The union between God and the soul in Malebranche's epistemology

a proposal for reinterpretation

Abstract

The purpose of this article is to discuss the Malebranche's epistemology, with the aim of suggesting an alternative interpretation to the way in which Pricladnitzky qualified the union of the soul with God, in an article entitled “The nature of ideas according to Nicolas Malebranche” published in this magazine in 2015 (v. 11, No. 2). Our hypothesis is that the writer's understanding that such union would be analogous to a parasitic relationship is plausible but does not fully contemplate the Malebranchian proposal. The concept of God operates as the primary cause that created the world for Its own glory and created human beings inclined to love It. Because of this, we believe that the figure of God would not be analogous to that of a host, but of a being who also enjoys an advantage with this union and makes this mutual advantage. To propose this discussion, we divided our text into four parts. In the first, we briefly report on Pricladnitzky's object and general argument in the article mentioned above. In the second part, in agreement with Pricladnitzky, efforts turned to indicate how this epistemic dependence is established, as well as under what assumptions. Then, we propose to investigate how this union also contributes to the glory of the author of nature. Finally, our aim was to discuss the implications of this theory of knowledge on the inclinations of the soul, to understand how this epistemology is at the service of the glory of God. With this discussion, we found that by qualifying the union of the soul with God as a relationship of mutuality, we make an illustration that suggests Malebranche's proposal more closely, although we recognize the need for a more specific approach to know what kind of mutualism would best illustrate this union.