Our Bodies, Our Selves: Malebranche on the Feelings of Embodiment

1.1. Preliminaries

Suppose that a perceiver looks at a lime. Malebranche holds that the perceiver’s visual experience as of a round, green object located some distance in front of her is a compound mental state, resulting from the combination of green sensations with natural judgments hardwired into her visual system.[7] A sensation is ‘the passion, the sensation, or the perception of the soul, i.e. what each of us senses in spite of himself,’ upon the occasion of changes in the perceiver’s brain. Sensations result in the perceiver’s conscious awareness of sensible qualities (e.g., colors, smells, tastes, sounds, tactile qualities, pains, pleasures, etc.) (OCM I: 129–130/LO: 52). Natural judgments transform sensible quality sensations into sensory experiences or perceptions as of three-dimensional objects.[8] Although Malebranche sometimes writes as though the perceiver were responsible for making natural judgments, these judgments occur automatically as a result of the occasional law coordinating changes in the body with changes in the soul: they occur ‘in us and independently of us, and even in spite of us’ (OCM I: 199–120/LO: 46). Natural judgments are part and parcel of sensory experience, just as much as sensations are. ‘As the senses can only sense and never judge, properly speaking, it is certain,’ Malebranche writes, ‘that this natural judgment is only a compound sensation’ (OCM I: 97/LO: 34; see also OCM I: 119–120/LO: 46–47, OCM I: 130/LO: 52, OCM I: 156–158/LO: 68–69, OCM XII: 93–94, and OCM XV: 17).

Both sensations and natural judgments explain the way things sensorily appear. When the perceiver looks at the lime, the lime visually appears to be green and spherical to her. The sensational component of this visual experience explains the lime’s green appearance, the natural judgments its spherical appearance. I use sensory perception, sensory experience, and sometimes just experience or feeling for the overall conscious result of combining sensations with natural judgments, in virtue of which things sensorily appear thus and so to the perceiver.[9]

Malebranche contrasts natural judgments with free judgments, which often accompany sensory experience (OCM I: 130/LO: 52). These free judgments are constituted by the will’s assent to sensory experiences, and they explain the perceiver’s ordinary sense-based beliefs about the world. It is one thing for a lime to visually appear spherical to the perceiver, and quite another for her to believe that the lime is spherical. Natural judgments explain the visual appearance of sphericality; free judgments explain the belief.

1.2. Natural versus Free Judgments of Bodily Ownership

In this section, I argue that Malebranche holds that the perceiver feels, rather than merely believes, that a human body belongs to her. That is, I argue that he accepts:

Although Malebranche is clear that the perceiver believes that a human body belongs to her on the basis of experiencing bodily sensations like pleasure and pain, he is not always explicit that bodily ownership is built into sensory experience itself. In the Dialogues on Death, for example, he writes,

Aristes believes that an arm belongs to him because it hurts when Theotime squeezes it. But it is unclear whether the content ‘this arm belongs to me’ occurs exclusively at the level of free judgment, or is built into Aristes’s experience of pain. Sometimes Malebranche writes as though the perceiver infers that a body part belongs to her from a more primitive sensory basis that does not itself represent bodily ownership:

This passage suggests that the perceiver feels pleasures and pains located in a single human body, and that she then infers that this body is part of herself, and, hence, belongs to her, resulting in belief, not feeling. Nevertheless, I contend that Ownership reflects Malebranche’s considered view. For Malebranche, judgments can be either natural or free: the former are part and parcel of sensory experience, the latter are not. His use of inferential language is similarly equivocal: he describes natural judgments as the conclusions of inferences that God makes on the perceiver’s behalf (OCM I: 119–120/LO: 46–47). Thus, the passages we have looked at so far do not settle whether bodily ownership is represented by bodily awareness, or exclusively at the level of belief.

Natural judgment is ‘a judgment of the senses or a compound sensation, which is within us, occurs independently of us, and even in spite of us,’ whereas free judgment is constituted by the perceiver’s free act of consent, ‘which can be avoided, and which consequently we must not make if we wish to avoid error’ (OCM I: 156/LO: 68). Sensory experiences happen to the perceiver, whereas she freely forms beliefs (OCM XII: 93–94/JS 57; see also OCM XV: 15, 17).[10] If Malebranche holds that the judgment that a body belongs to the perceiver occurs ‘independently of us, and even in spite of us’, this would be evidence that this judgment is natural, and, hence, sensory, rather than free. Consider the following passage from the Search:

All the judgments mentioned here are unavoidable, and, hence, natural. The soul can ‘hardly help’ judging that bodily sensations ‘belong to it in some way’. Similarly for the judgments localizing bodily sensations in the perceiver’s limbs: ‘It should not be imagined that it is up to us,’ Malebranche writes, ‘to affix the pain to the pricked finger rather than to the thorn that pricks it. All of this occurs in us independently of us and even in spite of us as the natural judgments I spoke of in the ninth chapter’ (OCM I: 133/LO: 55; see also OCM I: 130/LO: 52). In this context, we may surmise that the soul’s judgment that a human body is part of itself and belongs to it occurs unavoidably as well, and, therefore, is sensory.

Someone might raise the following objection. Suppose we grant that bodily ownership figures in the contents of natural judgment. Still, it is unclear that bodily ownership is felt, rather than merely believed, since it is not obvious that natural judgment is sufficient for feeling. The fact that natural judgments occur automatically does not show that their contents are felt, since many of our responses occur ‘within us, independently of us, and even despite of us’, without being feelings in any meaningful way (OCM I: 156/LO: 68). Consider a snap judgment, or a first-impression of someone. These responses might be just as unavoidable as the prick of a needle, and yet they are not part of sensory experience.[11]

To respond to this objection, we need to clarify what is at stake in the debate about whether bodily ownership is felt or merely believed. As I understand this debate, it is about whether there is a sensory appearance of bodily ownership. Suppose that our perceiver closes her eyes, and allows herself to simply feel her body. There will be a way that her body sensorily appears to her in bodily awareness, say, as warm, relaxed, and as having certain dimensions. We can describe this sensory appearance by saying that the properties of being warm, relaxed and having certain dimensions are conveyed or represented to the perceiver by her bodily awareness, or, equivalently, by saying that these properties figure in the contents of her bodily awareness. But these are just alternative descriptions of the sensory appearance presented to the perceiver’s point of view. The debate at hand, then, is about whether bodily ownership is among the properties that sensorily appear to the perceiver. Partisans of the mere belief view hold that this sensory appearance never includes bodily ownership, whereas partisans of the feeling view hold that this sensory appearance at least sometimes includes bodily ownership.

Given this construal of the debate, the question for Malebranche is whether a natural judgment of bodily ownership implies a corresponding sensory appearance of bodily ownership. If natural judgments infuse their contents into the sensory appearances, as indeed they do, then Malebranche’s view that the perceiver naturally judges that a body belongs to her will imply that there is a genuine feeling of bodily ownership. As we saw above, Malebranche holds that the perceiver’s overall sensory experience is a compound of sensations and natural judgments. When she looks at a lime, green sensations explain the lime’s appearing green, whereas natural judgments explain the lime’s appearing spherical (OCM I: 129–130/LO: 52). More generally, natural judgments explain the appearance of size-constancy (OCM I: 97/LO: 34), of depth and three-dimensionality (OCM I: 109–120/LO: 41–47), and of sensible qualities being ‘in’ objects (OCM I: 130/LO: 52; OCM I: 138–139/LO: 58–59). These passages suggest that natural judgments inject their contents into the appearances, and, hence, that the natural judgment of bodily ownership entails a corresponding sensory appearance. This commits Malebranche to the feeling view of bodily ownership.

Malebranche sometimes endorses Ownership without using the ambiguous language of judgment. ‘Through the instinct of sensation,’ Malebranche writes, ‘I am persuaded that my soul is joined to my body, or that my body is part of my being …. I do not know it through the light of reason, but only through the pain or pleasure I sense when objects strike me’ (OCM II: 172/LO: 365–366). Assuming that the ‘instinct of sensation’ persuades via representation, then the senses represent that ‘my soul is joined to my body, or that my body is part of my being’. Malebranche’s discussion of phantom limbs in Elucidation VI to the Search also suggests that he accepts Ownership. He describes an amputee who experiences himself as having an arm, despite believing otherwise:

Malebranche’s amputee believes that he lacks an arm, while his pain tells him that he possesses one, in much the same way that two lines look different lengths in the Müller-Lyer illusion, despite our believing that they are the same length. This discrepancy suggests that the amputee’s experience of pain represents the arm as belonging to him, and, hence, that this content is properly attributed to bodily awareness.[12] A few pages later, Malebranche is even more explicit: ‘God discloses creatures to us … as belonging to us … when the perception is very interesting and very lively, as is pain’ (OCM III: 66/LO: 575, emphasis mine).

Despite the confusions introduced by Malebranche’s equivocal use of the term ‘judgment’, the textual evidence shows that he accepts Ownership. When a perceiver steps on a rusty nail and experiences a sharp pain in the foot, there is a way the foot appears to the perceiver in bodily awareness. The foot sensorily appears to have a certain location, to have certain dimensions, and to be damaged, but also to belong to the perceiver.

2.1. Causal Connection

In the Search, Malebranche refers to our ‘inner experience of the union’ (OCM I: 130/LO: 339), and writes that ‘through the instinct of sensation, I am persuaded that my soul is joined to my body’ (OCM II: 172/LO: 365).[14] But, for Malebranche, the union of soul and body consists in the coordination and mutual reciprocity of changes in the soul with changes in the body, grounded in occasional laws (OCM XI: 121–122; see also OCM I: 215/LO: 102; and OCM XII: 166/JS: 120).[15] Thus, a sensory experience of the union just is a sensory experience of the ‘mutual and reciprocal action’ between these substances, that is, their causal connection (OCM XI: 121–122). When a perceiver’s body is pricked, for example, she experiences the body as causing her painful experience. When she voluntarily moves her arm, she experiences herself as causing this movement.

Sometimes Malebranche uses the term ‘union’ more narrowly to refer to the way the mind was causally connected to the body before the Fall, in contrast to the mind’s postlapsarian dependence. ‘We are no longer as God made us,’ Malebranche writes, ‘and the union of our soul with our body has changed to a relation of dependence, for since man disobeyed God it was right that his body ceased to be subject to him’ (OCM XII: 101–102/JS: 64). The difference between union and dependence consists in the mind’s degree of control over its body (OCM XII: 102/JS: 65; see also OCM III: 73/LO: 580 and OCM: XIII 396). Because prelapsarian Adam could determine the state of his brain in the way we now control our limbs, Adam could shut his sensory experiences off. ‘But having sinned,’ Malebranche explains, ‘the first man lost this power’ (OCM III: 74/LO: 581). Crucially, Malebranche holds that we have a sensory experience of dependence, and, hence, that we experience our postlapsarian causal connection to the body. In the Search, Malebranche juxtaposes the deliverances of reason and experience:

Reason tells us how things should be, sensory experience how things are. And sensory experience represents the perceiver as dependent on her body: as ‘joined and subjugated’ to the body (OCM II: 133/LO: 342), and as plagued ‘by involuntary and rebellious impulses’ that seem to originate in the body (OCM III: 74/LO: 581). Malebranche reiterates this point in the Dialogues:

These passages suggest that the perceiver experiences herself as causally connected to her body.

Malebranche’s occasionalism complicates this dimension of the perceiver’s experience. He recognizes two kinds of causes: a single true or genuine cause—God—as well as many occasional causes—creatures. It is not yet clear which of the two kinds of causation figures in the perceiver’s experience of being causally connected to her body. At stake here is whether this experience is veridical. That is, does the perceiver falsely experience her body as the true or genuine cause of her sensory experiences, and her will as the true or genuine cause of her body’s movements? Or does the perceiver veridically experience her body as the occasional cause of her sensory experiences, and her will as the occasional cause of her body’s movements?[16]

Although the passages we have looked at so far do not settle this question, Malebranche holds that the senses misrepresent the ‘alliance’ of mind and body as involving true or genuine causal interaction. In Dialogue VII of the Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, Malebranche suggests that the senses falsely represent the body as the true cause of the perceiver’s sensory experiences. Near the beginning of this Dialogue, the naïve Aristes gives the following speech:

Malebranche often qualifies the term ‘union’ as ‘immediate’ or ‘direct’ to refer to the mind’s true or genuine causal relation to God.[17] Thus, Aristes’s claim that he is ‘united to [his] body more closely than anything else’ suggests that Aristes is articulating the un-Malebranchean view that the body is the true or genuine cause of the mind’s sensory experiences. Malebranche’s spokesperson Theodore is unimpressed:

Theodore gestures towards an explanation of how Aristes arrived at his mistaken position, namely, by consulting only his senses. This suggests that the senses falsely represent the body as the true cause of the perceiver’s sensory experiences.[18]

The senses also falsely represent the perceiver’s will as if it were the true or genuine cause of her body’s movements. In Elucidation XV to the Search, Malebranche criticizes a variety of ‘proofs’ for the ‘efficacy of secondary causes’, and, more specifically, for the claim that ‘man acts through his own efficacy’ (OCM III: 224/LO: 668). One of these proofs suggests that ‘I know through the inner sentiment [sentiment intérieur] of my action that I truly have this power’ to move my body. Crucially, Malebranche accepts his opponents’ description of the phenomenology, namely, that the experience of voluntary movement includes a feeling of efficacy or causal oomph. Instead, Malebranche disputes this experience’s veridicality:

Malebranche is an occasionalist. Of course he will deny that our effort is able to ‘impart motion to animal spirits or to determine them’. I want to emphasize the common ground Malebranche shares with his opponents, namely, that the senses represent the perceiver’s will as the true cause of the body’s movements. Malebranche reiterates this point in the Christian Meditations:

Malebranche’s framing of this passage—‘I sense in myself …’—indicates that he is describing a perceiver’s sensory experience of her embodiment. One misleading aspect of this experience is the perceiver’s feeling that she has a ‘true force or power’ to move her body. In other words, the senses misrepresent the perceiver as the true cause of ‘at least those movements which we call voluntary’.[19]

2.2. Material Connection

In addition to representing the perceiver’s mental life as causally connected to the body, the senses represent the perceiver as materially connected as well. ‘After the Fall,’ Malebranche writes, ‘the mind became, as it were, material and terrestrial…’ (OCM II: 130/LO: 339). The ‘as it were’ is crucial. The mind is an immaterial substance, devoid of parts, and capable of existing apart from the body (OCM I: 123/LO: 49; see also OCM II: 161/LO: 359 and OCM XII: 33/JS: 6). The mind cannot literally become material: ‘One need not imagine, as do most philosophers, that the mind becomes material when united with the body, and that the body becomes mind when it unites with the mind’ (OCM I: 215/LO: 102). Rather, the mind experiences itself as ‘material and terrestrial’.[20]

Malebranche reiterates this point throughout the Search:

Because we are ‘constantly affected by bodies’, we consider ‘the soul to be material, that is to say, extended in the whole body and shaped like the body’ (OCM I: 476/LO: 253). The claim that the perceiver experiences herself as a material being, or, equivalently, as materially connected to a single human body, is abstract. Malebranche suggests three more precise characterizations:

• (a) Composite: The perceiver sensorily experiences herself as a composite whole that includes the body as a part.
• (b) Identity: The perceiver sensorily experiences herself as identical to the body.
• (c) Aspect: The perceiver sensorily experiences herself as an aspect, state, or part of the body.

Just as Ownership comes in different varieties, so too for Material Connection. Material Connection is the genus; Composite, Identity, and Aspect are the species. These options suggest different accounts of the perceiver’s materiality, transposed into a phenomenological register.

2.3. Perspectival Connection

In addition to experiencing herself as causally and materially connected to her body, Malebranche suggests that the perceiver experiences herself as perspectivally connected, in so far as the senses represent the world from the body’s perspective.[21] ‘Our sight,’ he writes, ‘does not represent extension to us as it is in itself, but only as it is in relation to our body’ (OCM I: 84/LO: 28, emphasis mine). In the Dialogues on Metaphysics and Religion, he argues that God provides us with ‘instinctive proofs’—that is, with sensory experiences—that do not tell us anything about ‘the nature and properties of the bodies around us’ or ‘the relation between objects’, but only about ‘the relation they have to our body’ (OCM XII: 99/JS: 62; see also OCM I: 186/LO: 85, OCM I: 488–489/LO: 261, OCM X: 113, and OCM XII: 119/JS: 80). When a perceiver looks at a palm tree, for example, the perceiver’s visual experience represents nothing but the various ways in which the palm tree is related to her body. The proposal, then, is that the perceiver experiences herself as perspectivally connected to her body in so far as her visual experience—and, indeed, the senses more generally—represents only relations to her body.

Consider the visual experience of size (la grandeur) or extension (l’étendue). When the perceiver looks at a palm tree, she does not see its absolute size, but that the palm tree is looming above her: ‘it is a groundless prejudice to believe that we see bodies as they are in themselves. For our eyes, which were given us only for the preservation of our body, perform their duty quite well by providing us with ideas of objects proportioned to the idea we have of the size of our body’ (OCM I: 87/LO: 29). This point comes out nicely a few paragraphs later:

The perceiver’s visual experience of the palm tree’s size is restricted to representing the ratio or proportion between the palm tree’s size and the size of her body, namely, that the palm tree is taller than her body. This visual experience is accurate, as it would be if she were a denizen of Lilliput confronted by a miniature palm tree, so long as the experience gets the proportion or ratio between her body and the palm tree right (OCM I: 87–88/LO: 29–30). Sight represents not absolute size, but scale relative to the perceiver’s body.

Malebranche advances similar body-relative accounts of location and shape. When a perceiver sees ‘at about a hundred steps from me a large white horse running towards the right’ (OCM III: 343–344/LO: 744–745), the perceiver does not see the horse’s location in a ‘cosmic coordinate system’ (Simmons 2003: 400). The perceiver sees the horse’s location relative to the axes and orientation of her body: to the right of her body, and roughly a hundred steps away. The perceiver’s visual experience of the horse’s location is accurate, as it would be if the perceiver and the horse were in California or on the far side of the moon, so long as her experience accurately represents the way the perceiver and the horse are located relative to each other. The perceiver sees an object’s shape in virtue of seeing where the object’s parts are located relative to each other and to her body. When a perceiver sees a rectangular table, for example, she sees some parts of the table as closer to her and other parts as farther away: in effect, she sees the table’s rectangular shape as it is oriented relative to her body (Simmons 2003: 402). Shape perception thus reduces to seeing relations to the perceiver’s body as well.

Malebranche also offers body-relative accounts of the sensible qualities—that is, color, smell, taste, hot, cold, etc.—represented by the senses. A perceiver’s experience of a glass of wine as cool, sweet and red represents different ways the wine is related to her body. She experiences the wine’s temperature not in Celsius, Fahreinheit, or Kelvin, but, rather, as hotter or colder than her body, ‘according to [her body’s] disposition at the time’ (OCM XII: 99/JS: 62). The perceiver’s experience of the wine as ‘pleasant-tasting’ is a sign that ‘wine is then good for [her]’ (OCM III: 186/LO: 647). More generally, taste is ‘a short and incontestable proof of whether certain bodies are, or are not, proper to consume’ (OCM XI: 131). The perceiver’s visual experience of the wine’s redness is partly constituted by an actually red sensation, and this experience represents the wine as eliciting this sensation in her, which depends on the nature of the perceiver’s body. The wine might look red to one perceiver, and green to another, as a result of ‘diversity in different people’s organs of sight’ (OCM I: 152 /LO: 66).

Malebranche’s view that sight represents only relations to the body has profound implications for the perceiver’s experience of her body. First, this thesis implies that visual experience contains a wealth of information about the perceiver’s body, although this information is often implicit and attentively recessive. When a perceiver sees a palm tree as bigger than her body, her visual experience represents the ratio or proportion between the palm tree and her body. This experience tells her something important about the palm tree: that the palm tree is bigger than her body! But it also tells her something important about her body, namely, that her body is smaller than the palm tree. These are just two aspects of a single experiential package, corresponding to the two poles of the ‘bigger than’ relation. This structure is ubiquitous. When the perceiver sees a palm tree to be located twenty paces ahead, she learns something about the palm tree’s location, but also something about her body’s location, namely, that her body is in the vicinity of a palm tree. When the perceiver steps on a rusty nail, she learns that the nail is harmful to her body, but also that her body is vulnerable to nails.

Second, this bodily perspective implies that the body occupies a special place in the contents of visual experience. In short: Malebranche’s view implies that the senses represent a system of relations in which the body is always and invariably a relatum. When a perceiver walks down a street, she sees a diversity of objects: first a palm tree catches her eye, then a house, then some shrubs, then a few more palm trees, and then another house. But one thing remains constant in the ebb and flow of her visual experience: her body. When the perceiver sees the palm tree, she sees that the palm tree is bigger than her body, located and oriented relative to her body. She walks a little further. The palm tree disappears from view. She sees a house. Again, she sees the ways the house is related to her body: the house too looks bigger than her body, and looks to be located relative to her body. The external objects change as she traces a path through her environment; the body relative to which these objects are represented remains the same.[22]

The perceiver’s sensory experience of the body as the fixed point relative to which everything else is represented is the third, perspectival dimension of the perceiver’s experience of embodiment. Gueroult puts this point beautifully:

In Gueroult’s terminology, the perceiver experiences herself as perspectivally connected to the body in so far as she experiences the body as ‘the center’ of the ‘world of sensations’. My proposal, then, is that the perceiver experiences herself as having a body in so far as her sensory experience represents the world relative to this body’s perspective.

2.4. A Foil: Adam Before the Fall

So far, we have mostly been looking at passages where Malebranche describes our current, postlapsarian experience of embodiment. To bring this experience into focus, it will be useful to consider a contrast case, namely, prelapsarian Adam. Even Adam before the Fall experienced a body as belonging to him. But his experience of bodily ownership differed in a few respects.[23]

Consider, first, the causal dimension of Adam’s experience of embodiment. Whereas the human mind is now dependent on the body, Adam was merely united—in the narrow sense of the term—to his body (OCM XII: 101–102/JS: 64). The body now enslaves the human mind; Adam was the body’s master. And just as the human mind presently experiences its subjugation, Adam experienced his mastery over the body:

Another important difference is that Adam’s experience accurately represented the ‘alliance’ and ‘natural correspondence’ between his mind and body for what it truly was: the correspondence of occasional causes. ‘Adam before his sin,’ Malebranche explains, ‘was not stupid enough to imagine that bodies were the cause of his pleasures’ (OCM III: 96/LO: 593). In general, Adam veridically experienced created things—including his body—as merely occasional causes, whereas human beings are now condemned to falsely experiencing created things as having genuine causal efficacy (OCM I: 133–134/LO: 267, OCM II: 318–319/LO: 451, OCM III: 203/LO: 657, and OCM XII: 139/JS: 97).

Second, Adam’s experience of his materiality differed as well. Before the Fall, Adam ‘had a body that God willed he should preserve’ (OCM I: 70/LO: 19), and, indeed, Malebranche suggests that Adam was ‘composed of mind and body’ (OCM I: 72/LO: 20; see also OCM XII: 104/JS: 66, OCM IV: 36, OCM IV: 111, OCM XI: 67, and OCM XI: 130). Adam experienced himself as a composite being: he ‘had a body … which he regarded as part of himself’ (OCM I: 70/LO: 19). But Adam experienced his materiality without any illusions. Now, this might seem puzzling. Malebranche insists that the self (or I) is an immaterial mind or soul, devoid of bodily parts, and capable of existing apart from the body (OCM I: 123/LO: 49; see also OCM II: 161/LO: 359 and OCM XII: 33/JS: 6). So how could Adam veridically experience the body as part of himself? To make things even more confusing, Malebranche holds that since the Fall human perceivers falsely experience the body as part of themselves (OCM II: 172/LO: 365–366). But how could this experience—of including the body as part of oneself—be veridical before the Fall, and false afterwards?

The solution to this puzzle is that Malebranche, like Descartes, employs two distinct concepts of self: (i) a narrow concept that refers only to the mind, and (ii) a broader concept that refers to the composite of mind and body, that is, what Descartes and Malebranche call ‘the human being’ or ‘man’.[24] Malebranche distinguishes these concepts of self in the Christian Meditations:

With this distinction in hand, we may read Malebranche as saying that Adam truly experienced the body as part of himself qua human being, while human perceivers since the Fall falsely experience the body as part of themselves qua mind. This reading derives additional support from Malebranche’s claims that postlapsarian perceivers confuse the mind with the body in a way Adam did not. ‘Now this is what the first man did not do before his sin,’ Malebranche argues (OCM XII: 105/JS: 67). ‘For undoubtedly he did not confound the modalities of which his mind was capable with those of extension. His ideas were not then confused, and his perfectly subjugated senses did not prevent him from consulting Reason’ (OCM XII: 105/JS: 67). In contrast, postlapsarian human perceivers consistently misrepresent the nature of the mind or soul. ‘Since Original Sin,’ Malebranche argues, ‘the soul has become corporeal, as it were …. It looks around among corporeal beings — it takes itself now for one, now for another, now for air, now for fire, now for the harmony of its body’s parts …’ (OCM I: 146/LO: 62–63; see also OCM II: 130/LO: 339).

Consider, finally, the perspectival dimension of Adam’s prelapsarian experience of embodiment. Even before the Fall, Adam’s external sensory experience was restricted to representing relations to his body, since this kind of body-relative information enabled him to efficiently care for his body. ‘As the soul is united to the body and must interest itself in its conservation,’ Malebranche writes, ‘it must be informed by instinctive proofs, I mean short but convincing proofs, of the relation that the bodies surrounding us have to the one we animate’ (OCM XII: 98/JS: 61). If Adam were responsible for working out the relations between his body and its environment, he would not have any time left over for thinking about God:

Hence, Malebranche concludes, ‘Adam had the same senses as we do, by which he was advised of what was necessary for his body,’ namely, about various relations to the body (OCM I: 75/LO: 22).

Nevertheless, the perspectival character of Adam’s experience differed from ours. Before the Fall, Adam experienced his body as a standard relative to which he experienced other material things. But he did not experience his body as an objective standard that revealed the absolute, true, or non-relational properties of these material things. For example, when Adam looked at a palm tree, he saw the palm tree as bigger than his body. He saw this proportion or ratio, and there was nothing about his visual experience that suggested he was seeing more than that. After the Fall, in contrast, the human perceiver tends to misleadingly experience her body as an objective standard. When a Fallen perceiver looks at a palm tree, for example, she too sees only the relation between the size of the palm tree and her body (OCM I: 88/LO: 30). But her visual experience confusedly suggests that the palm tree’s relative size is its true, absolute, or non-relational size, as if her body were the one true unit of measurement for material things, inscribed into the nature of the universe. The senses, in effect, suggest that bigger than the perceiver’s body equals big simpliciter. As Malebranche writes,

Of course the idea that our bodies could be the universe’s measure is confused and narcissistic. But that’s the senses for you. They purport to provide more insight into the nature of reality than they really do.

Let me sum up: prelapsarian Adam’s experience of embodiment was illusion free. The postlapsarian experience of embodiment is not:

• (1) Causal Connection: Adam’s experience of embodiment accurately represented the ‘alliance’ and ‘natural correspondence of changes in the body with changes in the soul’ as the coordination of occasional causes; postlapsarian experience misrepresents this correspondence as the interaction of true or genuine causes (OCM XI: 121–122).
• (2) Material Connection: Adam’s experience accurately represented the self qua human being as partly material; postlapsarian experience misrepresents the self qua mind as material.
• (3) Perspectival Connection: Adam experienced his body as the standard relative to which external objects are represented, but he did not experience his body as an absolute standard. Postlapsarian experience misleadingly represents the body as an objective or absolute standard that provides insight into what material things are like independently of the body.[25]

By contrasting our postlapsarian experience to Adam’s, we can see more clearly the ways our experience falls short of the ideal—of ‘the model of a perfect man, such as our father was before the sin’—and the various errors our experience of embodiment contains (OCM XII: 103/JS: 65).

3.1. Survival

As Simmons (2008) shows, part of the story is biological. The senses were ‘given to us for the preservation of the body’ (OCM I: 76/LO: 23; see also OCM I: 99/LO: 36, OCM I: 376/LO: 195, OCM XII: 106/JS: 68, and OCM XI: 130). The feeling that a human body belongs to the perceiver contributes to the preservation of the body by making the perceiver care about her body (Simmons 2008: 92–93; see also OCM I: 127–128/LO: 51–52, OCM XII: 98/JS: 61, OCM XI: 104, and OCM XI: 130–131). But Simmons’s explanation is incomplete. Simmons does not distinguish the various dimensions in the experience of bodily ownership, and so she does not fully explain how these dimensions contribute to the biological function of the senses. So let me try to fill in some of these details.

First, a perceiver’s experience of being causally connected to her body tells her that she has control over her body, and, hence, that she can do something to preserve it. The experience of causal connection reminds her that ‘the movement of our feet and hands is subject to our will’, and that she is not merely a spectator to her body’s fate (OCM XI: 133).

Second, a perceiver’s experience of being materially connected to her body funnels her self-interest to her body, and, hence, makes her care about preserving it. As Simmons writes, ‘perceiving the destruction of a foot is one thing. I can take an interest or not. Perceiving the destruction of my foot or me, on the other hand, commands my concern’ (Simmons 2008, 92–93). That seems right as far as it goes. But we have not yet explained why a perceiver’s experience of her materiality fluctuates between representing the perceiver as a composite being with a bodily part, as identical to the body as a whole, or as an aspect, state, or part of the body. My proposal is that this fluctuation contributes to the preservation of the body because these different ways of experiencing one’s materiality allocate self-interest in slightly different ways, as the situation demands. ‘When we consider something as part of ourselves or ourselves as part of something else,’ Malebranche argues,

Thus, when the perceiver experiences her body as part but not the whole of herself, she will thereby experience her body as requiring some but not all of her concern, and her concern for the body will increase as the body ‘seems to be a greater part of the whole’. This partial identification is adequate for preserving the body when there is no immediate danger: the body still requires food and drink, but its preservation does not require her complete attention. When the perceiver experiences herself as wholly identical to the body, the preservation of her body will seem more urgent, and will monopolize her self-concern. Complete identification is helpful when the body as a whole is in grave danger, when the perceiver is being chased by a tiger, for example, or skirting the edge of a cliff. Finally, when the perceiver experiences herself as an aspect, state, or part of the body, her sense of self—and, hence, her self-interest—will be wholly focused on the relevant region of her body. Suppose, for example, that the perceiver has placed her hand on a hot burner. If she experienced herself as wholly in her hand at that moment, she would do everything she could to save it.

Third, a perceiver’s experience of being perspectivally connected to her body contributes to her bodily survival in so far as experiencing relations to the body is useful.[27] When a perceiver is running away from a tiger, she does not need to know the absolute or true sizes of things, but only whether her body will fit through a gap in the rocks. The tiger’s absolute location and motion are irrelevant to the perceiver’s ability to preserve herself: all she needs to know is where the tiger is located in relation to her, and how quickly the tiger is gaining on her. Similarly, when a perceiver bites into a rotten apple, all the perceiver needs to know is that the apple is bad for her body. Given that the perceiver’s experience of being perspectivally connected to her body just is an aspect of these sorts of body-relative experiences, we may vindicate the third dimension of bodily ownership by pointing towards the usefulness of being informed about these sorts of relations.

When we consider how well the senses—including the feelings of bodily ownership—fulfill their biological function, they look pretty good:

Still, even once we've granted that a tool—like the senses—is good relative to its proper function, there is a further question about whether it is good that someone be given a tool. Does a woodcutter need a whisk, or a child a knife? To complete his theodicy of embodiment, Malebranche needs to explain why it is good that human beings be equipped with senses at all. This further explanatory demand is difficult to meet, since the mind does not seem to require a tool for conserving the body, nor the body any help from the mind.[28]

As we saw above, Malebranche often describes the senses—and, particularly, the feelings of bodily ownership—as a corrupting influence on the mind, precisely because they make the mind overly focused on preserving its body. We are ‘blinded by the body’ into thinking ‘that its goods and evils are [our] own’ (OCM X: 190). The senses are an extremely effective tool that human minds end up using to harm themselves, like a beautifully sharp knife in a child’s hands, which hardly seems compatible with God’s benevolence.[29] Surprisingly, human bodies would also be better off without any help from the mind. Non-thinking animals, Malebranche argues, are better at preserving themselves than human beings are, because they do not have souls meddling with their bodies’ natural mechanisms:

God, then, is not doing human bodies any favors by entrusting them to the mind’s care. From the body’s perspective, it is good that human beings be equipped with senses, on the assumption that God has established the will as the occasional cause of the body’s movements, since otherwise ‘we would be very content to see [our body] destroyed’ (OCM I: 127–128/LO: 51–52). But we have not explained why God puts the human in charge of the body’s movements in the first place. Thus, the biological justification of the senses in general, and the feelings of bodily ownership in particular, is incomplete.[30]

3.2. Salvation

Malebranche has another explanation for why the experience of embodiment is good. He argues that God institutes the mind-body union so that human beings can follow Christ’s example, by sacrificing themselves:

The body provides human beings with a sacrificial victim by serving as the occasional cause for the soul’s sensations of pleasure and pain:

Suppose, for example, that someone is in the midst of prayer and meditation, when she catches a whiff of freshly baked apple pie. Her stomach growls. She feels temptation. And now she is faced with a choice: God or apple pie? She can walk away from the apple pie, or towards it; deprive herself of the pleasures of pie, or wallow in them; suffer the pangs of hunger while she continues praying, or satiate her appetite.[31] The choice is real because her will is established as the occasional cause of her body’s movements, and she can decide whether to join or separate herself from the objects that induce sensations of pleasure and pain (OCM XI: 133).[32] Her body provides her with the opportunity to prove herself, by choosing her relationship with God over apple pie and other bodily goods.[33]

The experience of bodily ownership raises the stakes for this choice. Because pleasure and pain are the natural marks of what is good and bad for the body, foregoing pleasure and suffering pain is typically bad for the body (OCM I: 72/LO: 20–21). The feelings of bodily ownership make us experience this violence to the body as violence to ourselves:

When we deprive ourselves of the pleasures of apple pie, we aren’t just missing out on pleasurable feelings. We experience this deprivation as harm to our bodily selves. For Malebranche, our experience of ownership is important not merely because of its biological utility, but also because it transforms the sacrifice of a body into something far more significant, namely, ‘a kind of sacrifice and annihilation of ourselves’ (OCM XII: 97/JS: 60).[34]