‘Vision in God’ and ‘Vision by God’; Two Approaches in the Epistemological System of Malebranche and Mulla Sadra

Although Mulla Sadra believed in sensory, imaginary, and intellectual perceptions, he sought true knowledge within a framework beyond the senses, intellect, and the material world and considered it to be the result of divine enlightenment and exaltation, as well as the promotion of the soul to the world of meaning, and in other words, the knowledge of God. At the same time, in the West, with the advent of Descartes (1650) and his philosophical tradition, epistemology received more attention, which was the result of the emergence of the age of skepticism, which itself was the outcome of the emergence of modern science and the rejection of Aristotelian tradition. Among the Cartesians, Malebranche (1715) proposed a new theory in the field of epistemology, calling it the ‘vision of God’. This theory was quite different from the epistemological views of others such as Descartes and his followers. According to Malebranche, knowledge depended on God and His will. Also, in the works of Mulla Sadra and Malebranche, the truth of perception is interpreted as a kind of representation. This means that we cannot perceive objects directly, but we perceive them through intermediaries. However, the main question of the present article is how to obtain true knowledge and how to acquire it in the philosophy of Mulla Sadra and Malebranche, which is based on the will of God? On the other hand, what are the similarities and possible contradictions between the theory of vision in God in the philosophy of Malebranche and the theory of acquiring knowledge through the enlightenment of God in Mulla Sadra? The author of the present study interprets the latter as ‘vision by God’. In this article, the author tries to answer the mentioned questions in this field by the analytical and descriptive methods based on library research. By proposing the theory of ‘vision in God’, Malebranche believes that to understand the facts, one must observe them in God. According to him, man first perceives the ideas of things and then through them, and by union with God, he realizes the truths. Mulla Sadra also considers true knowledge to be based on the divine will and human psychic intuition through connection with the spiritual world, which the author interprets as ‘vision by God’. Mulla Sadra, by referring all sciences to knowledge by the presence on the one hand and the possibility of true knowledge through psychic intuition, on the other hand, considers knowledge to be based on divine forgiveness.  From the similarity of the two, it can be pointed out that their epistemological theory is based on the results of their ontological view based on occasionalism and the unity of existence, which in the later stages leads to the theory of representation of perception. From the opposition of the two views, it can be noted that Malebranche considers his theory as a philosophical matter and explains it within the framework of his philosophical system. But Mulla Sadra considers his view to be transcendent and in the highest mystical degrees, that man attains by connecting with the spiritual world.