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DESCARTES,SPINOZA,ANDTHEIMPASSEOF
FRENCHPHILOSOPHY:FERDINANDALQUI
VERSUSMARTIALGUEROULT
KNOXPEDEN

ModernIntellectualHistory/Volume8/Issue02/August2011,pp361390
DOI:10.1017/S1479244311000229,Publishedonline:28July2011

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Modern Intellectual History, 8, 2 (2011), pp. 361390 
C Cambridge University Press 2011
doi:10.1017/S1479244311000229

descartes, spinoza, and the

impasse of french philosophy:
ferdinand alquie versus
martial gueroult
knox peden
Centre for the History of European Discourses, University of Queensland
Email: k.peden@uq.edu.au

This article presents a decades-long conflict in the upper echelons of postwar French
academic philosophy between the self-identifying Cartesian Ferdinand Alquie,
professor at the Sorbonne, and the Spinozist Martial Gueroult of the College de
France. Tracking the development of this rivalry serves to illuminate the historical
drama that occurred in France as phenomenology was integrated into the Cartesian
tradition and resisted by a commitment to rationalism grounded in a specifically
French understanding of Spinozism. Over the course of Alquie and Gueroults polemic,
however, we nevertheless witness a shared concern to preserve philosophy from the
reductive tendencies of historicism and its possible assimilation to theology. What is
more, the ultimate impasse of this conflict continues to inform the most innovative
projects in French thought in the wake of structuralism and the theological turn of
French phenomenology.

It is a lasting testament to Michel Foucaults talent for historical schematics

that one of the most helpful frameworks for assessing twentieth-century French
philosophy comes from one of the central practitioners of the field. In his essay
Life: Experience and Science, Foucault observed that the theoretical efforts of
his generation had been conditioned by a rift at the center of the preceding one.1

In addition to Tony La Vopa and MIHs anonymous reviewers, each of whom provided
responses crucial to this articles improvement, I would also like to thank the following
readers for their reactions to this piece in various stages of its composition: Leslie Barnes,
David Bates, Ray Brassier, Nathan Brown, Carla Hesse, Martin Jay, and Ben Wurgaft. I
remain grateful to Peter Hallward for the invitation to present the earliest version of these
arguments to an audience at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy,
then at Middlesex, now at Kingston University, UK. Sam Moyn deserves a special word of
thanks for his persistent encouragement. Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my
own.
1
M. Foucault, Life: Experience and Science, in idem, Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology,
ed. J. D. Faubion, trans. R. Hurley (New York, 1998), 46578.

361
362 knox peden

In Foucaults view, the arrival of phenomenology in France led to a split between

a philosophy of experience, of meaning, of the subject, and a philosophy of
knowledge, of rationality, and of the concept.2 In the first camp stood the giants
Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The latter was home to lesser-
known, more exclusively academic thinkers, including Georges Canguilhem,
as well as Gaston Bachelard, Jean Cavailles, and Alexandre Koyre. To be sure,
Foucault noted the deeper roots of this division in the nineteenth century, in the
discordant relation between Henri Bergson and Henri Poincare, for example.3 But
the fact remained that the introduction of phenomenology in the French context
was a seismic event, and that its impact triggered a renewed consideration of the
scope and function of philosophy. Despite the familiar oppositions that structured
the fieldMarxist or non-Marxist, Freudian or non-Freudian, academic or non-
academicit was the fractured concept of philosophy itself that served as the
crucial site of contestation within postwar French thought.
In a sense, Foucaults rubric is more of a heuristic than a historical thesis,
one reflective of his own theoretical itinerary, which sought to bring the insights
of a philosophy of the concept to bear on the problematics of experience and
subjectivity. In this respect, it is striking that Alain Badiou has recently proffered
a similar framework that nevertheless omits reference to phenomenology and
locates the central fracture of twentieth-century French philosophy in the stand-
off between a vitalist mysticism descending from Bergson and a mathematizing
idealism grounded in Leon Brunschvicgs efforts.4 Badiou situates himself
in the latter category, along with Cavailles, Albert Lautman, Jean-Toussaint
Desanti, Louis Althusser, and Jacques Lacan; he places Gilles Deleuze and Gilbert
Simondon, as well as Canguilhem and Foucault, in the former. If it is clear
that there is no strict alignment of Badious categories and Foucaultsagain,
Badious choices are reflective of his own theoretical agenda, which seeks to
make an unabashed mathematizing idealism immune to vitalist impulses the
foundation for a twenty-first-century materialismthen it is equally clear that
the notion of a fundamental discrepancy in the concept of philosophy has served,
and continues to serve, as a powerful mechanism for French thinkers efforts to
situate their projects within their own national intellectual history.
Indeed, if Foucault considered the concern for what constitutes philosophy
per se to be a surreptitious influence throughout the 1960s and 1970s, then

2
Ibid., 466.
3
This acknowledgment is the main substantive difference between this essay, finalized in
1984, and its original version, first published in 1978. Cf. M. Foucault, Introduction,
in Georges Canguilhem, The Normal and the Pathological, trans. C. R. Fawcett in
collaboration with R. S. Cohen (New York, 1989), 724.
4
A. Badiou, Logics of Worlds, trans. A. Toscano (London, 2009), 78.
 descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy 363

this concern has become increasingly overt in the last two decades. Deleuzes
final major work before his death in 1995 was a valediction titled What Is
Philosophy?.5 As for Badiou, the publication of his magnum opus Being and
Event in 1988 was accompanied by a shorter tract titled Manifesto for Philosophy.
The publication of Being and Events sequel Logics of Worlds in 2006 was
followed by its own companion volume, titled accordingly Second Manifesto for
Philosophy.6 If, despite Badious efforts to tar Deleuze with a vitalist brush that
makes him complicit with various phenomenologies of life,7 the two philosophers
might still be considered together as thinkers hostile to many of the tropes of
phenomenology and its theological turn,8 then what is equally striking is to
see thinkers in this latter trajectory likewise reaffirming the power and place
of philosophy in French intellectual life. Michel Henry and Jean-Luc Marion,
arguably the preeminent living French phenomenologist, are cases in point. In
1989, Marion wrote, In an essential way, phenomenology assumes in our century
the very role of philosophy.9 In his 1990 volume Material Phenomenology, a book
which plays a role in Henrys oeuvre analogous to What Is Philosophy? for Deleuze,
Henry is even more emphatic:

With the collapse of the Parisian fashions of the last decades, and most notably
structuralism, which represented its most widespread form because it was the most
superficial, and with the return of the human sciences (which sought to replace philosophy
but only offered an external viewpoint on the human being) to their proper place,
phenomenology increasingly seems to be the principal movement of the thought of
our times. The return of Husserl is the return of the capacity for intelligibility, which
is due to the invention of a method and, first of all, a question in which the essence of
philosophy can be rediscovered.10

Henry specifies that experience itself is and always has been the goal and the
ultimate arbiter of philosophy, the essential stuff of Husserls rediscovery: The
phenomenological substance that material phenomenology has in its view is
the pathetic [pathetique] immediacy in which life experiences itself. Life is itself

5
G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, What Is Philosophy?, trans. H. Tomlinson and G. Burchell
(New York, 1994).
6
A. Badiou, Being and Event, trans. O. Feltham (London, 2005); idem, Manifesto for
Philosophy, trans. N. Madarasz (Albany, NY, 1999); idem, Second Manifesto for Philosophy,
trans. L. Burchill (Cambridge, 2011).
7
Cf. A. Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. L. Burchill (Minneapolis, 2000).
8
D. Janicaud, La phenomenologie dans tous ses etats (Paris, 2009).
9
J.-L. Marion, Reduction and Givenness: Investigations of Husserl, Heidegger, and
Phenomenology, trans. T. A. Carlson (Evanston, IL, 1998), 1.
10
M. Henry, Material Phenomenology, trans. S. Davidson (New York, 2008), 1.
364 knox peden

nothing other than this pathetic embrace and, in this way, is phenomenality
itself.11
Let us contrast Henrys claims with the Definition of Philosophy Badiou
published in 1992:
Philosophy is never an interpretation of experience. It is the act of Truth in regard to
truths. And this act, which, according to the law of the world, is unproductive (it does not
even produce one truth), places a subject without object, open solely to the truths that
pass in its seizing.
Let us call religion everything which supposes a continuity between truths and the
circulation of meaning [sens]. Philosophy, then, against all hermeneutics, that is, against
the religious law of meaning, sets out compossible truths on the basis of the void. It thereby
subtracts thought from all presupposition of a Presence.12

Where for Henry the signal virtue of phenomenology is its capacity to articulate
an experience (a moment and site of auto-affectivity anterior to all objectification)
that itself provides the ground of sense and meaning, for Badiou the task
of philosophy is precisely to take leave of experience and indeed meaning
in a rationalist program capable of registering the truths produced in the
heterogeneous domains of science, art, politics, and love. For Henry, the essence
of manifestation as such is thoroughly qualitative; for Badiou, the ontology on
offer is thoroughly subtractive, in that it aims to articulate Being as that
which in itself is devoid of all qualities, an inconsistent multiplicity that only
acquires consistency and thus meaning through an operation from without.
The opposition between phenomenology and rationalism in the respective
projects of Henry and Badiou could not be more stark.
The task of the current article is not, however, to provide a fuller exposition
of these projects, nor is it to parse the inconsistencies of Foucault, Badiou, and
Henrys various categorizations. Rather, the aim is to break through the gauze
of these countervailing heuristics in order to show how they were historically
conditioned by a long-standing opposition at the heart of French philosophy that
was codified in a specific conflict between two institutional dons of the postwar
era: Ferdinand Alquie of the Sorbonne and Martial Gueroult of the College de
France. The (re)turn of philosophy itself,13 to borrow a title from another of
Badious missives, is in fact not a return at all. For all throughout structuralisms
rise and fall, and persisting through phenomenologys theological turn, Alquie
and Gueroults disagreement over the proper method for writing the history

11
Ibid., 3. Pathetic should be understood in the generic sense of pathos, or feeling.
12
A. Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy, trans. J. Clemens and O.
Feltham (London, 2005), 125, translation modified; idem, Conditions (Paris, 1992), 80.
13
Badiou, Conditions, 5778.
 descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy 365

of philosophy, a dispute which became concentrated in the face-off between

Alquies Cartesianism and Gueroults Spinozism, fundamentally set the terms
for the fracture which all of these thinkers, despite the variety of their slogans,
agree lay at the heart of French philosophy: that between a philosophy which
emphasizes the limits of rational thought to the profit of a more primordial,
ineffable experience or intuition, and a philosophy which insists upon the capacity
of rationalism to transgress the limits of lived experience to articulate conceptual
insights of a universal or indeed absolute variety. The thirty-year polemic between
Alquie and Gueroult concerning the philosophies of Descartes and Spinoza is
historically significant insofar as it served at once as a specific manifestation of
this conflict in French philosophy, and also as an influence on its development due
to the pedagogical impact of the two scholars on the institutional trajectories of
phenomenology and a formalist or structuralist rationalism in France. Cloistered
academics that they were, their modality of intellectual labor was decidedly
abstract, if not arcane. And yet they were key instructors for many of the most
viable export commodities of recent French philosophy, including many of the
thinkers named thus far.
Before moving into the particulars, some further introductions are in order.
Ferdinand Alquie (190685) once conceded to his auditors at the Sorbonne that he
was a Cartesian, as everyone knows, and that perhaps this affiliation accounted
for the sheer incomprehensibility of Spinozas philosophy in his eyes.14 Born in
Carcassonne, Alquie received a classical philosophical education in interwar Paris.
But he was also close to the Surrealist movement at this time, and good friends
with both Andre Breton and Jacques Lacan.15 With the publication of his book
La decouverte metaphysique de lhomme chez Descartes in 1950, Alquie established
himself as the author of a potent new reading of Descartes that went against
the grain of the Heideggerian critique of the cogito then gaining prominence
in France. Alquie emphasized separation and absence as the essential contents
of Descartess metaphysical discovery of man. This argument complemented
those of Alquies other works of the period, Le desir de leternite (1943) and
La nostalgie de letre (1950), books whose titles give some sense of Alquies
philosophical program, his investment in Descartes, and his affinity with French
phenomenology.
Alquies central position at the Sorbonne from 1952 until his death in 1985
meant that he influenced scores of French thinkers. His work in the history of
philosophy, and specifically on Descartes, deeply resonated with the recuperation
of Cartesianism within phenomenological philosophy that was inspired by

14
F. Alquie, Lecons sur Spinoza (Paris, 2003), 207.
15
J. Guitton, Notice sur la vie et les travaux de Ferdinand Alquie (Paris, 1989); F. Alquie,
Cahiers de jeunesse, ed. P. Plouvier (Lausanne, 2003).
366 knox peden

Husserls own late turn to Descartes and the efforts of numerous French
thinkers to reinvigorate the phenomenological project in the wake of Heideggers
destruction of metaphysics. Indeed, the similarity between Alquies reading
of Descartes, with its relentless emphasis on metaphysical separation, and that
offered by Levinas in Totality and Infinity a decade later is striking; Levinas
acknowledged this proximity with his contribution to a Festschrift for Alquie
published in 1983.16 Roughly Alquies contemporary, Levinas never knew Alquie
as an instructor, whereas Henry and Marion, by contrast, numbered among the
latters most faithful students. The reading of Descartes pursued in Marions
trilogy of the 1970s and 1980s has Alquies teaching as its essential precondition.17
Marion dedicated the first volume to Alquie and the French Heideggerian, Jean
Beaufret; in the preface to Sur la theologie blanche de Descartes, the trilogys
centerpiece, Marion identified Alquies lessons on the creation of the eternal
truths in Descartess philosophythe guiding theme of Marions study, and
in many respects a blueprint for his later phenomenological concernsas his
primary source of inspiration. Where Levinass Descartes prefigures Marions in
several important ways, it is nonetheless Alquie who was signally responsible for
producing a comprehensive reading of Descartes in the French context that at
once decoupled him from rationalism and salvaged his project from Heideggers
critique. Finally, beyond the phenomenological domain, Lacans reconsideration
of the Cartesian subject as the subject of the unconscious riven by an irremediable
ontological fracture also bears a patent debt to Alquies efforts.18
Unlike Alquie, Martial Gueroult (18911976) took a distance from the
currents of spiritualism at the Sorbonne that provided such fertile ground for
phenomenologys reception there. Esteemed for his comprehensive readings of
Fichte and Mamon,19 Gueroult was elected to the College de France in 1951,
occupying a chair in the history and technology of philosophical systems.
Gueroults lessons provided structuralism with a classically philosophical
imprimatur by producing readings of the giants of early modern philosophy
driven by an avowed geneticism and hostility to biographical, psychological,
or indeed historical elements as factors in his synchronic analyses.20 As a lecturer

16
E. Levinas, Sur lidee de linfini en nous, in J.-L. Marion, ed., La passion de la raison:
Hommage a Ferdinand Alquie (Paris, 1983), 4952.
17
J.-L. Marion, Sur lontologie grise de Descartes (Paris, 1975); idem, Sur la theologie blanche
de Descartes (Paris, 1981); idem, Sur le prisme metaphysique de Descartes (Paris, 1986).
18
J. Lacan, Ecrits, trans. B. Fink, with H. Fink and R. Grigg (New York, 2006), esp. 671702,
72645.
19
M. Gueroult, La philosophie transcendantale de Salomon Mamon (Paris, 1929); idem,
Levolution et la structure de la doctrine de la science chez Fichte (Paris, 1930).
20
F. Dosse, History of Structuralism: The Rising Sign, 19451966, trans. D. Glassman
(Minneapolis, 1997), 7884.
 descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy 367

at the College de France, Gueroult had no official students of his own, and
thus his influence was more inchoate than Alquies. Philosophers equally shaped
by French epistemology, such as Gilles-Gaston Granger and Jules Vuillemin,
were nevertheless unambiguous in citing their debts to Gueroult, as well as the
resonance of his methodology with the philosophy of science first put forward by
Jean Cavailles.21 Moreover, despite his investments in analytic philosophy, Jacques
Bouveresse ought perhaps to be read as the most prominent living inheritor of
Gueroults rationalism in the French context.
And yet, Gueroults impact transcended its confines, decisively inflecting the
development of structuralism at the Ecole normale superieure, an institution as
hostile to the spiritualism of the Sorbonne as the College de France had become.
Gueroults methodology found significant support among the students of Louis
Althusser, and in particular the editors of the Cahiers pour lAnalyse (19669).22
One of Gueroults essays was reprinted in the journal, and his method was cited as
a fundamental inspiration.23 Reflecting on this enterprise, which was emblematic
of the moment of high structuralism in France, Alain Grosrichard has remarked
that he and his fellow editors made assiduous use of Gueroults Descartes
selon lordre de raisons (1953), as did Lacan.24 The normaliens responsible for the
journal, in which texts from Derrida and Foucault appeared alongside analyses of
Frege and texts of Godel and Cantor, shared with Lacan and Althusser a notable
disdain for phenomenology and substantialist accounts of subjectivity. Badiou
was a driving force in this venture, and indeed the ontology of Being and Event
enacts a return to the formalism and rationalism of this period after Badious years

21
See their contributions to Hommage a Martial Gueroult: Lhistoire de la philosophie,
ses problemes, ses methodes (Paris, 1964), 4358, 13954. For more biographical data on
Gueroult, see J. Stoetzel, Notice sur la vie et les travaux de M. Gueroult (18911976) (Paris,
1976). On Gueroult and Cavailles, see G.-G. Granger, Jean Cavailles et lhistoire, Revue
dhistoire des sciences 49/4 (1996), 572. The point of departure for any engagement with
Gueroults voluminous output is C. Giolito, Histoires de la philosophie avec Martial Gueroult
(Paris, 1999).
22
This journal is available in full, with a comprehensive annotative apparatus, at Concept
and Form: The Cahiers pour lAnalyse and Contemporary French Thought, hosted at
http://cahiers.kingston.ac.uk. Note as well Althussers comment on Gueroults popularity
among his students in The Future Lasts Forever, trans. R. Veasey (New York, 1993),
182.
23
M. Gueroult, Nature humaine et etat de nature chez Rousseau, Kant, et Fichte, Cahiers
pour lAnalyse 6 (1967). See the avertissement, Politique de la lecture, and La pensee du
prince (Descartes et Machiavel), both authored by F. Regnault, in this same volume.
24
Interview with Alain Grosrichard, available at http://cahiers.kingston.ac.uk/interviews/
grosrichard.html.
368 knox peden

producing Maoist tracts and his lingering commitment to dialectical philosophy

in his 1984 volume Theory of the Subject.25
With Lacan, the stand-off between Alquie and Gueroult thus appears quite
porous. Indeed, Lacan occupied a peculiar, mediate position between Gueroult
and Alquie, affirming the fractured nature of the subject in line with the latters
teaching, but taking to the formal, nearly logicist methods of the former. More
striking still, however, is the case of Deleuze, who was a student at the Sorbonne
and produced his doctoral thesis on Spinoza under Alquies direction.26 And
yet, concurrent with the publication of this thesis, Deleuze produced a glowing
review of the first volume of Gueroults meticulous reading of the Ethics,27 itself a
result of his courses delivered at the College de France at the time that Deleuzes
own work on Spinoza was under way. Deleuze seemed to endorse Gueroults
thesis concerning an absolute rationalism in which thoughts full adequation
to being was presented not only as a distinct possibility, but also as a philosophical
necessity.28
Deleuzes endorsement of Gueroults position squares awkwardly with his
admission, in his public defense of his doctoral works, that his idea of philosophy
as a specific practice that ruptures with other modes of understanding was a result
of Alquies influence.29 But this tension we find between Alquie and Gueroults
respective positions in the singular cases of Deleuze and Lacan does not render the
conflict between Alquie and Gueroult inoperative or historically moot. Rather,
it suggests that, beyond the institutional discord between phenomenology and
structuralism it portends, this conflict was itself integral to some of the most
innovative projects in recent French thought. Moreover, it is important to
note that phenomenology and structuralism were positions to which Alquie
and Gueroult were assimilatedby celebrants and detractors alikerather than
labels the scholars readily donned themselves. What this suggests in turn is
that these thoroughly modern categories were by and large grafted onto long-
standing philosophical traditions in the French context, or at the very least
that phenomenology and structuralism were each viewed through a prism
constituted by the key figures in the history of philosophy whose texts provided
the cornerstone of a French philosophical education. In this respect, the history
of philosophy as an academic field ought to take its place alongside the various
other disciplines that form the terrain of recent French intellectual history, from

25
A. Badiou, Theory of the Subject, trans. B. Bosteels (London, 2009).
26
G. Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York, 1992).
27
M. Gueroult, Spinoza 1: Dieu (Paris, 1968).
28
G. Deleuze, Spinoza et la methode generale de M. Gueroult, in idem, Lle deserte: Textes
et entretiens 19531974, ed. D. Lapoujade (Paris, 2002), 20216.
29
G. Deleuze, La Methode de dramatization, in ibid., 149.
 descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy 369

anthropology to psychoanalysis. Clarifying the stakes and development of the

conflict between Alquie and Gueroult might thus provide us with a better
purchase on the tension evident in recent French thought tout court, namely
that between a rigorous commitment to philosophical rationalism that leaves no
conceptual stone unturned (Gueroults legacy) and a nevertheless coexisting sense
of fracture, incompleteness, and ineffability that characterizes the post-Kantian,
or indeed post-Cartesian, subject of the modern age (a position distilled and
maintained in Alquies works).
What follows traces the development of Gueroult and Alquies polemic from
the formers appointment to the College in 1951, which saw a sequence of lessons
on Descartes targeting Alquies reading, to the publication of the latters Le
rationalisme de Spinoza in 1981, a book designed to make evident the flaws in
Gueroults multivolume study of Spinoza cut short by its authors death in 1976.
Subtending this dispute, however, is a shared concern to define the specificity
of philosophy, a concern which has a historical development of its own. In the
early stages of their disagreement, Gueroult and Alquie are both intent to preserve
philosophys universal remit from the corrosive effects of historicism, understood
as any attempt to reduce a philosophical position to its contextual trappings. In
the latter stages, the primary aim is to produce a concept of philosophy that is
distinct from, and inimical to, theology. Here Spinoza serves as the medium for
their countervailing charges of theology and occultism. With the trajectory and
results of Gueroult and Alquies decades-long quarrel established, and its parallels
with the development of French structuralism and phenomenology manifested,
we will conclude by considering the historical sense of the impasse of their dispute
for French philosophy today.

descartes and the challenge of historicism

Gueroult concluded his inaugural lesson at the College de France with a call
to vanquish historicism.30 In the preceding hour, he had taken numerous
philosophers to taskfrom his institutional predecessors Henri Bergson and
Etienne Gilson to the German thinkers Wilhelm Dilthey and Martin Heidegger
for their tendency to illuminate the sense of a given philosophy through recourse
to elements beyond the philosophical text itself. In Gueroults view, the main
virtue of philosophy as a practice, evidenced time and again in the textual record
of its history, was its ability to check opinion and mere appearance; that is,
that which gives itself as real without being able to prove itself as such.31

30
M. Gueroult, Lecon inaugurale, faite le 4 decembre 1951, College de France, chaire dhistoire
et de technologie des systemes philosophiques (Nogent-le-rotrou, 1952), 34.
31
Ibid., 33.
370 knox peden

For Gueroult, irrefutable demonstration was the key element of a philosophical

work:

The rationality that grounds any philosophywhether that philosophy is rational or not
. . . has a constitutive function: since the philosophy is not already finished before it is
developed, only existing after its completion despite numerous obstacles . . . a double end
in one is thus realized: the construction a monument, the demonstration of a truth.32

Truths were plural in history; they were singular and eternal in a given
philosophical system. Accordingly, the historian of philosophy was to be
skeptical as a historian, but dogmatic as a philosopher.33
Gueroults antipathy to historicism drew from his belief that the scholars
conception of philosophy and its history must not be established prior to an
engagement with anterior philosophical systems, each of which must be granted
its autonomy as a specific philosophical reality. In this view, the problem with
historicist modes of study was that they were not historical enough, making
philosophys history subservient to the perspective of the philosophical present.
This charge was more fully fleshed out in the Dianoematique (the study of
doctrines), Gueroults multivolume manifesto, which, though only published
posthumously, provided much of the substance of his inaugural lesson.34 In the
Dianoematique, Gueroult sought to produce a radical idealism that would be
nothing less than the reversal of Hegelianism.35 Where Hegel had made his
subjective apprehension of philosophys history serve as the very basis for his
account, Gueroult wanted to effect an inversion, thus making the reality of
philosophys history the foundation for our systematic assessment of it. This
method would dictate a militant fidelity to the letter of philosophical texts,
and a practice of reading devoid of hermeneutic intentions. For Gueroult, a
philosophical system was not a representation of a truth or reality extrinsic to
that system; thus a hermeneutic approach would not only be of no avail, it would
also be disastrously misleading. Because a philosophical system could only be
judged on its own terms, it could not be held accountable to some deeper truth
of which that system was but one aspect. Gueroult contrasted his position with
Husserls in similar terms, arguing for an efflorescent pluralism against a reductive
essentialism whose criteria were located more in the vagaries of a contingent
encounter than in the fixed integrity of the philosophical text. Especially when

32
Ibid., 223.
33
Ibid., 1617.
34
M. Gueroult, Dianoematique, Livre I: Histoire de lhistoire de la philosophie, 3 vols. (Paris,
19848); idem, Dianoematique, Livre II: Philosophie de lhistoire de la philosophie (Paris,
1979).
35
Gueroult, Dianoematique, Livre II, 224.
 descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy 371

applied to philosophical texts, the phenomenological concept of intentionality

was nothing more than a mysterious deus ex machina,36 forsaking analysis and
conferring legitimacy upon what might well be the result of a purely contingent
encounter between a given consciousness and its intended object.
In contrast to all of these projects, from Husserlian phenomenology to
Bergsonian subjectivism,37 Gueroult presents his own project as the essence
of rational philosophy. Rational philosophy is to be a flight from the gratuitous
in the systematic construction of the work; by extension, the history of philosophy
should be approached in the same way, treating the various monuments of the
field in a way akin to the objects that compel the concern of the art historian
appreciative of the singularity of each work.38
Descartes was the first monument considered after Gueroults appointment
to the College. This decision was not entirely contingent. Eleven months before
his inaugural lesson, Gueroult had sent a letter to Alquie to share his thoughts
on the latters recently published study. In this work, Alquie argued that, in
the discovery of the cogito following the experience of radical doubt, Descartes
articulated a universal concept of the human as predicated upon a conscientious
fortitude in the face of radical absence, an absence of certainty or confidence
in the surrounding, existent world.39 Voicing his displeasure with this reading,
Gueroult pleaded with Alquie to abandon this novelistic philosophy in which
the philosophers of the past serve as mouthpieces for ones own philosophical
convictions. He implored Alquie to make a decision, either for pure philosophy
where you express yourself directly, or the history of philosophy, where you
will merely serve the thought of a genius, rather than enlisting him, willy-nilly,
to your own service.40 In 1953, Gueroult published the results of his courses:
Descartes selon lordre des raisons. The title drew its authority from Descartess
injunction to be read in such terms; its polemical force lay in its riposte to Alquies
interpretation. In the opening pages, Gueroult cited Alquies statement we do
not believe there is a system in Descartes, only to follow with the rejoinder:
Descartes thought otherwise.41
As Alquie was fifteen years younger than Gueroult, there must have been
something both harrowing and flattering in being taken to task by such an
authority. In a review of Gueroults study, Alquie conceded the brilliance of
its exquisite reconstruction of Descartess philosophy according to the order

36
Ibid., 178.
37
Ibid., 59, 68; Gueroult, Lecon inaugurale, 1829.
38
Gueroult, Lecon inaugurale, 302.
39
F. Alquie, La decouverte metaphysique de lhomme chez Descartes (Paris, 1950), VVII.
40
Cited in Giolito, Histoires de la philosophie, 112 n. 22.
41
M. Gueroult, Descartes selon lordre des raisons, 2nd edn (Paris, 1968), 19 n. 12.
372 knox peden

of reasons, but he maintained that the truth Gueroult sought to articulate

was merely scientific. As a result, the Descartes presented therein was not
satisfying.42 In striking contrast, Alquies book had argued that the eternal
value of Descartess philosophy, and the source of its satisfaction for anyone
who encountered it, was the lesson in ontological experience dramatized in the
Meditations, namely mans ability to move beyond the world of objects, gaining
closer proximity, not to say convergence, with Being itself. In general, for Alquie,
system was a term foreign to true philosophical experience. Access to the eternal
required an ontological demarche.43 Along these lines, in his short book Quest-
ce que comprendre un philosophe?, the result of a lecture conceived as a response
to Gueroults inaugural lesson, Alquie argued that one is not born a philosopher,
but becomes one as a reaction against non-philosophical thought and the lack of
satisfaction to be found there.44 Philosophy is defined as this demarche45 that
moves one toward philosophys essential discovery of a subjective universality.46
Philosophers, Alquie argues, by showing that the world does not contain its
own conditions, go toward a Being which is not a world.47 More emphatically,
nothing disorients us more than philosophy precisely because it takes us out
of the world to something that is not a world.48 Alquie contrasts his position
with Gueroults, arguing that the constitution of a system has never been the goal
of philosophy. Just as the knights of the Middle Ages did not know they were
living in the Middle Ages, Descartes did not know that he was Cartesian. In
effect, Alquie writes, Descartes did not want to establish a system that would
be Descartess system; he wanted to find the truth, which is totally different, and
he sought this truth with complete sincerity.49
In a move that drives to the heart of Gueroults project, Alquie casts
Gueroults method in the same league as those methodologiespsychological
or historicistthat Gueroult so distrusts. According to Alquie, what all of these
methodologies have in common is that they make an object out of philosophical
truth.50 True, the philosopher must express himself in some way, and this he
usually does according to the norms and procedures of the epoch. For the
system is always the interpretation of evidence in the name of that which is not

42
F. Alquie, Notes sur linterpretation de Descartes par lordre des raisons, in idem, Etudes
cartesiennes (Paris, 1982), 1530.
43
Giolito, Histoires de la philosophie, 117.
44
F. Alquie, Quest-ce que comprendre un philosophe? (Paris, 2005; first published 1956), 76.
45
Ibid., 8990.
46
Ibid., 26.
47
Ibid., 87.
48
Ibid., 878.
49
Ibid., 50.
50
Ibid., 52. See also F. Alquie, Signification de la philosophie (Paris, 1971), 2413.
 descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy 373

obvious [evident]. But Alquie sees in this systematization the greatest risk for
the author to express, despite himself, his time and the errors of his time.51
The notion that the philosophers errors, whatever they may be, conceal some
deeper immutable truth is central to Alquies conception of philosophy. This
conviction was given its clearest expression in La nostalgie de letre, where it was
argued that an eternal relation exists between our consciousness and Being.52
Against Hegelianism, and historicism more generally, in which Alquie saw a
lack of respect for the impassible totality of each man, Alquie claimed, like
Gueroult, that philosophies exist in history to be accepted or refused but never
to be exceeded [depasse].53 In each true philosophical gesture, however, Alquie
detected a profound nostalgia for Being.

The certainty of Being is thus, above all, certainty of its absence: as such, it is inseparable
from the desire to rediscover it, because, as it is not objective knowledge, it can only be
manifested in the feeling of our separation, which is itself born from our inclination not to
be separated. In this sense, every consciousness is nostalgia for Being, an indissoluble union
of certitude and will, and it is no easy task to distinguish in philosophers what responds
to the will and what expresses the certitude, ontological construction and metaphysical
critique.54

Even if it is no easy task, Alquie will present as heroes those who can withstand
the painful sense of separation, responding to this fact rather than to the desire
to suture some lost wholeness.55 Indeed, the nostalgia for Being is at the origin
both of critical philosophies, which describe it with exactitude and accept it with
courage, and ontologies, which set out to soothe it.56
Throughout Alquies project one can detect echoes of Heideggers critique
of metaphysics insofar as conceptual thought is seen as grounded on a more
primordial experience of incompletion, be it as separation or thrownness.
And indeed Heidegger does make it into Alquies account, but more as a
derivative specimen of Kierkegaardian courage before the nostalgia for Being
than as a philosophical authority in his own right.57 In Jacques Derridas
recollection, Alquie thought himself a worthy rival to Heidegger, whom he

51
Alquie, Quest-ce que comprendre un philosophe?, 523.
52
F. Alquie, La nostalgie de letre (Paris, 1950), avant-propos.
53
Ibid., 3.
54
Ibid., 1213.
55
Cf. F. Alquie, Lecons sur Kant: La morale de Kant (Paris, 2005); idem, La solitude de la raison
(Paris, 1966).
56
Alquie, Nostalgie, 13.
57
Ibid., 9.
374 knox peden

believed had stolen his idea.58 But the fact remains that if there is a Heideggerian
quality to Alquies project, it is a strange Heideggerianism that posits Kant and
Descartes as exemplary figures and nevertheless develops a project of authenticity
grounded in radical absence. The demarche central to Alquies effort calls
upon an unconceptualizable ontological experience, which cannot be replaced
by anything that derives from it.59 Philosophy makes explicit a fundamental
experience, a non-conceptual presence of being to consciousness, common to the
philosopher and everyone. This universal presence is what makes philosophy
at once legitimate and necessary.60 Here Alquie aligns himself in the camp of
philosophers who, according to Gueroult, make the philosophical work derivative
of an ineffable experience, a trend that Gueroult associates with the excess of
subjectivism infecting Bergsonism and its phenomenological legacy in France.61
More important still, this demarche of Alquies own points to the fundamental
disagreement between his and Gueroults positions: the primacy of subjective
experience or conceptual thought.62

confrontations
Nowhere was the dispute between the two scholars clearer than in the
confrontation that took place between them at the 1955 colloquium on
Descartes in Royaumont, an event largely inspired by their conflicting readings.
Alquie began the proceedings with a concession to Gueroults emphasis on
demonstration in Descartess philosophy, while nevertheless maintaining that
the demonstrative is important only in Cartesian science, which, as the domain
of the homogeneous, merely explains, whereas the heterogeneous realm of
metaphysicsthat is, Descartess philosophydiscovers and observes.63
Alquie suggests that, despite the myriad avenues by which Descartes can logically
lead us to a concept of God, what Descartes really wants to provoke is the
ontological experience of separation similar to his own.64 Gueroults response to
Alquie follows a similar rhetorical tack, ceding ground in its acknowledgment
of the ontological experience that inaugurates Descartess project. But he then
launches into an unforgiving offensive against Alquies position, centered above

58
D. Janicaud, Heidegger en France 2: Entretiens (Paris, 2005), 92. Alquies charge was
presumably facetious.
59
Alquie, Signification, 247. Emphasis added.
60
Alquie, Nostalgie, 148. Emphasis added.
61
Gueroult, Lecon inaugurale, 22.
62
Cf. F. Alquie, Lexperience (Paris, 1957).
63
Cahiers de Royaumont, no. 2: Descartes (Paris, 1957), 15.
64
Ibid., 13, 31.
 descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy 375

all on the issue with which Alquie closed his talk: the location of truth in
Descartes.65
Gueroult maintains that, for Descartes, the quest for certainty is essential and
what takes him above the plane of the simple lived. We can too easily be duped
by the multitude of intuitions present in experience. In a word, Gueroult
says, Descartes is absolutely hostile to a philosophy of gratuitousness, fearing
above all to be a victim of poetic intuition.66 From this opening gambit, the
conversation between Gueroult and Alquie traverses the text of Descartess corpus,
and quarrels by turns over the status of the extended thing versus extension or
the thinking thing versus thought. Alquie wants to maintain a metaphysical
distinction within both sets of terms where Gueroult sees none; Gueroult claims
that Alquie imputes an extra-intellectual support with an occult quality to
Descartess argumentation, a being that is unable to be reached by thought since
it would not be thought, and thus a move that effectively achieves a negation of
Descartes, who fought all his life against those who would place an occult quality
either in exterior things or in oneself.67 Alquie eventually breaks with the banter
to avow the following:
My whole thesis consists in affirming that, with Descartes, being is not reducible to the
concept. Yet the question you are asking me is the following: but what is it, this being that
is not reducible to the concept? As I can only express myself, by definition, by concepts, I
am unable to respond. But this doesnt prove I am wrong, because my thesis consists in
saying that being is precisely not reducible to the concept. If you are asking me what is this
being in the plane of concepts, then I cannot tell you, or provide you with an attribute
that is adequate to being. I believe that being [and] existence only reveal themselves to
thought in an experience that is familiar, but untranslatable. The evidence of the sum is
primary, and exceeds [depasse] the idea of thought.68

But Gueroult maintains his position all the same, ultimately refusing the phrase
reducible to the concept as relevant to the meaning of concept in Descartess
philosophy.69 He attacks Alquies usage of Cartesian concepts as if they are flexible
placeholders for intuitions rather than products of rational deduction. As the
discussion nears exhaustion, with the hope of any sort of agreement already
gone, Gueroult declares the following:
We are in a period where many do not like mathematics and mathematical certainty
very much, but the problem that Descartes poses for himself, everyone knows, is that of

65
See the Discussion in ibid., 3271.
66
Ibid., 32.
67
Ibid., 39.
68
Ibid., 42.
69
Ibid., 49.
376 knox peden

certainty, it is not that of ontological experience. What is important at bottom to know

[savoir] is not what we know [connat], but to be sure that we can know [connatre]. It is
to be sure that we can have a science, to have the certainty that the certainty which we
grant to science or to metaphysics or to anything whatsoever is not deceptive.70

The Aristotle scholar Victor Goldschmidt no doubt spoke for many in attendance
when he noted the disconcerting impression left by Gueroult and Alquies
dispute at Royaumont. That agreement between two philosophical positions
might be difficult is no problem, Goldschmidt wrote. But that two interpreters
could not come to agree upon the meaning or even the letter of the Cartesian
texts, thats what is disturbing, humiliating even, for any listener who believes
in the universality of the intellect.71 But universality was indeed at stake in
the disagreement. As Alquie said, the evidence of the sum in cogito ergo sum
is primary and exceeds all conditions which might intervene to obscure it.
Gueroults untimely celebration of mathematical certainty is directed against
the gratuitousness he sees at work in this obscure evidence and in Alquies
presentation.
In the vehemence of Gueroults critique as it was presented, however, we
see the intimations of this conflicts move from the terrain of Cartesianism
to that of Spinozism. For Spinoza the factic immediacy of thought itself has
priority over the evidence of the sum contingent upon the discrete cogito.
The axiom man thinks is a point of departure for Spinoza that requires no
further elaboration.72 What is clear from Gueroults contribution to the debate
at Royaumont is that, regardless of the potential justification for his claims
in Descartess texts, Gueroult is infusing Descartes with a decidedly Spinozist
position by persistently downplaying the location of Cartesian certainty in the
cogito, and the element of discretion and indeed isolation that this localization
implies. Many respondents to Gueroults work have pointed to the general accord
between his hard-line rationalist outlook in the postwar years and Spinozism as
a rational system.73 This assessment is provocative, but its implications are of
course deeply problematic for Gueroults general method. If, as Spinoza argued,
truth is its own sign, and the more geometrico gives us the eyes to see this sign,
what are the stakes for Spinozas intentions and Gueroults method if variable
truths can be expressed with the same tools? Can truth retain its constitutive and
universal qualities in such circumstances?

70
Ibid., 56.
71
V. Goldschmidt, A propos du Descartes selon lordre des raisons, Revue Metaphysique
et de morale 1 (1957), 67.
72
Spinoza, Ethics, Book II, Axiom 2.
73
Deleuze, Gueroult, 216; Giolito, Histoires de la philosophie, 7682. Cf. D. Parrochia, La
raison systematique (Paris, 1993), 279.
 descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy 377

Alquie and Gueroult would meet again in 1972 at a colloquium in Brussels on

method and the history of philosophy where these issues would be addressed more
directly. Cham Perelman orchestrated this event to be a deliberate resumption
of the debate begun at Royaumont seventeen years earlier.74 At this stage, the
positions of both thinkers have modified slightly, reflecting their scholarly
accomplishments in the intervening years. Alquies study of Malebranche has
taught him the value of historical work that considers a philosophys implications
beyond its intentions; for example, he sees a strong line of Malebranchist thought
stretching into the secular Enlightenment.75 Gueroult for his part maintains
his distrust of phenomenologywhich he claims locates philosophys value
in an inaccessible interiorityand rehashes his insistence that a philosophys
construction is commanded by the reality at its source, even if that reality
is one that requires of reason its own detriment.76 A new emphasis on plurality
nevertheless appears in Gueroults contribution to these proceedings. Indeed,
Gueroult stresses the multiplicity of paths, rational or irrational, that give
access to philosophy.77 Once there, however, each philosophy calls upon a
philosophizing reasonraison philosophanteto justify the reality it discovers.
In this way, Descartess foreclosure of reasons reach can be justified by his
own philosophizing reason, and his philosophy is now understood to be fully
sensible according to its own immanent criteria. Gueroult also suggests a new
relationship between reality and truth in the exchanges at this conference, yet
rooted still in his Dianoematique. The truth of a philosophy is the affirmation
of a certain reality, which it estimates truly to be reality.78 The systematic
philosophical text is not a means of communication of a reality independent
of it; the chef doeuvre is, rather, that philosophys optimum and maximum
expression.79
Perelman, a proponent of Gueroults method, presses Alquie on how a
demarche, which is not a proposition, could ever be true. Alquie concedes
a plurality of truths, but maintains that truth in this sense is merely logical, the
effect of a proposition. His reference in support of his own positionand his
hesitation to present it as suchis significant. Philosophical truth, for Alquie, is
in the same sense as Christs response to Pontius Pilate that he is the Truth,

74
C. Perelman, ed., Philosophie et methode: Actes du colloque de Bruxelles (Brussels, 1974).
75
F. Alquie, Intention et Determinations dans la genese de loeuvre philosophique, in
ibid., 2842. Cf. F. Alquie, Le cartesianisme de Malebranche (Paris, 1974).
76
M. Gueroult, La methode en histoire de la philosophie, in Perelman, Philosophie et
methode, 1727. Cf. Gueroults exchange with Gianni Vattimo in Cahiers de Royaumont
No. 6: Nietzsche (Paris, 1967), 121.
77
Perelman, Philosophie et methode, 27.
78
Ibid., 53.
79
Ibid., 55.
378 knox peden

the Way, and the Life.80 The point of this reference, directed against Gueroults
lecture, is that Christ did not say truths, because the genuine referent of truth
cannot be pluralized. But Gueroult will persist: though philosophies contain an
element of truth in a scientific sense, this truth is only that of a judgment; the truth
he is talking about, the one that can exist in the plural, is an intrinsic truth.81
The implication of Gueroults response is that the concept of truth Alquie ascribes
to science is more in line with the latters religious example; here truth results
from assent. The truth that is intrinsic, that is attendant to philosophical reality
as Gueroult understands it, must be recognized as such. That this recognition
must take place from the outside is obvious to Gueroult, but this recognition
does not involve, or require, assent.
In the course of their exchange at Brussels, Alquie argues that even though
Descartes, Kant, and Husserl all say something different when the first says, I
think, therefore I am, or the second establishes the transcendental subject, or
the third performs his phenomenological reduction,
it is equally true that, in a certain manner, they are saying the same thing. And it is that,
before whatever objective given, there is a way for the mind [lesprit] to come back to itself
and to consider itself as primary in relation to the object.82

It is this subjectivism that Gueroult finds intolerable. If Descartes was satisfied

with his intuition of the cogito, Gueroult asks, why did he not stop there? The
cogito is not the unique truth of Descartes, it is one of the truths of Descartes, a
truth to which, from all evidence, his philosophy cannot be reduced.83 Moreover,
the suggestion that with the cogito Descartes is expressing the same truth as
Saint Augustine, Kant, Fichte, Maine de Biran, or Husserl, etc. is not only
impossible to endorse or refute, it is irrelevant. Descartess philosophy, that is
to say, his system, incites a world of productive reflections that the cogito alone
would be unable to incite.84
Although Gueroult and Alquie find themselves on the familiar battleground
of Descartess philosophy, it is clear that the terms of their dispute have
shifted somewhat. Where previously the argument had concerned the location
of immutable truth in Descartess philosophy, in the depths of his conscious
experience or in the proliferation of his conceptual apparatus, at this stage the
dispute concerns the status of philosophical truth as either singular or plural,
even within a unique philosophical system. As noted, the meeting in Brussels took

80
Ibid., 53.
81
Ibid.
82
Ibid., 52.
83
Ibid., 54.
84
Ibid., 54.
 descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy 379

place at a time when each scholar had moved beyond Descartes to engage with
other rationalist philosophers. The first volume of Gueroults study of Spinoza
had already appeared in 1968, and Alquies work on Malebranche would be
published six years later in 1974, the same year as Gueroults second volume on
the Ethics.85 The last foray in their protracted conflict would be Alquies major
study of Spinoza, published in 1981 five years after Gueroults death. In their
respective readings of Spinoza, we see that theology is regarded as the privileged
threat to philosophical activity. In Gueroults study, theology goes by the name
of the occult, which is regarded as the target of Spinozas absolute rationalism.
For Alquie, Spinozism is itself nothing but a hyperrationalized theology that is by
turns naturalist or negative. Alquies hesitation to invoke a theological analogy
at Brussels belies his own effort to maintain that the separation constitutive of
the immutable truth at work in Descartes, Kant, or Husserl is not theological just
because it brackets a space in the beyond as unknowable. But it also prefigures
his later concern to color Spinozism as theological precisely in its privileging of
God, however naturalized, as a fully available object of inquiry.

spinoza and the threat of theology

Though Gueroults study can be situated amidst the upsurge of interest in
Spinozism among French thinkers in the 1960s, Spinoza 1: Dieu is an anomaly in
this field. Where for Althusser and certain of his students Spinoza became the
privileged theoretical resource for rethinking the Marxist project,86 the concerns
of the political, and indeed the ethical, were far from central or even relevant
to Gueroults study. Similarly, where Deleuze found in Spinoza a concept of
ontological univocity that would be foundational for his more politically charged
work with Felix Guattari, for Gueroult the peculiarities of Spinozas ontology
were subservient to the elaboration of the rational epistemology, or gnoseology,
to use the Scholastic term Gueroult deploys, that was Spinozas chief aim.
In one sense, however, Gueroults project was of a piece with this broader
return to Spinoza. In addition to elaborating the contours of an absolute
rationalism, Gueroults exegesis is also an attempt to rescue Spinozas philosophy
from the misreading it has suffered in the hands of Hegel and those who read
Spinoza through a Hegelian lens. Gueroult devotes nearly two hundred pages
to the opening propositions of Book I of the Ethics in order to refute Hegels
interpretation of Spinozism as a negative theology wherein the attributes serve
as determinations of a Substance that would otherwise remain indeterminate

85
M. Gueroult, Spinoza II: Lame (Paris, 1974).
86
E. Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, trans. P. Snowdon (London, 1998); P. Macherey, Hegel ou
Spinoza (Paris, 1980). Cf. A. Matheron, Individu et communaute chez Spinoza (Paris, 1969).
380 knox peden

without them. Gueroult argues that Spinozas decision to have substance and
attribute operate as equivalentthat is to say, synonymousterms in the first
eleven propositions of the Ethics is genetically essential for his overall project.
Though Substance will later be capitalized to refer to the idea of the infinity of
attributes in one concept, the establishment of the substantial quality of the
attributes in these early steps is necessary to prevent the speculative persistence of
an arriere-monde that exists prior to its determination in this world. The error of
classical rationalism as Spinoza saw it, according to Gueroult, was its reliance
on a foundation that was elsewhere, outside the world itself.
At one point in his study, Gueroult gives a striking clue as to the complicity of
his methodology with his scholarly object in his description of Spinozas concept
of Substance as genetic, in other words synthetic.87 The central paradox of
Spinozas philosophy that Gueroults work seeks to clarify is how there can be a
synthetic operation, indeed any concept of synthesis at all, without a foundation
for that synthesis that is elsewhere or at the very least external to the synthetic
operation itself (e.g. a transcendental subject or a creator-God). The model
for the equivalency that Spinoza establishes between genesis and synthesis
is mathematical. Mathematics provides Spinoza a method of reasoning that is
intrinsic, driven by wholly internal conditions. A genetic definition, according
to Gueroult, is one that expresses the efficient cause of the object in question; in
this it is opposed to a definition that merely offers a property. A circle is not to
be defined by its roundness; it is a figure described by a straight line of which
one end is fixed and the other is mobile.88 In this example, the comprehension
of a circle as a being of reason89 is predicated not on an exhaustive account
of all the qualitative differences among all the possible or existent circles, large
or small, or red or blue, or whatever properties any given circle may bear. It is
comprehended, rather, only in terms of its genetic cause.
Gueroults reading of the Ethics proceeds in similar terms, comprehending
the text according to its genetic, conceptual construction, beginning with a
definition of substance that prohibits recourse to an outside and pursuing
the consequences of this conceptual foundation. But it is clear that this model
of comprehension is deemed operative not only within the constitution of
Spinozas system, but also in the concept of understanding as such that Spinoza
seeks to promote. This comprehension has as its condition, however, an
incommensurable ontological confrontation that results from the argument for
the attributes of Thought and Extension, the only two among the infinity of
attributes that the intellect can perceive, as being substantially,that is,

87
Gueroult, Spinoza 1, 457.
88
Ibid., 170.
89
Ibid., 41324.
 descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy 381

essentiallydistinct.90 Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of Gueroults

interpretation for readers used to thinking of Spinozism as a thoroughgoing
monism is the insistence on two dualisms at the heart of Spinozas philosophy, that
between the attributes themselvesThought and Extensionand that between
the attributes and the modes coded in terms of the epistemological difference
between cause and effect. For Gueroult, Substance is the singular idea of a
relation, namely that among the attributes as substantially distincthence the
importance of Gueroults reading of the first eleven propositionsbut relating
to each other in a unitary frame that is infinite and brokers no beyond. This
singular frame accounts for the identity of the attributes in the last instance,
despite their essential distinction from one another. There is no juxtaposition of
the attributes, since they are identical as to their causal act, Gueroult writes, but
neither is there fusion between them, since they remain irreducible as to their
essences.91 The ingenuity of Spinozas philosophy, in Gueroults reading, is not
to allow this incommensurability to function as a placeholder for a void or for
some kind of plenitudinous presence marking the separation between thought
and being (or matter), but rather to serve as the motor itself for the genesis
of synthetic knowledge in Thought and qualitative transformation in Extension.
If Thought and Extension are incommensurable due to their essential
that is to say, ontologicaldistinction, then the dualism of cause and effect that
takes place in the intellect is essentially epistemological. As the intellect is but
one mode among others of the attribute Thought, for Gueroult the act of
knowingthe terrain of the absolute rationalism on offer in Spinozism
is decoupled from any kind of ontological questioning that posits a being
beyond knowledge that thought is nonetheless compelled to contemplate. But
this modal knowing, which takes the form of a genetic grasp of the relation
between cause and effect in discrete instances (e.g. the circle example noted
above), necessarily involves an element of transcendence in Gueroults reading.
Gueroult thus plays the role of heretical Spinozist twice over, making a case for
the function of dualism as well as for the evidence of transcendence in Spinozas
gnoseology. Gueroult insists that the conception of God as immanence in
Spinozas systemwhich is but another expression of the idea of Substance
as relations without outsideis designed to prohibit a conception of God as

90
Spinoza, Ethics, Book I, Definition 4. The evident discrepancy that results from Spinozas
speculative affirmation of an infinity of attributes and the fact that only two appear
relevant to human experience will be central to Alquies critique. See the discussion below.
For Spinozas own most concise justification for why Thought and Extension are the only
two attributes the human mind can attain knowledge of, see Letter 64, to G. H. Schuller,
in B. Spinoza, The Letters, trans. S. Shirley (Indianapolis, 1995), 298300.
91
Gueroult, Spinoza I, 238.
382 knox peden

a transient causethat is, as an entity capable of discrete intervention in the

worldand emphatically not to deny the element of transcendence involved in
all rational knowledge, including not least the knowledge of the idea of Substance
qua immanent God.
All the same, Gueroults endorsement of Spinozas absolute rationalism entails
that what is known in the transcendent moment of knowing touches on the
absolute itself. The argument for this position is extremely complex, giving rise to
the more than 1,200 pages of exegesis that comprise Gueroults two-volume study.
At its heart, however, is precisely the concept of incommensurability as describing
at once the epistemological relationship between cause and effect, which is to say
the relationship grasped by the intellect between the attributes/Substance on the
hand, and the modes on the other, and the ontological relation within the former
category between the attributes Thought and Extension. For Gueroult, this bi-
univocal incommensurable relation is the condition itself of true knowledge.
In other words, it is the incommensurability between the attributes Thought and
Extension that allows us to know their relation to one another via their modal
expression in discrete instances: This incommensurability, far from excluding
knowledge or the truth of the idea, is on the contrary their condition, for the
conformity of the idea, to its object, which defines the idea, or truth, would be
impossible without their fundamental distinction.92 The opposition of the object
and its idea, their distinction, even when the ideas object is in fact another
idea, is what renders synthetic knowledge possible. Here, the concept is forged
not in the overcoming of a radical opposition, and a consequent forgetting of
this moment, but rather in a militant attentiveness to the eternal and insistently
repeated opposition between the idea and its object.
In the insistence on the incommensurability of an idea with its object as a
condition for the emergence of a true idea, Spinozism becomes for Gueroult not
the site of a singular truth in and of itself, but rather an epistemology (gnoseology)
which allows for the articulation and understanding of a plurality of true ideas
to be produced ad infinitum. This investment acquires its full remit only in light
of Gueroults methodology, which is geared in each instance toward producing
the fully adequate idea, i.e. his study, of the object in question, i.e. a textually
extant philosophical system. In his wholesale refusal to tolerate any chiasmic
intertwining between ideas and their objects, or a hermeneutics in which the
ideas of the reader and the text are ultimately rendered indistinct, Gueroult is at
pains to make Spinozism a rigorous antidote to the mysterious deus ex machina
of phenomenological intentionality that assures their fundamental union. In
this regard, the resonance of Gueroults Spinozism with the general current of

92
Ibid., 285. Emphasis added.
 descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy 383

structuralism is patent. At the heart of Saussurean linguistics was the insistence

on the pure difference among linguistic signs as constitutive of meaning. At no
point was a signifier deemed meaningful due to an essential content to be found
in the signified; rather, it was the incommensurability among signs, signifiers,
and phonemes that allowed for a proliferation of sense. Gueroults reading of
Spinozism in terms of its integral incommensurability is not only redolent of
structuralism; it is exemplary of it. Paul Ricoeurs description of Levi-Strausss
structuralism as a Kantianism without a transcendental subject93 is an apt
description of Gueroults Spinozism as well.
We can thus see why Spinozism is so convenient for Gueroults method and
how formally similar the two systems are in their essentials. This proximity
turns on the distinction in French between knowing as savoir or as connatre,
a distinction we have seen was important to Gueroult in his defense of the
rationalist Descartes. Spinozism is a philosophy purely on the side of savoir;
Gueroult writes of savoir absolu, not connaissance absolue.94 Just because
God, or Substance, is unknowable in an exhaustive sense does not mean that
an adequate comprehension of the idea of Substance is impossible. To know
in the sense of savoir, which involves an abstracted and genetic understanding,
is predicated on the impossibility of knowing as connatre, which involves an
intimacy and familiarity, a kind of burrowing out of the object in question. In
Gueroults reading, the attempt to know God in the sense of connatre came
to be the hobgoblin of Descartess otherwise rationalist project.95 This same
epistemological distinction is in play in Gueroults reading of past philosophical
systems. As conceptual systems, they can be known in the sense of savoir, but it is
impossible to know a philosophers consciousness, his inner or lived experience,
in the latter sense of connatre. Against a fusion of an idea with its object, or mind
with world, that would allow for an interminable intuition of properties, Gueroult
maintains that it is the immutable incommensurability between the two that is
generative of rational concepts qua true ideas. To be sure, this fully rational
version of the world is arguably anemic, in that it is conceived at a maximal level
of abstraction that provides minimal purchase. Indeed, this abstracted world is
belied daily by the multitude of feelings and intuitions that are attendant on lived
experience. It is for this reason that Alquie finds Spinozism, and in particular
the version of it exquisitely presented by Gueroult, completely unacceptable as
philosophy.
It is a testament to the challenge of Gueroults reading, and to the persistence of
their dispute, that Alquie saw fit to make the last major study of his own career an

93
Dosse, History of Structuralism, 237.
94
Gueroult, Spinoza I, 11.
95
Ibid., 9. Cf. Deleuze, Expressionism, 4151.
384 knox peden

eminently critical work. The advantage of Alquies study over Gueroults is readily
apparent. Where Gueroult concentrated on the first two books of the Ethics,
containing Spinozas metaphysics and his theory of the soul, Alquie takes the
whole of the Ethics for his object. As a result, where the limitations of Gueroults
study, cut short by his death, offered the convenience of remaining silent on
the questions of beatitude that inform the conclusion of the Ethics in Book V,96
for Alquie it is these promises of salvation that structure his interpretation of
Spinozas philosophy as a whole. In other words, where Gueroult read each book
of the Ethics in Spinozistic terms, as structured proofs devoid of teleology,
Alquie reads the Ethics in terms of the texts own material telos, the promise of
beatitude. In his Sorbonne courses twenty years earlier, Alquie offered that his
failure to understand Spinoza was perhaps a personal one.97 At this later stage,
Alquie professes to be more empowered in his critique given that, in his lifetime,
he has never met or heard of anyone living a life of beatific salvation as a result
of reading the Ethics. What is more, Alquie maintains that his assessment is most
faithful to Spinozas demands in that other so-called Spinozists must somehow
be disingenuous by Spinozas own standards. If Spinozism works, where is their
evidence of the everlasting contentment promised at the end of the Ethics?
Spinozas readers were not the only disingenuous ones. In fact, the heart
of Alquies expose is an accusation of Spinozas own disingenuousness in his
attempts to produce a rationalism more absolute than Descartess. The myriad
discrepancies in the Ethics, for example those between a God as Nature and a
God that remains personal in its benevolence, or those inherent in a realist
concept of knowledge that produces salvation as a result, draw from Spinozas
misguided attempt to make fully rational his naturalist intuition concerning
Gods immanence. Spinozas failure lies less in his intuition per se than in his
effort to conceptualize his own inaugural ontological experience. Indeed, his
desire to banish the unknown from the domain of human experience by way
of mathematical certainty only produces a philosophy more mystifying in spite
of itself.98 Where rationalism as a method led Descartes to a concept of God
as precisely that which was incomprehensible, in Spinoza rationalism ceases
to be a method and becomes a doctrine that is in itself incomprehensible.99
In this move, Spinoza effectively creates a new theology whose insistence
on Gods full presence paradoxically reinforces a Judeo-Christian image of the

96
Cf. M. Gueroult, Introduction generale et fragment du premier chapitre du troisieme
tome du Spinoza, Revue philosophique de la France et de letranger 167 (1977), 285302.
97
Alquie, Lecons sur Spinoza, 20610.
98
F. Alquie, Le rationalisme de Spinoza (Paris, 1981), 326.
99
Ibid., 3256.
 descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy 385

Deus absconditus.100 The argument runs that Spinozas intransigent avowal that
God is fully immanent and thus knowable is belied on two counts. First of all,
turning Gueroults gnoseological argument against itself by testing its ontological
implications, Alquie notes that the attributes are effectively transcendent to the
modes in Spinozas universe, as causes are to effects, despite impressions some
passages may give to the contrary. Where for Gueroult this transcendence
operated in our epistemological grasp of the relation of cause to effect, for Alquie
this admission of God qua attributes as functionally transcendent clearly shows
that Spinozas insistence on Gods immanence fails by his own lights. The second
issue is revelatory of the persistent confusion at work in Gueroult and Alquies
argument over what it means to know or to understand. Alquie emphasizes
that the modes and the attributes are both infinite in number; as such, not even
Spinoza himself claims that a complete inventory of these categories could ever be
accomplished. For this reason, the universal intelligibility which his rationalism
affirms remains a promised intelligibility. This promise of intelligibility does not
cause the transcendence of Being, which remains forever beyond our grasp, to
disappear.101 But the insistence on intelligibility, minus the evidence of it, infuses
Spinozism with a promesse du bonheur that is essentially theological.102 As
Alquie remarks at the outset of his study, Spinozas version of salvation never
comes.
Spinozas dissimulation does not stop there, however. In his dogged pursuit of
his pantheist conviction, Spinoza achieves a curious slippage which compromises
the foundation of his entire system. In Alquies reading, Spinozas intolerance
for the incomprehensibility of God in Descartess philosophy leads him to
strategically displace the I think, which inaugurates Descartess philosophy
and which Alquie believes is the essence of the sum as first evidence, with his
own formula: I am thought by God.103 The subjective act of thinking does not
evaporate in this transition; it is merely transposed to God, which is precisely
contrary to the evidence of experience. With Spinoza, the cogito extends itself,
universalizes itself, and eternalizes itself. The result is a certainty that a Cartesian
can always throw into doubt with recourse to the itinerary available to any human
being, namely the I think, first discovered and affirmed.104 Hence, even worse
than being a theology masquerading as philosophy, Spinozism is effectively a
doctrine in bad faith. The roots of Alquies critique of Spinozism are evident in
La nostalgie de letre: the exigencies of critical thought and the virtue of rationalism

100
Ibid., 16062.
101
Ibid., 160.
102
Ibid., 352.
103
Ibid., 3256.
104
Ibid., 326.
386 knox peden

qua method are submitted to the demands of a will that finds the constraints
of finite existence to be intolerable. Much as Gueroults Spinozism resonated
with the currents of French structuralism, we can see here Alquies proximity to
the general line of French phenomenology from Levinas to Marion. There is an
otherwise than Being or a without Being, and any attempt to incorporate
this Other into an ontological or conceptual continuum with worldly existence
cannot but collapse into incoherence.
In Alquies view, the central event of Spinozas philosophy is the dissolution
of the I and its finitude contrary to all evidence. Thus the seduction of
Spinozism105 is that it answers mans eternal desire to escape finitude and achieve
immortality. This seduction aims for the derealization of man to the profit of
God alone.106 In effect, Alquie reads Spinozas philosophy in terms of its fidelity
to an inaugural instinct. He considers Spinozas philosophy in light of Spinoza the
mans own desires, elements which Gueroult would no doubt call gratuitous and
irrelevant to the reality of Spinozas philosophy. More importantly, however, in
terms of Alquies own philosophy, he judges Spinozisms failure against a singular
truth of separation, a once-and-for-all moment to be infinitely reaffirmed that, by
virtue of its emphasis on a singularity which trumps the efforts of rational thought
to comprehend it, arguably possesses a theological quality in its own right. Alquie
made a confession of this sort at Brussels, and it is thus no small irony that with Le
rationalisme de Spinoza Alquie reverses the charge against Gueroult, making the
affirmation of absolute rationalism a surreptitious replacement of philosophy
with theology.
In the juxtaposition of Gueroults and Alquies studies, the incommensurability
of their respective philosophical agendas is thrown into the sharpest relief. Most
revealing is the way that incommensurability itself figures into each thinkers
defense of his own position. For Gueroult, it is the incommensurability of idea
and object that is itself generative of absolute understanding. For Alquie, it
is this same incommensurability that is evidence of the failure of any project
which seeks to overcome it. The fact that Gueroult levels charges of occultism
at Alquie, and that Alquie returns the charge, effectively calling Gueroults
Spinozism antiphilosophical in its theological aims, points to the fundamental
short circuit at the heart of their dispute. Anything that smacks of completeness is
theological in Alquies account; theological for Gueroult signifies the persistence
of a domain that is off-limits to rational thought. Each thinker wants philosophy
to be autonomous and eternal, and yet not theological. But there is nary an
agreement over what it means to be theological between them. In fact, their

105
Ibid., 353.
106
Cf. P. Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London, 2006),
which pursues a critique of Deleuze along similar lines.
 descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy 387

respective versions of this persistent threat to philosophy are mirror images of

one another. In the end, their dispute over rationalism appears to collapse into a
kind of philosophical decisionism. Alquie, for his part, is perfectly cognizant of
this. He writes,
The sage of the Ethics thinks of nothing less than death. Thus Spinozism can only be
constituted by excluding from itself the anguish of our disappearance. We can conclude
from this that the idea of death is foreign to truth. If, to the contrary, one holds this idea
to be constitutive of our consciousness, it must be admitted that reason cannot suffice to
explain man. On this point, one must choose.107

Alquies reduction of their dispute to an existential choice is consistent with his

entire project. He says as much when he writes, the truth of a philosophy must
stand up to the truth of man, and the truth of man is that of experience. At
least such is the thesis that, in all my writings, I have not ceased to defend and
support.108 For Gueroult, as we have seen, philosophical truth must remain
intrinsic, unbeholden to a standard external to itself, least of all the truth
of experience. But Gueroult no less than Alquie acknowledges, inadvertently
perhaps, that the foundation of Spinozas philosophy is in itself not philosophical
when he writes that absolute rationalism, imposing the total intelligibility of
God, key to the total intelligibility of things, is Spinozisms first article of faith.109
For all their shared hostility to history and theology as surrogates, the
agreement between Gueroult and Alquie that philosophy must speak to the
eternal, that it must be the domain of philosophical truth, appears rooted in
the evident impossibility of deciding upon the meaning of truth itself.

conclusionthe impasse of philosophy

In a brief aside in her recent assessment of postwar French philosophy,
Elisabeth Roudinesco describes the division in French thought codified by
Foucault in terms of Cartesians versus Spinozists.110 The polemic between Alquie
and Gueroult lends historical veracity to Roudinescos gloss, which does Badious
rejoinder to Foucault one better by displacing the rift from the nineteenth to
the seventeenth century. When we consider the history of Gueroult and Alquies
conflict in light of these various heuristics, however, what we find is a certain
fungibility among the concepts and philosophical positions on which they are
based, one that accounts for the pliability of the distinction itself. For even

107
Alquie, Rationalisme, back cover (attributed to Alquie).
108
Ibid., 5.
109
Gueroult, Spinoza I, 12. Emphasis added.
110
E. Roudinesco, Philosophy in Turbulent Times, trans. W. McQuaig (New York, 2008), 31.
388 knox peden

as Gueroult and Alquie become increasingly intransigent over the course of

their dispute, their positions on Spinoza ultimately approximate one another.
Gueroults insistence that the absolute rationalism on offer in Spinozism is a
matter of conceptual adequacy plays into Alquies charge that Spinozism is blind
to its own failure to provide an exhaustive account of ontological experience.
Likewise, Alquies insistence that there is permanent remainder that cannot be
domesticated in conceptual thought remains open to Gueroults charge that such a
position is an abrogation of philosophy, providing a foundation for philosophical
thought that cannot, by definition, be philosophically vouchsafed. The proximity
of these positions suggests that at issue between Gueroult and Alquie was perhaps
less a definition of philosophy than an evaluation of philosophys task. In this
respect, their polemic provides a rich depth to what was after all Foucaults main
point in introducing his distinction in the first place, namely to stage it as the
resurgence of contending responses to the question what is Enlightenment?111
a respect for the limits of reason in light of the constraints of finitude, or
reasons capacity for transgressing these constraints in the production of true
ideas.
The historical insight gained from a return to Gueroult and Alquies polemic
is thus dual-sided. Indeed, while the differend traced over the course of this essay
is most starkly evident in the generalized nonrelationto call it a dialogue of
the deaf presumes a dialoguebetween purveyors of an arguably theological
phenomenology and an earnestly post-structuralist rationalism, the fact remains
that the impasse made manifest in Gueroult and Alquies dispute is operative
within the most innovative and compelling projects of contemporary French
thought. For example, although Badiou belongs in the Gueroult camp in terms
of his methods and investments, his long-standing commitment to thinking the
emergence of subjectivity as predicated upon an errant void within Being clearly
bears traces of Alquies foundational rereading of Descartes. The separation that
Alquie found at the heart of Descartess discovery is no less immutable and
singular than Badious ontological void. In this regard, Lacan is the Cartesian
mediator between Alquie and Badiou. In Badious system, Descartes is privileged
above Spinoza, the latter of whom forecloses the void in a metaphysics too
given to closure in the last instance, despite its manifest commitment to thinking
the infinite.112
Badious distance from Spinozism is one effect of his distance from Deleuze,
another key thinker in whom we can discern the striking pertinence of Gueroult
and Alquies dispute, one that is, as noted, grounded in Deleuzes philosophical
education. At the heart of Deleuzes multifaceted career lay the attempt to

111
Foucault, Life, 46770.
112
Badiou, Being and Event, 11220.
 descartes, spinoza, and the impasse of french philosophy 389

develop a properly post-phenomenological rationalism for the modern age. Such

a rationalism would be grounded in Spinozas metaphysics, but it would also
accept the general movement that Alquie deemed paramount in philosophical
thinking, conceived as a thinking that aims, in Alquies own words, toward
a Being which is not a world.113 The GueroultAlquie polemic is in a way
exquisitely captured in the title of the central philosophical work of Deleuzes
oeuvre: Difference and Repetition.114 Where scholars have colored this pairing as a
Deleuzian translation of Being and Time, or indeed a reworking of Bergsons
Matter and Memory,115 we can also read it in terms of Gueroult and Alquie; that
is, Gueroults primordial incommensurability conceived as essentially generative
(difference) and Alquies infinite and immutable recurrence of the ontological
fracture that makes philosophical thought possible (repetition).
Finally, there is the case of Jean-Luc Marion, a thinker who appears to be
wholly committed to phenomenology as a philosophical mode and to developing
the legacy of Alquies teaching. But even within Marions central theological
workGod without Beingwe find the traces of the rationalist commitment best
exemplified by Gueroult. In his preface for the English translation of this book,
Marion posits the following question as central to his effort: can the conceptual
thought of God (conceptual, or rational, and not intuitive or mystical in the
vulgar sense) be developed outside of the doctrine of Being (in the metaphysical,
or even in the non-metaphysical sense)?116 In other words, Marion takes what
Alquie precisely conceded to be a non-conceputalizable experience in his first
public exchange with Gueroult and aims to give it its concept, or indeed concepts:
agape, charity, love, givenness.
With Deleuzes death, his thought has passed definitively into a sequence of
further development by those inspired by his work. But Badious and Marions
projects remain works in progress. In all these efforts there lies a tension that
stretches beyond the tropes of structuralism and phenomenology, going back to
Descartes and Spinoza as foundational figures for modern French philosophy.

113
Cf. Hallward, Out of This World. Avoiding engagement with Gueroult or Alquie, Hallwards
critique nevertheless targets both influences in Deleuzes thought: (1) its tendency to
collapse in an incoherent monism, in which all sense of relation is lost (i.e. Alquies
critique of Gueroults Spinoza); (2) the tendency for Deleuzian philosophy to enact a
counteractualization that takes thought out of this world to a theological, or, to use
Hallwards term of art, theophanic plane (i.e. Gueroults critique of Alquies Descartes).
114
G. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. P. Patton (New York, 1994).
115
D. W. Smith, Deleuze and Derrida, Immanence and Transcendence: Two Directions in
Recent French Thought, in P. Patton and J. Protevi, eds., Between Deleuze and Derrida
(London, 2003), 51; S. Guerlac, Thinking in Time: An Introduction to Henri Bergson (Ithaca,
NY, 2006), 179.
116
J.-L. Marion, God without Being, trans. T. A. Carlson (Chicago, 1991), xxiv.
390 knox peden

What is more, this tension was developed in the highest echelons of the academic
culture that shaped these contemporary thinkers. Foucault, for his part, was
ultimately well aware of the value and importance of this sphere of philosophical
discussion. In an interview conducted shortly before his death, he spoke with
regret about the passage of the philosophical question into the realm of the
slogan that had marked French intellectual life in recent decades. In the past,
he observed,
there were two different circuits. Even if it could not avoid all the pitfalls, the institutional
circuit, which had its drawbacksit was closed, dogmatic, academicnevertheless
managed to sustain heavy losses. The tendency to entropy was less, while nowadays
entropy sets in at an alarming rate.117

Foucaults notion that his generation sought to overcome this tension manifested
at the heart of the institutional circuit stands today as the expression of an
unfulfilled desire rather than the marking of an accomplishment. But then again
perhaps the signal virtue of returning to Gueroult and Alquies dispute lies less
in an evaluation of their technical arguments against one another than in a full
recognition of its conclusion in an impasse, not an impasse that it would be
philosophys task to overcome, but one that serves as the constitutive motor for
the progress of philosophical discourse itself.

117
M. Foucault, Critical Theory/Intellectual History, in M. Kelly, ed., Critique and Power:
Recasting the Foucault/Habermas Debate (Cambridge, MA, 1994), 134.