Merry Christmas to all! I got this absolute treasure for the bibliophile and the epistemophiliac that I unapologetically am. This is the lectures on Malebranche that Maurice Merleau-Ponty gave at the Ecole Normale Supérieure in Paris in 1947-1948. We are able to read this because a student kept his notes that are published here. This is special to me because Malebranche is my favorite philosopher/theologian. When I was reading Malebranche I was surprised about how his theory of the union of the body and the soul was breaking so clearly with the platonism of Descartes who drastically separates both and also how this union announces the phenomenology of flesh of Merleau-Ponty. I was enchanted to discover through this book that the reason why I could not dissociate the two authors is because the second studied extensively the first. I continue to believe that Malebranche is revolutionary because his research implies that the manifestation of the sacred is more of a matter of states than a matter of belief. Which raises 3 questions still 3 centuries later if the religious emotion is grounded on states: 1 in what order these states manifest themselves for the sacred to actualize it self? 2 do the believer and the secularist can have a full contact with the sacred ? 3 is what we call the phenomenon of revelation a modification of those states?
Merry philosophical Christmas dear Friends! ❤️
