Sensation in a Malebranchean Mind Alison Simmons Harvard

37 Pages·2011·0.25 MB·English

Penultimate draft. Final draft in Topics in Early Modern Theories of Mind, Studies in the History and Philosophy of
Mind 9, edited by Jon Miller (Springer Press, 2009): 105-129.

Sensation in a Malebranchean Mind
Alison Simmons
Harvard University
My topic is Malebranche’s theory of mind and, as my title suggests, the place of
sensation within it. My aim, however, is not simply to recount a long forgotten, and rather
weird, account of the human mind. My aim is to explore the roles that intentionality and
consciousness play in conceptions of the mind, and Malebranche provides a particularly nice
case study. That is in part because his theory of mind as a whole is so strange from our
point of view. (We see all things in God?!?) In thinking through such a theory, nothing can
be taken for granted, and that helps to raise questions about the mind that often go unasked.
It is also a good case study because recent commentators have made a rather striking claim
about Malebranche’s place in the history of theorizing about the mind: Malebranche, they
claim, was the first (and perhaps only) philosopher in the early modern period to break
decisively with the view that intentionality is a mark of the mental.1 A striking claim, if true.
I think it is untrue. To see why requires turning over a number of rocks that, I hope, reveal
what is strikingly novel, and thought-provoking, about Malebranche’s unusual account of the
mind.
Why highlight sensation? In defending the claim that Malebranche rejects
intentionality as a mark of the mental, commentators point to his treatment of sensation.
Malebranche, they claim, draws a sharp distinction between sensation and perception:
sensation is a decidedly non-intentional mental state (a mere sensation, if you will) while

1 The clearest recent examples are Jolley [1990, 1995, and 2000] and Pyle [2003], though
others effectively commit him to this position, including Alquié [1974], Guéroult [1987],
Lennon [1992], Nadler [1992], Rodis-Lewis [1963], and Schmaltz [1996].
perception is an intentional mental state.2 I think this is wrong as a reading of Malebranche’s
account of sensation, and, more generally, wrong as a reading of the place of intentionality in
his theory of mind. Malebranche is not interested in denying that intentionality is a mark of
the mental. He is out to change our understanding of the nature of intentionality. I’m not
the first to point out that Malebranche has a different conception of intentionality from
many of his contemporaries,3 but I think that commentators have not fully appreciated its
consequences for the nature of Malebranchean sensation, or, consequently, for the scope of
intentionality in the Malebranchean mind.
The typical strategy for investigating this topic is to look first at what Malebranche
has to say about sensation, note that it seems to be a non-intentional mental state, and then
draw the conclusion that Malebranche rejects intentionality as a mark of the mental. I want
to reverse things, looking first at what Malebranche says about the nature of the mind
generally, and then thinking through its implications for sensation. The texts look a little
different when we turn things around in this way. If I’m right, Malebranche does
demonstrate a commitment to mental life being essentially intentional. And if that’s right,
then sensation too had better be intentional. But, we will have to ask, how? And if
Malebranche does draw a sharp distinction between sensation and other sorts of mental
state, as I agree he does, then what does that distinction amount to if not a distinction
between the non-intentional and the intentional?
I will suggest that what is special about sensation is not its relationship to
intentionality, but its relationship to consciousness. Sensations stand out to consciousness in
a way that other mental states do not. But consciousness, in Malebranche’s estimation, is a

2 I this reading is right, then Malebranche would be anticipating Thomas Reid’s more
famous, and very clear, distinction between sensation and perception.
3 Nadler [1992] makes this point quite explicitly, clearly, and convincingly. So does Pyle
[2003].
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very poor guide to the mind, and so the fact that sensations stand out wreacks
epistemological havoc both for our knowledge of both mind and world. Unlike many of his
contemporaries, Malebranche argues that consciousness, while providing a special form of
access to the mind, is not all that illuminating. In this, and in his examination of the
epistemology of consciousness more generally, he stands out against others in the period. In
the end, Malebranche may very well be a maverick in the history of thinking about the
human mind. But that status has less to do with what he takes to be the mark of the mental
than with his view that consciousness provides but a very dim light on the mind.

I. Preliminaries
I have been throwing around a philosophical term that means different things to
different people and, worse, is not a word that Malebranche himself uses: intentionality.
Commentators freely use the term when writing about Malebranche and I will join them, but
with some caution. I mean to employ the term in a maximally inclusive way. To say that a
mental state is intentional is simply to say that it is of or about or directed to an object of some
sort (be it a physical object, a mental object, a concrete object, an abstract object, a
proposition, a state of affairs, or any other sort of object you fancy). It is not to say, more
particularly, that the mental state possesses content (propositional content, informational
content, conceptual content, representational content, or any other kind of content). It is
not to say that the mental state is truth-apt or has satisfaction conditions. It is not to say that
the mental state is capable of being directed to a non-existent object or that its object has a
special sort of immanent inesse. I mean my use of intentionality to be neutral with respect to
competing theories of intentionality, theories about its nature. As I use the term, both direct
realists (who think of mental states as involving a primitive relationship between mind and
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world) and so-called intentionalists (who think of mental states as having some sort of truth-
evaluable content that represents the world as being thus and so, whether or not the world is
thus and so and, perhaps, whether or not the world even exists) conceive thought as
intentional. I believe that the claim that Malebranche rejects intentionality as a mark of the
mental does not turn on reading “intentionality” in any particular technical way, though I
will have to substantiate that as I go along.
It is really the nature of non-intentional mental states that is important for the target
thesis. A non-intentional mental state is going to be one that is not of, about, or directed to
an object in any way at all; it doesn’t even purport to be of, about, or directed to an object.
Non-intentional mental states, if they exist, are a bit like mental bruises: they are typically
caused by objects, but they are not in turn of or about their causes. They begin and end in
the mind. Candidates for non-intentional mental states include pains, tickles, orgasms, and
moods. Whether these mental states are in fact non-intentional depends, of course, on your
theory of intentionality and your intuitions about these states. But for fans of non-
intentional mental states, these are the ones that rise up as the best candidates.
One further note on terminology: I will use “thought” and “perception”
interchangeably. This is a jarring interchange for 21st century readers, but for the early
moderns both terms are used generically to pick out a variety of mental states. What we
might describe as a thought about some mathematical proposition, they are just as likely to
describe as an intellectual perception. What we might describe of as a perception of a pink
flower, they are just as likely to describe as a sensory thought. It is not that they fail to
notice that there are great differences between thinking about abstract matters and seeing
concrete particulars; it’s just that the difference is not systematically reflected in the use of
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the terms “thought” and “perception.” Unless I indicate otherwise, then, these terms are
simply generic terms for mental states.

II. Malebranche the Maverick
Let’s start by getting the target thesis in place. Nick Jolley offers a clear statement of
it:
In general, seventeenth-century philosophers seem to have assumed that
intentionality is an essential characteristic of our mental life. Malebranche is
perhaps the only philosopher in the period who stands out clearly against the
prevailing orthodoxy; he is committed to the thesis that there is a large class of
mental items—sensations—which have no representational content.4

In his recent monograph, Andrew Pyle similarly points to Malebranche’s treatment of
sensation as evidence for his “absolute denial of the thesis that intentionality is the mark of
the mental.”5 Insofar as they agree that Malebranchean sensations are non-intentional
mental states, Tom Lennon, Steven Nadler, and Tad Schmaltz commit Malebranche to a
similar position.6 French commentators say much the same.7 The emerging consensus, then,
is that Malebranche rejects intentionality as a mark of the mental, and that sensations
provide the evidence.
So what’s the evidence that Malebranchean sensations are non-intentional? There
appear to be three sources. First, Malebranche insists over and over that sensations are just
modifications of the mind. Here’s an example:
All the sensations of which we are capable could subsist without there being
any object outside us. Their being contains no necessary relation to the
bodies that seem to cause them, as will be proved elsewhere, and they are

4 Jolley [1995], 128-129. See also Jolley [1990], 60 and Jolley [2000], 31.
5 Pyle [2003], 61.
6 See Lennon [1992], 64; Nadler [1992], 74; and Schmaltz [1996], 94 and 117.
7 See, for example, Alquié [1974], 152-159; Gueroult [1987], 20; and Rodis-Lewis [1963], 103.
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nothing other than the soul modified in this or that fashion; consequently,
they are properly modifications of the soul.8

The force of the restriction “nothing other than” and elsewhere “merely” in classifying
sensations as modifications of the mind seems to be that sensations do not represent
anything in extramental reality, and (so?) are not of or about or directed to, objects outside
the mind. They are purely subjective mental states, as Schmaltz puts it, exhausted by their
intrinsic phenomenological features.9
If the ring of the text isn’t enough to convince, consider Malebranche’s account of
secondary qualities. If secondary quality sensations are going to be intentionally related to
anything outside the mind, then presumably they are going to be intentionally related to
secondary qualities: sensations of color will put us into intentional contact with colors,
sensations of odor will put us into intentional contact with odors, and so on. But, the
argument goes, Malebranche is a sensationalist about secondary qualities; that is, secondary
qualities like color and odor are themselves nothing but sensations in the mind. This is true.
Malebranches writes explicitly to Arnauld that he “learned from Descartes that color, heat
and pain are only modalities of the soul.”10 Here’s a more elaborate statement:
Our eyes represent colors to us on the surface of bodies and light in the air
and in the sun; our ears make us hear sounds as if spread out through the air
and in the resounding bodies; and if we believe what the other senses report,
heat will be in fire, sweetness will be in sugar, musk will have an odor, and all
the sensible qualities will be in the bodies that seem to exude or diffuse them.
Yet it is certain…that all these qualities do not exist outside the soul that
perceive them.11

8 Search I.i.1, OCM I 42-43/LO 3. See also Search III-II.v, OCM I 433/LO 228.
9 Schmaltz [1996], 94 and 117-118. Schmaltz offers this explicitly as an account of
Malebranche’s claim that sensations are “nothing but modifications of the mind.” Alquié
[1974] says much the same, 505-506.
10 Trois Lettres, OCM VI, 201. Malebranche may be misreading Descartes, but he makes his
own position on secondary qualities perfectly clear here. For an excellent discussion of
Malebranche’s position on secondary qualities, see Schmaltz [1995].
11 Elucidations 6, OCM III 55-56/LO 569.
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If secondary qualities are themselves just sensations in the mind, then there does not seem to
be anything outside the mind for those sensations to be intentionally relating us to. And so
they must be non-intentional mental states.12 Locutions like “sensation of red” and
“sensation of sweetness” must be employing descriptive genitives that simply tell us which
qualitative kind of sensation we are having, rather than objective genitives telling us what
feature of the world the sensation is directing us to.
But perhaps the most decisive evidence that Malebranchean sensations are non-
intentional comes from what I will call Malebranche’s “duplex theory” of sensory
perception. Malebranche insists that sensory perception always involves two things: a
sensation and a pure idea. The ideas in question here are intelligible ideas in God’s mind (akin
to Platonic ideas, they are eternal, immutable, infinite, universal, necessary, etc.).13 Here’s a
sample passage:
When we perceive something sensible, one finds in our perception sensation
[sentiment] and pure idea. The sensation is a modification of our soul, and it is
God who causes it in us…As for the idea that is found together with the
sensation, it is in God and we see it because it pleases God to reveal it to us.14

Commentators routinely read “pure idea” as elliptical for “pure perception of an idea,” ideas
being the objects of our pure perceptions. (Pure perceptions are intellectual perceptions.)
Malebranchean sensory perception, then, appears to be a mélange of two distinct and
heterogenous mental states: a sensation and a pure (or intellectual) perception of an idea in
God’s mind. The sensation is wholly non-intentional but the pure perception is intentional
because it is directed to an object outside the human mind, viz., an idea in God’s mind. As
Schmaltz puts is: “Sensations…bear a causal relation to divine ideas, but they lack the sort

12 Jolley [1995] employs just such an argument for the target thesis.
13 For a taste of Malebranche’s description of these ideas, see, for example, Search IV.xi.3,
OCM II 103/LO 322 and DM I.vii, OCM XII 40/JS, 12.
14 Search III-II.vi, OCM I 445/LO 234.
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of direct cognitive relation that is characteristic of pure perceptions.”15 And Jolley writes:
“although sensations may occur in conjunction with perceptions of ideas [which are
intentional], in themselves they are not intentional.”16 The two together constitute a sensory
perception. On this view, the presence of a sensation is what makes the overall experience
properly sensory and it phenomenologically adorns (but epistemologically shrouds) what is
otherwise an intellectual perception of an idea in God.17
Note that on the duplex theory, sensory perception as a whole is indeed intentional,
but its intentionality is secured exclusively by the perceptual/intellectual component to
which sensations have attached themselves like so many mental barnacles. Of course sense
perceptual experience doesn’t feel like a complex of phenomenally impressive but non-
intentional sensations and intellectual perceptions of abstracta. But like many early moderns,
Malebranche maintains that there is something confused about sensory perception. As
defenders of the target thesis understand it, the sensation and the perception get mixed up,
or literally con-fused. So what happens when I have the experience of sensorily perceiving a
red circle is that “a sensation of red occurs in conjunction with the perception of an idea (a
geometrical concept) in such a way that I take my experience to be of a red, circular body.”18
(How to cash out the “in such a way” is, of course, the million dollar question. In fairness,

15 Schmaltz [1996], 107-108; see also 99.
16 Jolley [1995], 131; see also Jolley [1997], xviii.
17 A number of French commentators offer a similar analysis of sensory perception without
the explicit claim that the sensory component is non-intentional, but with the explicit claim
that the sensation is joined to an intellectual perception of an idea, so that there are two
distinct mental states at work only one of which is a perception of an idea. See Alquié
[1974], 505; Elungu [1973], 127; and Rodis-Lewis [1963], 103 and 139.
18 Jolley [2000], 40. Nadler offers a similar account: “What happens in [sensory] perception
is that both of these elements—a conceiving and a sensing, each of which can otherwise
occur by themselves—are present…One can perform an act of conceiving with one’s eyes
closed, and thereby intellectually apprehend a pure idea of extension undistracted by any
(visual) sensations. When one opens one’s eyes, the act of conceiving, which formerly took
place by itself, now becomes, along with the onrushing flood of sensations, an element in
our perceptual consciousness of the objects in the world around us” (Nadler [1994], 199).
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though, this is a difficult thing to account for on any interpretation of Malebranche.) If
sensations are simply adding a bit of phenomenological panache to otherwise intellectual
perceptions, then it does seem that in and of themselves, they are non-intentional, and so we
would indeed have to conclude that Malebranche gives up intentionality as a mark of the
mental.
The case for my opponents looks pretty solid. I nevertheless think it is wrong. To
see why it is wrong, we have to back up a bit and look at some features of Malebranche’s
treatment of the mind more generally, in particular what he has to say about intentionality
and consciousness, and then return to ask how sensations and sensory perception fit into
that account.

III. Malebranche on Intentionality
The place to turn for Malebranche’s view about intentionality is his (in)famous
debate with Arnauld over the nature and status of ideas. In recent Anglo-American
commentaries, the debate has been cast as a debate between direct and indirect realism:
Arnauld is supposed to be the progressive direct realist; Malebranche is the classic
skepticism-inviting indirect realist (according to whom ideas are immediate objects of
perception that mediate our access to particular physical objects by serving as
representational proxies for them). While there is something to this portrayal, I think it is
misleading and loads the dice in Arnauld’s favor. After all, each of them appeals in one way
or another to representative ideas in his account of cognition; and each accuses the other of
some sort of skepticism-inviting indirectness in virtue of his peculiar use of these
representative ideas. There is more going on in the debate than a dispute about the
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(im)mediacy of cognition. What is most fundamentally at issue is the nature of
intentionality.19
Both Arnauld and Malebranche repeatedly say that thought is always thought of something
and that to think of nothing is not to think. Here’s Arnauld:
Since it is clear that I think it is also clear that I think of something, because
thought is essentially thus.20

And Malebranche:
To see nothing is not to see; to think of nothing is not to think…Properly
speaking, this is the first principle of all our knowledge.21

Both Arnauld and Malebranche at least seem to be committed to the view that thought is
essentially intentional: thought essentially has an object of some sort. What is at issue
between them is what it is that makes a thought be a thought of something. And that is what
interests me in the debate. I do not think that what I will have to say here is in any way
controversial, but I am going to draw some consequences from it that will be controversial,
and so it is worth getting clear on the basics.
Arnauld holds what I will call an intrinsic conception of intentionality.22 The idea here
is that mental states are Janus-faced: they have formal being and objective being. They have
formal being insofar as they are actual modifications of an actually existing human mind, that
is, insofar as they are acts of perceiving (or, equivalently, thinking); and they have objective
being insofar as they are themselves representations of actual or possible things. My visual
perception of a poodle is at once an act of visual perceiving and a representation of a poodle;
it is, we might say, a visual-perception-of-a-poodle. Mental states are intentional insofar as

19 Again, I am by no means the first to note this. Nadler [1992] and Pyle [2003] offer
extensive discussions of this aspect of the debate.
20 VFI 6.
21 Search IV.xi.3, OCM II 99/LO 320. See also Search VI-II.vi, OCM II 372/LO 481; DM
I.4, OCM XII 35/JS 8; Réponse X, OCM VI 84; and Trois Lettres, OCM VI 202.
22 Nadler [1992] calls it a content conception of intentionality.
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