Abstract

A.A. Mosleh & S.R. Musavi Moghaddam According to Descarte, man is an autonomous being whose essence is thought. God is also taken as “pure thought” which plays an epistemological role in his philosophy. God is merely a creature and a guarantee for the continuity of nature’s mechanical rules. In other words, He is the same as the nature and rules. Man, in this mechanical world, is merely a machine possessing, unlike other creatures, a soul but yet alongside other things is only a creature of God. God has created man and left him to himself. Like the stable rules of the world, man is simply a rule of this natural aimless world. On the basis of Tabatabaei’s perspective, Cartesian man is an abrogated one which is alienated from his identity. One of the important issues concerning anthropology in the west, particularly in modern age, is the discussion about the essence of man and its relation to God as the origin of the world and the absolute reality. The main theme of this research is to examine the relation of man to God according to Descartes’ philosophy and then to criticize it in line with Tabatabai’s viewpoint..