goods.

(p. 550)12 What, then, do we do when we do not sin? We do everything God does in us, for we

do not limit to a particular good, or, rather, to a false good, the love that God impressesin us for the true good. And what do we do when we sin? Nothing. We love a falsegood that God does not make us love through an invincible impression. We give upseeking the true good.

(p. 551)1 2 Je soutiens . . . que l’ame étoit l’unique cause de ses actes, c’est-à-dire de ses détermi-

nations libres, ou de ses consentemens bons ou mauvais moralement, conformes oucontraires à la Loy éternelle, quoique toûjours dépendament de l’action de Dieu en elle. . . J’ai toûjours soûtenu que l’ame étoit active: mais que ses actes ne produisoient riende physic, ou ne mettoient par eux mêmes, par leur ef�cace propre, aucunes modaliteznouvelles, aucun changement physic . . . Je dis par leur ef�cace propre; qu’on y prennegarde. Car il est certain qu’il arrive bien des changemens physics dans l’ame, ensuite deses actes bons ou mauvais moralement, c’est-à-dire conformes ou contraires à la Loidivine. Mais c’est Dieu seul qui est la cause ef�cace de ces changemens.

(Ré�exions, pp. 40–41)20 ‘En un mot l’erreur vient, de ce qu’il [Boursier] confond le physic avec le moral, ou qu’il ne

distingue pas assez l’un de l’autre’ (Ré�exions, p. 37). Also:1 2 Car bien loin que les actes de la volonté soient des êtres ajoûtez à l’être de l’ame, êtres

que Dieu seul peut créer; que ces actes ne mettent ny par eux mêmes, ny par quelqu’-ef�cace qu’ils ayent, aucune modalité nouvelle, aucun changement physic dans l’amequie les produit. Car,

1 2 Le moral n’est pas le physic. Les actes de la volonté sont bons ou mauvais moralement,quand ils sont conformes ou contraires à la raison, à la Loi divine: & par-là ils méritent, queDieu mette dans l’ame qui les produit, des modalitez qui la rendent réellement plus parfaite& plus heureuse; ou qui la recompensent, si les actes sont bons moralement; ou qui la punis-sent, s’ils sont mauvais. Mais la moralité des actes, qui dépend uniquement de la varieté desobjets dans lesquels la volonté se repose, n’est point la cause ef�cace des nouvelles modalitezou changemens physics de l’ame. Et quoique l’ame soit la vraye cause de ses actes libres, quel’on peut appeler moraux, puisqui’ils ne produisent rien de physic par leur ef�cace propre.

(Ré�exions, pp. 42–3)

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produces nothing external and itself does not require a material (real)basis.21

2d Our soul determines the direction or object of the inclinations or im-pressions God creates in us; it cannot itself arrest them or create them.22

2e The soul’s natural movement is indeterminate. God’s continuous cre-ation of the soul is consistent with its freedom.23

2f God doesn’t create us qua consenting.24

Malebranche is attempting to reconcile occasionalism with some notion offreedom. These statements provide constraints in understanding hisattempt: Our interpretation of him must satisfy them.

Now consider the �rst part of the �rst claim: God produces all that’s ‘real’in us. If Malebranche wants it to be, �rst, that God creates everything realin us, then this may be satis�ed as long as God creates all actual states ofaffairs involving us. But of course Malebranche wants more, for he wants,second, to allow some room for our ability to (suspend) consent to the incli-nations God produces in us. Here, I suggest, the notion of God’s volitional

MALEBRANCHE’S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM/CONSENT 33

21 ‘Mon consentement est un acte immanent de ma volonté qui ne produit rien au dehors, &qui ne change pas même les modi�cations de ma substance, ou qui n’y produit ni idées nisentimens ni mouvemens.’ (Recueil, p. 567). Also:

1 2 [Our ‘stopping to rest’] is certainly done by an act, but by an immanent act that pro-duces nothing material in our substance – by an act that in this case does not evenrequire of the true cause some material effect in us, neither new ideas nor sensations,in short, that is, by an act that does nothing and makes the general cause do nothing.

(Elucidations 1, p. 551)

22 ‘[O]ur soul can direct in various ways the inclination or impression that God gives it. Foralthough it cannot arrest this impression, it can in a sense turn it in the direction that pleasesit’ (Search 1.1.2, p. 4); ‘[We] have a principle of our own determinations’ (Elucidations 1, p.548).

23 Cf. Treatise 3.1.5, pp. 171–2, quoted in note 17. Also:

1 2 Il y a contradiction dans les termes, que Dieu meuve un corps d’une maniere indéter-minée . . . Mais le mouvement naturel de l’ame est un mouvement indéterminé: c’estl’amour du bien en general. Pour déterminer vers tels & tels biens ce mouvement indéter-miné, il suf�t de les répresenter à l’ame. Et par consequent, puisque l’homme peut avoirdifferentes idées de bien par son union avec la Raison universelle, il peut changer à tousmomens les déterminations de son amour: il n’est point necessaire pour cela qu’il sur-monte la puissance de Dieu; les mouvemens particuliers de l’ame n’étant pas invincibles,comme les mouvemens particuliers des corps, parce qu’ils ne sont pas, comme ceux descorps, une suite necessaire de leur conservation, ou de leur création continuée.

(Recueil, p. 569)

24 I answer that God creates us, speaking, walking, thinking, willing, that He causes in usour perceptions, sensations, impulses, in a word, that He causes in us all that is real ormaterial . . . But I deny that God creates us as consenting precisely insofar as we areconsenting or resting with a particular good . . . God merely creates us as always beingable to stop at such a good . . . God creates us, then, not precisely insofar as we are con-senting or withholding our consent, but insofar as we are able to give or withhold it.

(Elucidations 1, p. 554)

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incompleteness may help. Since God’s power traces to His volitional content,then what God creates or ‘authors’, strictly speaking, is sensitive to whichdescriptions (or conceptions) He uses in His volitions. Suppose that whenGod creates all the actual states of affairs involving us, satisfying the �rst, Hedoes so only under certain applicable descriptions and not others. There maythen be room to satisfy the second as well, as long as the descriptions withwhich God creates are morally neutral concerning us, i.e. do not explicitlypreclude our freedom, specify our (suspension of) consent, or violate anyother desiderata in (2a)–(2f). For one quick example, God may create thesequence of states of affairs which constitutes an act of (say) Smith’s con-senting to a lesser good g, i.e. of sinning, but He cannot create this sequenceunder descriptions such as ‘Smith consents (to g)’, ‘sins’, etc.; if He did, thenour consenting, sinning, etc. would unacceptably be directly due to Him.Indeed this seems to be just what constraint (2f) above is saying: God con-tinuously creates Smith (here) with all his mental states throughout his actof consenting, yet He does not create Smith qua consenting. As such Heneedn’t count as the author of our morally evaluable acts even if He is alonecausally responsible for all our states of affairs – as per constraint (2a).

That’s the basic idea.

3 Let’s start �eshing out this basic idea by considering how Malebranche sat-is�es the heart of constraints (2d) and (2e). He clearly desires to assign to usthe determination of the particular objects of our inclinations. One wayGod’s volitional incompleteness might help here would be were God’s voli-tional content simply not to include our relevant particular states of inclina-tion. (The occasionalism would be preserved, again, just as long as Godcreates all our actual states of affairs, even if under descriptions which don’texplicitly specify our particular inclinations.) And indeed, there is textual evi-dence that Malebranche does hold something like such a view: Except incertain speci�c cases, he seems to think, God wills only that we are inclinedtowards the good in general.25 But what does this mean? Using reading (v)earlier, the content of God’s volition here might be expressed, roughly, as:

(vii)i For all goods x, if Smith perceives x, then Smith is inclined towards x

Suppose, then, that God also wills, say, that

(viii) Smith perceives particular good g

It then follows as a logical consequence of these volitions that Smith will infact be inclined towards g, even though God never exercises a volitionwhose content is

34 ANDREW PESSIN

25 ‘God imprints but one love in us, which is the love of the good in general, and we can lovenothing except through this love . . . The love of the good in general is the source of all ourparticular loves’ (Search 4.1.3, p. 267). Numerous other passages in Search 4.1.3 and Eluci-dations 1 express similar sentiments.

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(ix) Smith is inclined towards g26

As such, God need not count as the ‘author’ of Smith’s particular inclination.Unfortunately, while this view might provide Malebranche room to

satisfy constraints (2d) and (2e), I don’t think, ultimately, that he subscribesto it. For one thing, there is also textual evidence that he thinks that Goddoes directly create our particular inclinations.27 For another, I think it’squestionable whether the view at issue is consistent with his occasionalism.28

Finally, I think that Nadler (1993) is correct, contra Clarke (1995) and Black(1997), that Malebranche’s God does not operate by volitions with a generalcontent, such as (vii) – in which case we need a different reading of God’swilling our inclination towards the good in general.29

Fortunately we have one. Using reading (vi) earlier, another way wemight express the content of God’s volition here, very roughly, is

(x)i Smith is inclined towards maximum goodness

MALEBRANCHE’S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM/CONSENT 35

26 [God] produces and preserves in us whatever is real and positive in the particulardeterminations of our soul’s impulse, viz. our ideas and sensations. For this is what nat-urally determines our impulse for the good in general toward particular goods.

(Elucidations 1, p. 550)

12 For the actual presence of particular ideas positively determines toward particulargoods our impulse toward the good in general.

(Elucidations 1, p. 548)

27 [H]ere is what God does in us . . . when we sin[:] First, God unceasingly impels us byan irresistible impression toward the good in general. Second, He represents to us theidea of some particular good . . . Finally, He leads us toward this particular good.

(Elucidations 1, p. 547)

1 2 If our having a particular inclination merely followed logically from the �rst two steps,there’d be no need to add the third step. Similarly, Malebranche also refers later to‘the impression He gives us toward particular goods’ (p. 553), again hinting that Godmay perhaps be given direct responsibility for our particular inclinations. Too, hemakes a similar three-step distinction in Ré�exions in which he concludes: ‘[C]’estaussi [Dieu] qui produit dans l’ame ce mouvement particulier . . . J’appelle donc Pre-motions ou motifs physics, toutes ces déterminations particulieres.’

(Ré�exions 10, p. 42)

28 For example, to preserve occasionalism one would have to argue, quite implausibly, that thestate of affairs ‘Smith is inclined towards g’ is not merely entailed by but somehow identicalto the (conjoined) states of affairs expressed by (vii) and (viii) in the main text. Further,remarks by Sleigh (1990), pp. 155–8 would suggest that the view ultimately grants genuinecausal powers to particular states (such as Smith’s perceiving g) – for given that God wills(vii) and (viii), the states of affairs themselves expressed by (vii) and (viii) would be suf�cientconditions, hence genuine causes, of Smith’s inclination towards g.

29 Note though: It doesn’t matter, for the sake of my exegesis here, whether Malebranche sub-scribes to this view or the one I’ll develop next, or even a combination of the two. In the endI think he has a more coherent philosophical system overall if he subscribes only to the latterview, but I’m not convinced that he was perfectly careful in working out the implicationshere, and there are plenty of passages in support of both views.

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Here we might treat ‘maximum goodness’ as denoting a rather vague or‘indeterminate’ conception of Smith’s (cf. constraint (2e), and Search 1.1.2),a sort of ideal which he desires without attaching it to any particular goods.Alternatively, consider something like

(x1) Smith desires that, for all goods x, he possess x

(x1) would re�ect (as did (vii)) Malebranche’s partial gloss on our inclina-tion towards the good in general that ‘[God] wills that we love everythingthat is good’ (Elucidations 1, p. 547). Note, though, that (x1) differs in acrucial way from (vii), for in (x1) the quanti�er is within the scope of Smith’sintentional content, not outside it. This means that the volition God exer-cises with (x1), unlike that with (vii), is not itself one with a general content,but rather a particular one providing Smith with a general intentionalcontent. Consequently, (x1) avoids the problems I mentioned in the pre-ceding paragraph. Further, (x1) also serves the role (vii) served in being the‘source’ of particular inclinations: In a passage where Malebranche is ‘eluci-dating’ just what he means by his ‘source’ language in Search he writes,‘[S]ince God leads us toward all that is good, it is a necessary consequencethat He lead us toward particular goods when He produces the perceptionor sensation of them in our soul’ (Elucidations 1, pp. 547–8; cf. also note 27).Given that God wills (x1) (or (x)) and (viii), in other words, it is necessary(in whatever sense) that God will (ix).

The picture emerging, here, is this: God wills that we’re inclined towardsthe good in general, construed via (x) or (x1). He wills that we perceivevarious particular goods. Consequently – and it’s understandable that Male-branche, with his concern for freedom, often de-emphasizes this fact – Goddoes, after all, will that we are inclined towards those particular goods, i.e.He wills our particular inclinational states. So our �rst attempt to use God’svolitional incompleteness in the exegesis of Malebranche’s doctrine offreedom/consent won’t work.

4 Nevertheless it has produced an important component for another at-tempt. For the emerging picture also includes the fact that our inclinationtowards the good in general is not merely the source of our particularinclinations but is also an independent inclination which serves as a distinctcompeting ‘motive’ to the particular inclinations God creates in us. God’svolitional incompleteness doesn’t appear to provide Malebranche’sfreedom purely synchronically, then, since God directly wills all our incli-national states, towards particular goods and towards the good in general.What we’ll next consider is how, given our emerging picture, God’s voli-tional incompleteness may be applied diachronically .

Let’s work with an example of the act of consenting (suspending consentwould be analysed analogously). Suppose Smith is being tempted, duringtemporal interval t1-t3, to commit a sin, such as stealing a particular item ithat is lying seductively before him. At t4 he ‘exercises’ a relevant volition,

36 ANDREW PESSIN

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followed, at t5, by his body committing the act a of stealing i. How mightMalebranche analyse this, on my interpretation?

During t1–t3, God continuously creates Smith with at least the following:an inclination towards the good in general, representations of the desiredapparent goods i and a, particular inclinations towards i and a, and let’s notforget an ‘inner sensation of [his] freedom with regard to [particular goods]’(Elucidations 1, p. 552).30 (Henceforth we’ll focus just on a.) During thisinterval, in other words, Smith is constituted (partly) by the state of affairsof his soul being in this state: inclined to degree d (say) towards performinga. At t4 he is constituted by the state of affairs of his soul willing a, or atleast willing the relevant bodily motions. At t5 the bodily motions occur.God creates all these states of affairs, both mental and physical, and this se-quence of states of affairs is all that is ‘real’ here.

What about the ‘act’ of consent?On my interpretation, the act of consent does not involve any further dis-

tinct states of affairs or modi�cations of Smith’s soul. Rather, this very samesequence of states of affairs may legitimately be described as Smith’s consent-ing to the inclination which God creates in him. For Smith to consent to aninclination is just for him to act on it, nothing further, and this Smith does informing the volition in t4. ‘Smith consents to a’, in other words, is exten-sionally equivalent to (though intensionally distinct from) some descrip-tion(s) in more neutral terms – such as ‘Smith is in inclinational state x’, etc.– of one or more of the states of affairs in this sequence.31 To preserve theoccasionalism, God, in creating this sequence, need only will it under one ofthose extensionally equivalent descriptions; in so doing He wills everything‘real’. Yet note: At no point does God exercise a volition whose content is

(xi) Smith consents to a

As such, God does not will, hence does not ‘author’, Smith’s act of consent.It might now be objected that we simply feel (by ‘inner sensation’) that

MALEBRANCHE’S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM/CONSENT 37

30 Note that Malebranche would attribute the false appearance of the desired object, and thetheft thereof, as (complete or ultimate) goods, to a ‘false judgment on the part of our mind’(Elucidations 1, p. 549). Most of the issues and problems confronting his doctrine of consentalso confront his doctrine of judgment; this is no surprise, since Malebranche explicitly treatsthem analogously (cf. Search 1.2.2). So, if occasionalism is to be consistent with our ‘con-senting to sin’, so must it also be consistent with our ‘consenting to truth’; humans must causeor do ‘nothing real’ in either case. The interpretation I’m developing of Malebranche’snotion of freedom applies, I believe, to both cases.

31 I’m deliberately vague here to leave open the possibility of locating the extensional equival-ence in different ways. For example, we may extensionally identify ‘Smith consents to a’ withthe state of affairs just at t4, or we might locate it with the sequence of states of affairs att3–t4, or perhaps even with the entire sequence. In fact I’m inclined to think we need at leasttwo sequential states, but, as far as I can see, nothing much rides on deciding this; hence itdoesn’t seem to me necessary to develop more precise principles of extensional equivalencehere. (It’s because I think we need sequential states that I label the use of God’s volitionalincompleteness here ‘diachronic’.)

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there is a discrete moment in which we explicitly consent, that consent ismore than just the sequence of (say) our inclinations being followed by ourvolition: Something happens, distinct from our inclinations, which ‘bringsabout’ the volition. (Consider the phenomenology of a moment of decision,for example.) Perhaps even Malebranche himself would be inclined to saythis, since he has many passages where he is emphasizing the act of consent,or its reality, so strongly that it becomes hard to accept his competing claimthat it isn’t ‘real’.32

Other writers, too, seem to read Malebranche as holding that consent isa discrete act, occurring in its own distinct moment, distinct from oursequence of inclinations. Radner (1978) writes that ‘acts of consent . . . serveas occasions for [God] to produce new motions and desires’ (p. 120), sug-gesting that (say) God creates Smith’s volition at t4 as a consequence ofSmith’s prior act of consent. Similarly, Lennon (1980) writes that Godcreates us ‘because we consent’ (p. 768). And Arnauld raises an objectionwhich seems to presuppose that Malebranche holds the view in question:Either the act of consenting is caused by us, or by God. If by us, then Male-branche loses the occasionalism; if by God, then he loses our being free(Oeuvres 39, p. 254).

If there is such a discrete moment and act of consent, then it would be hardsimply to identify consent with the relevant sequence of states of affairs. Butwhile I don’t deny an ‘inner sensation’ corresponding to that view, I think thatwhat our inner sensation actually reveals to us must be examined carefully.

So consider: Suppose during t1–t3 Smith is feeling the inclination towardsa to degree d, in addition to any other inclinations he might be feeling, includ-ing towards the good in general. Imagine that the act of consent is somethingdiscrete and explicit that occurs, say, at t3. Now either Smith continues at t3in his states of inclination or he does not. Suppose for the moment that hisstates of inclination remain unchanged. That’s �ne, since in this case we onlywant to credit his consent with (occasionally) causing the volition at t4anyway, not (necessarily) any changes in inclination. So now we have Smithin t1–t2 inclined to degree d to steal without any decision one way or the other

38 ANDREW PESSIN

32 Here he explicitly seems to locate the consent at a given instant: ‘[B]ut they have also actedthrough the act of their consent, an act that they had the power of not giving at the momentthey gave it.’ (Elucidations 1, p. 553). Similarly, he refers to the ‘changemens physics dansl’ame’ which occur ‘ensuite de ses actes bons ou mauvais moralement’, i.e. its consentings(Ré�exions, pp. 40–1; also see 43).) Here he asserts both his competing claims in the samesentence: ‘This [consent] is certainly done by an act, but by an immanent act that producesnothing material in our substance . . . . that does nothing’ (Elucidations 1, p. 551); similarly:

12 Je crois donc que, quoique l’ame comme libre & active, soit la vraye cause de ses actes, l’u-nique cause immediate du consentement qu’elle donne, ou qu’elle refuse de donner auxmotifs physics qui la préviennent & la sollicitent: je crois, dis-je, qu’elle n’est point la causeef�cace des changemens réels qui lui arrivent, de même qu’elle n’est point la cause ef�cacedes changemens réels qui arrivent à son propre corps, en consequence de ses volontez.

(Ré�exions, p. 43)

12 That Malebranche contains such competing claims is, of course, what generates the exeget-ical problems.

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about whether he will steal, while in t3 he has the same inclination along withthe decision (consent) that he will act on it (in forming a volition at t4).

But we also have more. We also have his competing motives or inclina-tions, in particular that towards the good in general.33 To say that Smithduring t1–t2 has not decided, one way or the other, it seems to me, is to saythat the competing inclinations – say, towards a and towards the good ingeneral – are in some sort of balance: He could go either way. To say thathe has decided, during t3, is to suggest that balance is gone: One side haswon out; the other is no longer a live option. In such a situation, I think, ourinner sensation tells us that the inclination towards the winning option hasincreased relative to that of the losing option. If Smith truly consents at t3,then he should experience some sense of this changing balance of incli-nations; we should not expect, in other words, his inclinations to remainunchanged: The inclination towards a overpowers that towards the good ingeneral. (vice versa where he suspends consent.)

If the consent is conceived as the (occasional) cause of this change of bal-ance, then, if the consent occurs at t3, we may suppose the change of balancemight occur at t4; the volition should then be pushed off to t5.34 But nowreturn to our inner sensation again: Do we experience both an act of consentand a subsequent change in the balance of inclination? I don’t think so.When we’re in a situation like Smith’s, we weigh our alternatives, balancethe con�icting inclinations, experience that decisive moment, then act. If wedon’t experience both the consent and balance change, then we must decide,through our inner sensation, which it is we are experiencing. I’ve suggestedthat an act of consent should be expected to entail a changing balance ofinclinations; if there is the consent, then there should be both. Since therearen’t both, then we have two options: �rst, to deny there is any distinct act

MALEBRANCHE’S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM/CONSENT 39

33 Note that Malebranche admits that we never act without motives or inclinations (Search1.1.2, 5; Elucidations 1, p. 553); when we suspend consent to one inclination, it is on the basisof other (typically more powerful) inclinations: ‘[The soul] can, through the movementwhich God imprints ceaselessly in it to carry it towards good in general . . . halt its coursetowards any [particular] good that may be’ (Treatise 3.1.6, p. 172; cf. Treatise 3.1.20); ‘[T]hesoul’s power of suspending its consent with regard to false goods is drawn from its naturaland invincible impulse for happiness’ (Elucidations 2, p. 560); indeed suspending consent toa particular good seems to be just a matter of consenting to our inclination towards thegeneral good (Elucidations 1, p. 551; cf. Kremer (1999)). Moreover, freedom is a matter ofdegree, that can vary between and within individuals (Cf. Treatise 3.1.10); this seems due,partly, to the differences in strength of our inclinations: The more powerful an inclinationis, the more invincible it would seem to be – though, typically, we retain a freedom of differ-ence (albeit one that’s hard to exercise) even when experiencing very powerful inclinationstowards particular goods. For detailed discussion of Malebranche’s conception of ‘freedomof indifference’, cf. Sleigh et al (1998) and Kremer (1999).

34 Malebranche isn’t entirely clear on the temporal relations of occasional causes and effects:In Treatise, Illustration 1.13, for example, he writes ‘I grant that it would be appropriate that. . . occasional causes precede their effects rather than follow them, and that order itselfseems to require that these causes and their effects exist at the same time’ (p. 205), while onthe same page allowing that the prayers of Jesus Christ come after their effects. Fortunately,determining the speci�c temporal relation of cause and effect isn’t essential to my argument.

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of consent, or second, simply to identify the act of consent with the changein inclinations.

What I’m suggesting, in short, is that the ‘decisive moment’ that inner sen-sation reveals to us – which is the basis for the objection that the act ofconsent is an explicit, discrete act distinct from the sequence of states ofaffairs t1–t5 – just is a moment where our balance of inclinations suddenlyshifts. I grant that the original sequence of states of affairs may be incom-plete: We might insert one additional. But what we’re inserting is justanother state of affairs where, in effect, God creates Smith along with hisvarious (now changed) inclinations; as before, ‘Smith consents to a’ will beextensionally equivalent to (though intensionally distinct from) one or moreof the descriptions of this set. Indeed, once we include the changed balanceof inclinations in the set, I think, the incentive to �nd an additional discreteact of consent diminishes signi�cantly. Such an act just seems super�uous.

This interpretation is consistent with Malebranchean themes. Just acouple of related points here, with more to come below: as Sleigh et al.(1998) points out, Malebranche rejects ‘pure indifference’ (1239), implyingthat we should expect a very close relationship between our consents andour motives, i.e. our states of inclination. On my interpretation, thisrelationship is as close as it can be: Our consent is identical (in effect) to ourshifting balance of inclinations.

Malebranche attributes our power to suspend consent entirely to ourinclination towards the good in general, suggesting (it seems to me) that ourconsent itself may be a matter of our particular inclination outweighing ourgeneral one (Elucidations 1, pp. 549, 551). On my interpretation, this isre�ected perfectly in the shifting balance of inclinations.35

Indeed, on my interpretation we can make sense of why Malebranche sowaf�es on the ‘reality’ of the act of consent. In so far as there is this clearmoment, given saliently in inner sensation, which we may identify with theact, it is quite ‘real’; the passages quoted earlier, supporting its reality, maysimply re�ect his stress on that fact. Nevertheless, in so far as this momentmay also be identi�ed with our being in a sequence of particular inclina-tional states, for which God has complete causal responsibility, our distinct

40 ANDREW PESSIN

35 To put these two points differently: Malebranche stresses that we never act without motives,and that our ability to suspend consent is due directly to our inclination to the general good;indeed our suspension of consent may just be identical to our consenting to the latter incli-nation (Elucidations 1, p. 551). My interpretation takes him at his word: Our suspension ofconsent just is our inclination to the good in general outweighing our particular inclinations.(Cf.: ‘[L]’ame étoit l’unique cause de ses . . . consentemens . . . quoique toûjours dépenda-ment de l’action de Dieu en elle; toûjours dépendament des modalitez ou motifs physics,dont Dieu l’affecte’ (Ré�exions, 40)).

12 Alternatively still, our power to (suspend) consent is clearly closely related (if not identi-cal to) the non-invincibility of particular inclinations. (‘Now this power of loving or notloving particular goods, the non-invincibility . . . is what I call liberty’ (Treatise 3.1.3, p. 170)).Non-invincibility manifests itself precisely in the sequence of varying balances of inclina-tions. This, too, is re�ected perfectly on my interpretation.

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contribution to this moment, our consent, is ‘not real’. Further, given thatGod creates not only our current but also our next states too, our consentis given no causal power whatever.

Further evidence for my interpretation, �nally, may be found in myreplies – which I’ve put in note 36 – to Radner, Lennon, and Arnauld, whoeach read Malebranche as holding that consent is distinct from the relevantsequence of states of affairs.36

5 That completes the main exegesis. Let’s next return to our six constraintstatements, both to see how these may be understood in the light of myinterpretation and to emphasize their �t with my interpretation. In reverseorder:

(2f) God doesn’t create us qua consenting.

God does indeed create us completely. He creates all states of affairs in-volving us, such as the sequences discussed above, including our volitions andimpulses. But He doesn’t create us qua consenting in so far as He does notcreate us, or these sequences, under the description of our (not) consenting.

MALEBRANCHE’S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM/CONSENT 41

36 Consider, �rst, Radner (1978)’s claim that our acts of consent are occasional causes of oursubsequent states. She cites only two passages here, and neither directly support her claim.The passage from Méditations Chrétiennes asserts only that ‘tes volontez sont causesoccasionnelles de tes lumieres’ (6.20, p. 67), while the passages from the Treatise assert onlythat our ‘desires are the occasional causes of [our] enlightenment . . . . of [our] objects ofknowledge’ (3.1.6–7, pp. 172–3). Neither suggests speci�cally that our consents, as distinctstates, (occasionally) cause anything.

12 Consider, also, Lennon (1980)’s claim that God creates us ‘because we consent’ (p. 768).He cites only one passage (Elucidations 1, pp. 554–5) which also fails to support the claim.Malebranche is here answering the objection that, given continuous creation, God createsus in our consent, by claiming that while God creates all our ‘perceptions, sensations,impulses . . . all that is real’, He doesn’t create us ‘insofar as we are consenting’ (p. 554).Nothing here suggests that God in some sense consults our distinct (suspension of) consentand then, as a consequence, creates us appropriately in our next mental state.

12 In fact there are passages where Malebranche does suggest that acts of (non) consent areoccasional causes: ‘[Les] actes immanents de la volonté son inef�caces par eux-mêmes . . .[ils] ne produisent dans l’ame aucun changement physic . . . [ils] ne sont que des causesoccasionnelles’ (Ré�exions, p. 45). But what Malebranche has in mind here is the idea thata ‘just soul’ and an ‘injust soul’ are differently ‘rewarded’: The just soul, which resists temp-tation, receives new modes such as ‘la perception agreable de la beauté de la loi . . . l’esper-ance de la recompense etc,’ while the injust soul which succombs ‘est dans le trouble & dansl’inquietude: la crainte & la tristesse l’af�igent: les remords de sa conscience la persecutent’(Ré�exions, pp. 44–5). What we ultimately �nd here, in other words, is that our actions anddesires (occasionally) cause our being appropriately rewarded or punished; what we don’t�nd is that (non) consents are serving as distinct (occasional) causes of actions or newdesires.

12 Consider, �nally, Arnauld’s objection given above. On my interpretation this objection isunmotivated. We needn’t ask what causes speci�cally the act of consent because there is noact distinct from the sequence of states of affairs which God creates. Arnauld’s dilemma, atleast as stated, does not arise.

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These features do not �gure in the content of His volitions. Since His poweris a function of His will, He does not ‘author’ our (non) consents.

(2e) The soul’s natural movement is indeterminate. God’s continuouscreation of the soul is consistent with its freedom.

Recall, Malebranche designates ‘by the word “will”, or capacity the soul hasof loving different goods, the impression or natural impulse that carries ustoward general and indeterminate good’ (Search 1.1.2, p. 5). Our ‘natural’movement – before our freedom gets involved – he associates simply withour inclination towards the good in general, which God wills that we have.Now our continuous creation does not necessitate that we have any par-ticular inclinations; God is perfectly free not to create us in any perceptualstates, hence not to create us in any particular inclinational state. Hence ourbeing in a particular inclinational state is not ‘une suite necessaire de [notre]conservation, ou de [notre] creation continuee’ (Recueil, p. 569). Recall thatby ‘freedom’ Malebranche means ‘nothing else but the power that the mindhas of turning this impression toward objects that please us so that our naturalinclinations are made to settle upon some particular object.’ (Search 1.1.2, p.5). Since our being in particular inclinational states is not a necessary con-sequence of our continuous creation, and our freedom is associated with ourbeing in particular inclinational states, our continuous creation is consistentwith our freedom.

Or to put this differently: Our being free means, in part, that whichparticular inclinational state we end up in is a function of our (non) consent.Since God does not create us qua (non) consenting, our continuous creationis consistent with His not authoring our (non) consents, hence with ourfreedom.37

(2d) Our soul determines the direction or object of the inclinations orimpressions God creates in us; it cannot itself arrest them or create them.

Descartes has often been taken to hold that, while a �nite mind cannot in-crease the total quantity of bodily motion in the world, it can alter the direc-tion of such motion.38 Schmaltz (1996) details how the Cartesians Clerselierand Clauberg subscribed to that view (pp. 215–17), and suggests the in�u-ence of at least the former on Malebranche (p. 221). Malebranche, to besure, explicitly develops certain analogies between bodily motion and

42 ANDREW PESSIN

37 There are other ways to go here as well; cf. note 40. One misunderstanding to guard against:None of this suggests that God does not continuously create us with our particular inclina-tions, as we saw earlier. So ultimately God is indeed directly causally responsible for ourparticular inclinations. But since it is not necessary that He create us with any particular per-ceptions or inclinations, there is conceptual space to give a person some sort of responsi-bility for his particular inclinational states for which ‘il n’est point necessaire . . . qu’ilsurmonte la puissance de Dieu’ (Recueil, p. 569).

38 There is much controversy over his actual view. For just some of this, see Garber (1983),(1987), and (1992), and Gabbey (1985).

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mental ‘motion’ or inclinations (Search 1.1, 4.1). It’s thus quite plausible thatconstraint (2d) re�ects ideas highly current in Malebranche’s time. But allthat is consistent with my interpretation.

That our souls have any inclinations at all, or that they’re inclined towardswhatever they perceive as good, are unnegotiable facts caused by God;hence the soul cannot arrest its inclinations. That occasionalism is truemeans, too, that the soul cannot create its own inclinations, for God is fullycausally responsible for all states of affairs.

So suppose God creates us with a particular inclination. If we do not con-sent – if our inclination towards the good in general outweighs that par-ticular inclination – then God enlightens us with a new representation andcreates a particular inclination towards a new object. If we do consent – ifthe particular inclination outweighs the general – then we remain with thesame object. In so far as the object of our particular inclinations is a func-tion of our consent, then we determine that object.39

(2c) Our consenting (to God-created inclinations) is an immanent actthat produces nothing external and itself does not require a material(real) basis.

That it’s an act may be suggested by our discrete experience of that momentwhere the inclinations shift. But its immanence is a matter of the consent it-self being nothing other than, i.e. being extensionally equivalent to, the(material) sequence of states of affairs of shifting inclinations (plus perhapsvolition). The consenting itself adds nothing distinct to, and requiresnothing from, that sequence. Later members of the sequence arise (via oc-casional causation) from previous members, not from any distinct act ofconsent.

(2b) Our free acts are moral (not ‘physical’ or real) aspects of the soul.

That our (suspension of) consent is not a physical or real aspect of the soulmeans that no particular, discrete state of affairs corresponds to it distinctfrom the states of affairs that God creates; (suspension of) consent does notinvolve any new modi�cations of substance, and does not itself cause anynew modi�cations, in addition to those that God creates.

That our free acts are ‘moral’ aspects of the soul, I will argue in sectionIV, is a matter of certain relational features they possess.

Putting these together: God creates the states of affairs involving us under

MALEBRANCHE’S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM/CONSENT 43

39 Consider Schmaltz’s (1996) objection to Malebranche that he can’t say that consent involvesthe ‘turning’of an inclination because he also says we’re inclined towards a particular goodimmediately upon perceiving it, prior to any consent (pp. 221–2). In reply, note that notevery particular inclination – for example initial moments of inclination – need be attributedto our consent. In consenting to a given particular inclination, then, we can be said to deter-mine the object of our inclination in the next instant, if not the initial instant. Our ‘turning’just is our (non) consenting; it isn’t required to precede the appearance of the next object,but rather is completed by it.

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descriptions re�ecting their ‘intrinsic’ features. Still, other descriptionsapply to them as a function of their relations to things external to them. SoGod’s causal power, as a function of His volitional contents, fully accountsfor all states of affairs, i.e. everything ‘physical’. That God doesn’t createthese states of affairs under morally relevant descriptions lets Malebranche�nd his room for freedom.

(2a) God alone produces all that’s real in us, although the inclinations Hecreates in us are not invincible and He is not the author of our sins. We door create nothing real. We produce no new modi�cations. Sin is nothing.

God creates all states of affairs involving us, including our inclinations. Inaddition to our particular inclinations, He creates us with an unvarying incli-nation towards good in general. Most of our particular inclinations are notinvincible because they are always in con�ict with this general inclination,and it is always possible that our general inclination outweighs the particu-lar, resulting, in the next moment, in our being enlightened with a new par-ticular idea and a new (also non-invincible) particular inclination.40 He isnot the author of our sins in so far as He does not create our states of affairsunder any morally relevant descriptions.41 We do or create nothing real andno new modi�cations because our acts of (non) consent are not distinct fromthe sequence of states of affairs which God creates; there’s nothing they add(as we’ve seen) to that sequence. Sin is nothing because the act of consent

44 ANDREW PESSIN

40 Recall, our free acts are always dependent on our inclination towards the good in general.12 Another way to put this: To say that particular inclinations aren’t invincible is simply to

say that while we feel inclined towards a particular good, we may also feel more stronglyinclined towards some other particular good, or towards the good in general, in which casewe end up not acting on the �rst inclination or replacing it altogether with some other incli-nation.

12 There may be other senses of non-invincibility available as well. In a passage partly quotedearlier, for example, Malebranche calls the particular movements of the soul non-invinciblebecause they are not ‘une suite necessaire de leur conservation, ou de leur création contin-uée’ (Recueil, p. 569). My interpretation �ts nicely here as well; cf. discussion of constraint(2e) above, in particular note 37.

41 Malebranche writes:

12 God is in no way the author of sin because He constantly impresses the impulse tocontinue on whoever sins or stops at some particular good, because He gives the sinnerthe power of thinking of other things and of proceeding to goods other than the onethat is actually the object of his thought and love.

(Elucidations 1, p. 549)

12 This passage is less a characterization of ‘authorship of sin’ than exculpation. When we sin,on my interpretation, God does create us with our particular (sinful) inclination; but sinceHe also creates us with a competing inclination towards the good in general, He provides uswith a ‘possibility’ (loosely speaking) of not consenting to the sinful inclination, hence Male-branche’s attempted exculpation. Note, moreover, that my interpretation provides exactlythe sense in which the sinner may have ‘the power of thinking of other things’, viz. that Goddoes not specify his morally relevant states explicitly within His volitional content, and inthat sense does not ‘author’ them.

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which underlies it is itself nothing, i.e. nothing distinct from the sequence ofstates of affairs. (Not sinning, incidentally, is also nothing, for there we sim-ply follow the inclination towards the good in general which God creates inus; this has an air of being ‘something’ because it involves a change in par-ticular inclination in a way that sinning doesn’t.)

Summary. In this section I have sketched Malebranche’s attempt toreconcile his occasionalism with human freedom, and argued that we mayat least make sense of his theory if we interpret him in the light of the notionof God’s volitional incompleteness. I �rst rejected interpreting him asholding, in his solution, that God does not will our particular inclinations; Inext developed a second interpretation, according to which our act of (non)consent is identical to the sequence of states of affairs which God creates(although not under any morally relevant descriptions); and I concluded byarguing that my interpretation is consistent with our exegetical constraints,i.e. with Malebranchean themes and texts. I’ll �nish by contrasting myinterpretation with those of two recent commentators.

SLEIGH AND SCHMALTZ

Sleigh et al. (1998) [hereafter just ‘Sleigh’] characterize Malebranche’s doc-trines in this way. Malebranche’s scheme, he writes:

involves three distinct types of causes: an ef�cacious cause, which is God alone;occasional causes, which do no more than supply occasions on which God exer-cises ef�cacious causality; and true causes of non-real changes, which, unlikeoccasional causes, are not mere occasions for the exercise of divine causality,but which, like occasional causes, possess no ef�cacious power to exercise.

(p. 1243)

Sleigh then sketches Malebranche’s ‘distinct’ efforts to make sense of thenotion of ‘true causes of non-real changes’. The �rst attempt is Male-branche’s claim in Search that our soul determines the direction or objectof its inclinations, along with the claim that in so doing it effects nothingreal. The soul ‘causes’ this determination; but its act of causing (i.e. via (non)consent) does not involve any real changes in the soul (even though theresult of that act may be a new inclination). This, Sleigh suggests, con�ictswith Malebranche’s view that ‘God is causally responsible not only for the“motion” of the inclination, but its particular target as well’ (p. 1243).

Further, Sleigh continues, Malebranche seems to recognize this, for heoffers, in Elucidations 1, a second account which doesn’t presuppose oursoul’s determination of the objects of inclination. There the doctrine is thatalthough God provides us with our inclinations towards particular goods,these inclinations are not invincible: We have the power to (refuse to)consent to them. (Exercise of such power, of course, does not require trueef�cacious causality.)

MALEBRANCHE’S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM/CONSENT 45

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Now while recognizing the prima facie distinction in Malebranche’s ac-counts here, my interpretation allows us to see them as two sides of the samecoin.42 As we’ve seen, while God does create all our states of affairs, includ-ing our particular inclinations, He does not do so under descriptions involv-ing our ‘(non) consent’, hence does not ‘author’ our (non) consents. In sofar as determination of the objects of our particular inclinations is a func-tion of our (non) consent, therefore, the soul may thereby take ‘credit’.Nevertheless, the resulting particular inclinations are not invincible in thesenses discussed earlier. In this way Malebranche’s doctrines – God causesour states, we determine our particular inclinations, which are not invinc-ible – all hang together.

Sleigh continues. He writes that according to Malebranche:

when the soul passes from a state of indecision to a state of consent (or a stateof refusal) no real change has occurred, although, of course, a change hasoccurred. The crucial problem for Malebranche is the need to establish that thestate of consent (or refusal) is of an ontological type, members of which do notrequire the exercise of ef�cacious causality to come into existence. There areefforts in this direction in Malebranche’s writings, but no coherent programme. . . Malebranche devoted considerable effort to sustaining the thesis that thestate of consent (or refusal) is itself lacking in causal ef�cacity. But this is irrel-evant to the question whether the human production of states of consentinvolves ef�cacious causality on the part of the producer.

(p. 1244)

If Sleigh’s concern here is primarily about what causes our acts of (non)consent, then recall my response in note 36 to Arnauld, who raised the sameconcern. On my interpretation, (non) consent is identical to a sequence ofstates of affairs with shifting balances of inclinations. ‘Indecision’ and‘consent’ are not somehow distinct from that sequence, but rather ways ofcharacterizing it, or parts thereof. The only ‘changes’ that occur are thosein which one member of the sequence yields to the next, changes for whichGod is fully responsible. ‘Consent’ is perfectly real, or involves a realchange, in that it does correspond to perfectly real states of affairs (such asthe shift in inclinational balance). But the act is also not real in that it isnothing more than, distinct from, the sequence itself, all members of whichGod has created (though not under a ‘(non) consent’ description). If so,then it can play no distinct causal role in the sequence, qua act of consent,either as cause or as effect.

46 ANDREW PESSIN

42 And well we should: (a) Search went through many editions in his life, giving Malebrancheample opportunity to delete any views he no longer held; (b) Elucidations was meantprimarily to elucidate, not to replace, Search; and (c) Malebranche gives no indication inElucidations 1 that what he is saying represents any change of view relative to Search. Atthe very least we ought to conclude that he treats the doctrines as the same. Certainly thatis an advantage for my interpretation, which allows that. (This same point applies to my dis-cussion of Schmaltz below.)

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Malebranche clearly attempts to support both sides of this point. In thethird section we focused largely on the act of (non) consent’s lack of causalef�cacy; meanwhile Malebranche’s occasionalism precludes the soul’s beinga true ef�cacious cause of the act, and his desire to preserve freedom pre-cludes God from being a direct true ef�cacious cause of the act (qua (not)consenting). But both points are part of the same larger point, namely thatin a key sense the act is not real. Sleigh’s charge of ‘irrelevancy’ is thereforeunfounded: Malebranche does address his concern, and does so, I think, ina perfectly coherent (if not necessarily persuasive) way.

Finally, let’s turn to Schmaltz (1996). In addition to the ‘two’ accounts offreedom in Malebranche also noted by Sleigh, Schmaltz distinguishes athird, which he attributes to Ré�exions, based on the following consider-ations. Brie�y, Schmaltz suggests, Malebranche seems to allow (contra thesecond account) that ‘consent involves some change brought about by apower in us’ (p. 224), though not, of course, a ‘physical’ change broughtabout by a ‘physical’ power. Rather, Malebranche distinguishes the physi-cal from the ‘moral’, thus classifying the soul’s genuine free acts as moralentities, or, as Schmaltz puts it, ‘moral aspects of the soul’ (p. 225).

But what is this distinction between the moral and physical? Malebrancheelaborates by means of an imaginary case of bodily motion, which we’llexamine in a moment. The basic idea is that he distinguishes between theintrinsic and relational features of an object, and identi�es the moral fea-tures with certain of its relational ones. Our free acts, then, are to be con-strued as genuine relational features of our soul or behavior.

So far, so good. The key question now is in just what sense these acts are‘relational’, and here I am not convinced that Schmaltz is quite right. To seethis, let’s turn to Malebranche’s ‘imaginary case of bodily motion’, whichSchmaltz translates and presents as follows:

Suppose, for example, that God has created a body with a round shape, andwith four degrees of speed [vitesse], such that it depends on it [lui] to determineits motion toward the Orient or toward the Occident, and that the Eternal Lawdemands that all bodies move themselves toward the Orient. In this absurd sup-position . . . it seems evident to me that if this body moves sometimes towardthe Orient, and sometimes toward the Occident, motion of which it is not thecause, but which is not invincible: it seems to me, I say, that its determinationcontrary to the law, and morally evil, would remain such as it is, and wouldproduce by itself a change neither in its roundness, nor in the degrees of speedof this ball; and that if this body becomes cubical or immobile, following itsdetermination contrary to order, its change would never be produced by theef�cacy of its disordered determination, but by the author of all beings, and ofall their modalities.

(Ré�exions 10, p. 43; in Schmaltz (1996), p. 225)

Schmaltz suggests that this case is naturally read as implying that the ball’s

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shape and quantity of motion are intrinsic features, while its direction isrelational since it consists in the ball’s relation to the Orient or Occident.One problem, however, which Schmaltz points out, is that elsewhere Male-branche quite explicitly treats motion simpliciter as a relational feature.43

Schmaltz cleverly suggests how Malebranche could reply to this inconsis-tency, by relying on his own Cartesian de�nition of the quantity of motionas the product of the intrinsic size of the body and its speed; in this wayquantity of motion at least involves an intrinsic feature in a way that direc-tion of motion doesn’t. But this maneuver strikes me as suspect. For onething, in the passage itself Malebranche explicitly refers, twice, only tospeed, not to the overall ‘quantity of motion’. But more importantly, wecould avoid interpreting him as contradicting himself altogether – and keephis view that motion simpliciter is a relational feature of bodies – if weunderstand this passage somewhat differently from Schmaltz.

Malebranche’s goal here is to explain the distinction between ‘physical’and ‘moral’. Both the intrinsic shape and relational speed of the body arephysical features of it, I think, as is its relational direction of motion. If so,the physical vs moral distinction cannot re�ect, contra Schmaltz, theshape/speed vs direction distinction, since each side of the latter distinctioncontains both physical and relational. But then the physical v. moral dis-tinction must be based on something else. The remaining component in thepassage is the ‘Eternal Law’, demanding that all bodies move towards theOrient. What I suggest, then, is that the physical vs moral distinction hereactually re�ects the difference between this entire set of physical features(shape, speed, direction) and the further relational fact that members of thisset either do, or do not, conform to the Law.

Whether a member conforms is not itself an intrinsic feature of the set; itdepends also on just what the Eternal Law commands. Hence, the motion’s‘determination contrary to the law and morally evil, would remain such asit is, and would produce by itself a change neither in its roundness, nor inthe degrees of speed of this ball’: That the direction of motion is not in con-formance makes no difference to any of the ball’s physical features, neitherthe intrinsic roundness nor the relational speed, since conformance is a rela-tional property between the physical features and something non-physical,viz. the moral law. Similarly, ‘if this body becomes cubical or immobile,following its determination contrary to order, its change would never beproduced by the ef�cacy of its disordered determination, but by the authorof all beings, and of all their modalities’: The fact of (non) conformance doesnot itself (occasionally) cause the next state of affairs in the sequence, onlythe preceding state of affairs does that. In short, the moral features of thisstate of affairs are not themselves manifest distinctly within the state ofaffairs. They are a function of whether the state of affairs conforms to some-thing non-physical external to it.

48 ANDREW PESSIN

43 Cf. Elucidations 12, p. 640.

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On Schmaltz’s view, the key relation in the passage is that between theball and the object towards which it is moving; for the ball to determine itsown direction of motion is only for the ball to determine one of its relationalfeatures. But then not only does Schmaltz have Malebranche contradictinghimself, as above, but he has a second problem: It is also unclear just whatrole ‘morality’, ‘Eternal Law’, etc. play in this passage. If Malebranchemeant by the physical vs moral distinction merely the generic intrinsic vsrelational distinction, then his point would have been quite clear by sayingsimply, ‘Contrast the shape of a body with its direction of motion’. He couldhave just referred to the motion’s ‘determination towards the Occident’,and noted that this involves no changes in the body’s shape; the ball analogyhelps, in a strained way, to clarify what he means when he says the souldetermines the ‘direction’ of its inclination without causing anything intrin-sic. But then: (a) The notion of morality in no way serves to explain or evenmove beyond Malebranche’s ‘�rst’ account of freedom, which is based onthe idea that the soul determines the direction of its inclination; so (b)What’s the point of bringing in morality here?

To be sure, Schmaltz recognizes problems here and so in fact goes on toconstruct Malebranche’s ‘third account’ of freedom out of related materi-als, by suggesting that ‘a better position for [Malebranche] seems to be thatGod causes [in us] an indeterminate free movement that the soul itselfdetermines by causing its free consent’ (pp. 227–8). The details needn’tconcern us, except to say: �rst, Schmaltz seems to admit that Malebranchedoesn’t actually hold this view; second, the view invokes the very dif�cultnotion that God directly causes our ‘free’ movements, and third, it leavesunexplained why Malebranche is invoking the physical vs moral distinctionas a way of elaborating on his theory.

There’s yet a third problem with Schmaltz’s interpretation of the passage.Applying it to the soul, the key relation should be between the soul and itsobject of inclination.44 But to say the soul is inclined towards an object is tosay that it is in an inclinational mode with that object as its object; to changethe object, or the relation to the object, is, I think, to change the mode.45

But if the soul determines the direction of the inclination in any real sense– other than the one I’ve been defending – then it is clearly affecting one ofits own modes. For Schmaltz to locate the key relation here is problematicbecause the soul would have at least partial causal responsibility for its ownmodes, violating occasionalism!

MALEBRANCHE’S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM/CONSENT 49

44 Schmaltz writes, for example, ‘(Suspension of consent) merely changes the relation betweenthe soul and the object of attention and therefore does not itself cause a real being’ (p. 228).

45 An ‘idea’is ‘that which affects and modi�es the mind with the perception it has of an object’(Search 3.2.1.1, p. 217); and God ‘qui par l’ef�cace des idées, modi�e l’ame de ses percep-tions.’ (Ré�exions, 42) (my italics in both passages). Different ideas (or objects of inclina-tion) would suggest different modi�cations. (This particular point is somewhat controversial,and merits further investigation. Some relevant primary texts include: Search 1.1.1, p. 4; Elu-cidations 1, p. 551; Dialogues 1.9, 16; True/False 27, p. 201, Oeuvres 40, pp. 61–2. Some rel-evant secondary texts: Schmaltz (1996), ch. 3; Kremer (1999)).

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My interpretation of this passage, to the contrary, suffers from none ofthese three problems.

On my interpretation, the key relation is that between the ball in its stateof motion towards the object and the dictates of the moral law. First, then,Malebranche does not contradict himself; speed and direction can both berelational without that affecting his example. Second, his reference to‘Eternal Law’ becomes necessary to the example because that law is one ofthe members of the relation he is concerned with; similarly, ‘determinationcontrary to the law, and morally evil’ becomes not simply an indirect wayof saying ‘determination towards the Occident’, but a direct reference towhat’s important, viz. the fact of that motion’s not conforming to the law.And third, on the thesis I’ve been developing, that the soul determines itsobject of inclination means merely that the sequence of states of affairsinvolving it and its modes, for which God is fully responsible, may truly bedescribed in terms of ‘(non) consent’. There’s no danger of attributing tothe soul any causal responsibility for its own modes. In the same way, themoral aspects featured in Malebranche’s passage here are in no way con-tained within the physical states of affairs, but entirely external to it. Locat-ing the key relation as I do thus preserves the occasionalism.

I might add, �nally: Interpreted my way the overall passage works betterin its role as providing an analogy with which to elucidate Malebranche’snotion of the activity of the soul than it does when interpreted Schmaltz’sway. On his interpretation the key analogy between direction of motion andthe soul’s ‘direction’ of inclination is fairly strained; the notions have littlein common. On my view the key point is that the moral features of the statesof affairs are not themselves purely intrinsic features of those states ofaffairs. That point holds equally true, in exactly the same way, both forMalebranche’s imaginary ball as well as for our soul.

Tying this together: Malebranche’s God creates the entire physical andspiritual world, under particular descriptions, as a sequence of states ofaffairs. To preserve our freedom and remove Himself from responsibilityfor our sins, He creates the states of affairs constituting our behaviour underdescriptions leaving open their moral features. He continuously creates us,then, with all our features (sensations, thoughts, inclinations, volitions, etc.),and that is everything real (and intrinsic) to us. Nevertheless, thesesequences of states of affairs may be morally evaluable by virtue of theirexternal relation to the moral law. Put differently, moral notions provide alevel or mode of description distinct from that under which God creates thestates of affairs. In describing these sequences in terms such as ‘Smith con-sents’, we are ultimately making explicit the relation between the sequenceand the moral law. But in so far as God’s volitional contents are neutral rela-tive to the moral mode of description, He is not directly causally respons-ible for the moral features of our behaviours, and in this way our freedomis preserved. Yet in so far as He does indeed create all states of affairs, oc-casionalism is preserved.

50 ANDREW PESSIN

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Malebranche’s distinction between the moral and the physical may there-fore be explicated in terms of God’s volitional incompleteness, just as wesaw with his �rst ‘two’ accounts of freedom. The net result is that the materi-als out of which Schmaltz constructs his ‘third account’ of freedom do notrequire any such distinction: All ‘three’ accounts, contra Schmaltz, in factamount to a single, coherent theory.46

Conclusion. In this section I’ve contrasted my interpretation of Male-branche with those of two recent writers. Against Sleigh, I argued that thetwo distinct accounts of freedom he �nds in Malebranche are in fact justone, and that Malebranche does indeed (in effect) answer Arnauld’s worry.Against Schmaltz, I argued that his ‘third’ account of freedom is also nosuch thing: On my interpretation Malebranche may be read as holding asingle coherent theory.

CONCLUSION

I’ve argued in this paper that:

1 Malebranche appears to allow and use the notion of the incompletenessof God’s volitions,

2 We, by applying that notion to his doctrine of freedom/consent, may in-terpret that doctrine in a new way that is consistent with his texts,

3 In so doing, we can clearly see how he attempts to reconcile his oc-casionalism with the possibility of human freedom or self-determination,and

4 This new interpretation, unlike others, results in a theory which is uni-form and coherent.

What I have not argued is that Malebranche’s doctrine successfully recon-ciles occasionalism and human freedom. For any meaningful conception offreedom, it seems to me, this would be an impossible task: Once God hasfull causal responsibility for all states of affairs, regardless of the descrip-tions under which He wills them, freedom is precluded. Perhaps one mightgrant that Malebranche has cleverly managed to free God from authorshipof our (non) consents, and so of our (non) sins, but it would be hard to grantthat he has succeeded in the other key requirement, viz. assigning thatauthorship in any genuine sense to us. His opposing needs – that our (non)consents be both real (for the freedom) and not real (for the occasionalism)– just can’t, I think, be bridged.

In this paper I’ve merely tried to understand what Malebranche is assert-ing, not to defend it. But if I’ve understood him correctly, then I believe he

MALEBRANCHE’S DOCTRINE OF FREEDOM/CONSENT 51

46 For discussion of other senses of the moral/physical distinction, cf. Schmaltz (1996), pp.224–6, 287 n. 99.

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has produced a theory of admirable complexity and sophistication despiteits ultimate failure.47

Kenyon College

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47 I thank Steven Nadler, Thomas Lennon, and an anonymous reviewer of this journal forhelpful comments on earlier drafts of this paper, and Elmar Kremer for providing me witha pre-publication copy of a forthcoming paper on Malebranche’s doctrine of freedom.

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