Sommes-nous tous des lycanthropes? Imagination, folie et vision en dieu dans De la recherche de la vérité de Malebranche

Abstract

De la recherche de la verite. Arnauld’s description, often repeated, of the vision of God as the ramblings of a visionary is most often viewed as a term that backfires on Malebranche himself coming from his criticism of the errors of the imagination in the second book of The Search after Truth. To defend him, the follower of Malebranche then no longer has any other choice than to widen the gap between knowledge and the effects from the fact that, since the Fall, the union of the soul with God has turned into a dependence of the soul upon the body. This article suggests that, on the contrary, an authentically Malebranchian meaning can be given to Arnauld’s criticism by articulating rather than dissociating Malebranche’s denunciation of the imagination’s perversion and his adversaries’ criticism of the foundations of his theory of knowledge. What results is both clarifying and edifying: if more or less in every man we find a lycanthrope, that is to say, a man that takes the visions of his imaginations for reality, it is precisely because ever since original sin, a pure vision of God has become practically impossible. Reestablishing the lost connection between Books II and III of The Search after Truth thus, in the same movement, restores the anthropological foundations of Malebranche’s philosophy.