It is a lasting testament to Michel Foucault's 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.Footnote ¹ In Foucault's 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.”Footnote 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 Cavaillès, and Alexandre Koyré. To be sure, Foucault noted the deeper roots of this division in the nineteenth century, in the discordant relation between Henri Bergson and Henri Poincaré, for example.Footnote 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 field—Marxist or non-Marxist, Freudian or non-Freudian, academic or non-academic—it was the fractured concept of philosophy itself that served as the crucial site of contestation within postwar French thought.

In a sense, Foucault's 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 Léon Brunschvicg's efforts.Footnote ⁴ Badiou situates himself in the latter category, along with Cavaillès, 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 Badiou's categories and Foucault's—again, Badiou's 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 materialism—then 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 this concern has become increasingly overt in the last two decades. Deleuze's final major work before his death in 1995 was a valediction titled What Is Philosophy?.Footnote 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 Event's “sequel” Logics of Worlds in 2006 was followed by its own companion volume, titled accordingly Second Manifesto for Philosophy.Footnote ⁶ If, despite Badiou's efforts to tar Deleuze with a vitalist brush that makes him complicit with various phenomenologies of life,Footnote ⁷ the two philosophers might still be considered together as thinkers hostile to many of the tropes of phenomenology and its “theological turn,”Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁹ In his 1990 volume Material Phenomenology, a book which plays a role in Henry's oeuvre analogous to What Is Philosophy? for Deleuze, Henry is even more emphatic:

Henry specifies that experience itself is and always has been the goal and the ultimate arbiter of philosophy, the essential stuff of Husserl's rediscovery: “The phenomenological substance that material phenomenology has in its view is the pathetic [pathétique] immediacy in which life experiences itself. Life is itself nothing other than this pathetic embrace and, in this way, is phenomenality itself.”Footnote ¹¹

Let us contrast Henry's claims with the “Definition of Philosophy” Badiou published in 1992:

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 Henry's 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 Alquié of the Sorbonne and Martial Gueroult of the Collège de France. “The (re)turn of philosophy itself,”Footnote ¹³ to borrow a title from another of Badiou's missives, is in fact not a return at all. For all throughout structuralism's rise and fall, and persisting through phenomenology's “theological turn,” Alquié and Gueroult's disagreement over the proper method for writing the history of philosophy, a dispute which became concentrated in the face-off between Alquié's Cartesianism and Gueroult's 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 Alquié 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 Alquié (1906–85) 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 Spinoza's philosophy in his eyes.Footnote ¹⁴ Born in Carcassonne, Alquié 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 André Breton and Jacques Lacan.Footnote ¹⁵ With the publication of his book La découverte métaphysique de l'homme chez Descartes in 1950, Alquié 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. Alquié emphasized separation and absence as the essential contents of Descartes's metaphysical discovery of “man.” This argument complemented those of Alquié's other works of the period, Le désir de l'éternité (1943) and La nostalgie de l'être (1950), books whose titles give some sense of Alquié's philosophical program, his investment in Descartes, and his affinity with French phenomenology.

Alquié's 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 Husserl's own late turn to Descartes and the efforts of numerous French thinkers to reinvigorate the phenomenological project in the wake of Heidegger's “destruction” of metaphysics. Indeed, the similarity between Alquié's 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 Alquié published in 1983.Footnote ¹⁶ Roughly Alquié's contemporary, Levinas never knew Alquié as an instructor, whereas Henry and Marion, by contrast, numbered among the latter's most faithful students. The reading of Descartes pursued in Marion's trilogy of the 1970s and 1980s has Alquié's teaching as its essential precondition.Footnote ¹⁷ Marion dedicated the first volume to Alquié and the French Heideggerian, Jean Beaufret; in the preface to Sur la théologie blanche de Descartes, the trilogy's centerpiece, Marion identified Alquié's lessons on the creation of the eternal truths in Descartes's philosophy—the guiding theme of Marion's study, and in many respects a blueprint for his later phenomenological concerns—as his primary source of inspiration. Where Levinas's Descartes prefigures Marion's in several important ways, it is nonetheless Alquié 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 Heidegger's critique. Finally, beyond the phenomenological domain, Lacan's reconsideration of the Cartesian subject as the subject of the unconscious riven by an irremediable ontological fracture also bears a patent debt to Alquié's efforts.Footnote ¹⁸

Unlike Alquié, Martial Gueroult (1891–1976) took a distance from the currents of spiritualism at the Sorbonne that provided such fertile ground for phenomenology's reception there. Esteemed for his comprehensive readings of Fichte and Maïmon,Footnote ¹⁹ Gueroult was elected to the Collège de France in 1951, occupying a chair in “the history and technology of philosophical systems.” Gueroult's 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.Footnote ²⁰ As a lecturer at the Collège de France, Gueroult had no official students of his own, and thus his influence was more inchoate than Alquié’s. 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 Cavaillès.Footnote ²¹ Moreover, despite his investments in analytic philosophy, Jacques Bouveresse ought perhaps to be read as the most prominent living inheritor of Gueroult's rationalism in the French context.

And yet, Gueroult's impact transcended its confines, decisively inflecting the development of structuralism at the École normale supérieure, an institution as hostile to the spiritualism of the Sorbonne as the Collège de France had become. Gueroult's methodology found significant support among the students of Louis Althusser, and in particular the editors of the Cahiers pour l'Analyse (1966–9).Footnote ²² One of Gueroult's essays was reprinted in the journal, and his method was cited as a fundamental inspiration.Footnote 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 Gueroult's Descartes selon l'ordre de raisons (1953), as did Lacan.Footnote ²⁴ The normaliens responsible for the journal, in which texts from Derrida and Foucault appeared alongside analyses of Frege and texts of Gödel 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 Badiou's years producing Maoist tracts and his lingering commitment to dialectical philosophy in his 1984 volume Theory of the Subject.Footnote ²⁵

With Lacan, the stand-off between Alquié and Gueroult thus appears quite porous. Indeed, Lacan occupied a peculiar, mediate position between Gueroult and Alquié, affirming the fractured nature of the subject in line with the latter's 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 Alquié's direction.Footnote ²⁶ And yet, concurrent with the publication of this thesis, Deleuze produced a glowing review of the first volume of Gueroult's meticulous reading of the Ethics,Footnote ²⁷ itself a result of his courses delivered at the Collège de France at the time that Deleuze's own work on Spinoza was under way. Deleuze seemed to endorse Gueroult's thesis concerning an “absolute rationalism” in which thought's full adequation to being was presented not only as a distinct possibility, but also as a philosophical necessity.Footnote ²⁸

Deleuze's endorsement of Gueroult's 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 Alquié's influence.Footnote ²⁹ But this tension we find between Alquié and Gueroult's respective positions in the singular cases of Deleuze and Lacan does not render the conflict between Alquié 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 Alquié and Gueroult were assimilated—by celebrants and detractors alike—rather 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 anthropology to psychoanalysis. Clarifying the stakes and development of the conflict between Alquié 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 (Gueroult's 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 Alquié's works).

What follows traces the development of Gueroult and Alquié's polemic from the former's appointment to the Collège in 1951, which saw a sequence of lessons on Descartes targeting Alquié's reading, to the publication of the latter's Le rationalisme de Spinoza in 1981, a book designed to make evident the flaws in Gueroult's multivolume study of Spinoza cut short by its author's 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 Alquié are both intent to preserve philosophy's 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 Alquié's 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 Collège de France with a call to “vanquish historicism.”Footnote ³⁰ In the preceding hour, he had taken numerous philosophers to task—from 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 Gueroult's 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.”Footnote ³¹ For Gueroult, irrefutable demonstration was the key element of a philosophical work:

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.”Footnote ³³

Gueroult's antipathy to historicism drew from his belief that the scholar's 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 philosophy's history subservient to the perspective of the philosophical present. This charge was more fully fleshed out in the Dianoématique (the “study of doctrines”), Gueroult's multivolume manifesto, which, though only published posthumously, provided much of the substance of his inaugural lesson.Footnote ³⁴ In the Dianoématique, Gueroult sought to produce a “radical idealism” that would be nothing less than the “reversal of Hegelianism.”Footnote ³⁵ Where Hegel had made his subjective apprehension of philosophy's history serve as the very basis for his account, Gueroult wanted to effect an inversion, thus making “the reality of philosophy's 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 Husserl's 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 applied to philosophical texts, the phenomenological concept of intentionality was nothing more than a “mysterious deus ex machina,”Footnote 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,”Footnote 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.Footnote ³⁸

Descartes was the first “monument” considered after Gueroult's appointment to the Collège. This decision was not entirely contingent. Eleven months before his inaugural lesson, Gueroult had sent a letter to Alquié to share his thoughts on the latter's recently published study. In this work, Alquié 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.Footnote ³⁹ Voicing his displeasure with this reading, Gueroult pleaded with Alquié to abandon this “novelistic philosophy” in which the philosophers of the past serve as mouthpieces for one's own philosophical convictions. He implored Alquié 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.”Footnote ⁴⁰ In 1953, Gueroult published the results of his courses: Descartes selon l'ordre des raisons. The title drew its authority from Descartes's injunction to be read in such terms; its polemical force lay in its riposte to Alquié's interpretation. In the opening pages, Gueroult cited Alquié's statement “we do not believe there is a system in Descartes,” only to follow with the rejoinder: “Descartes thought otherwise.”Footnote ⁴¹

As Alquié 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 Gueroult's study, Alquié conceded the brilliance of its exquisite reconstruction of Descartes's philosophy according to the “order 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.”Footnote ⁴² In striking contrast, Alquié's book had argued that the eternal value of Descartes's philosophy, and the source of its satisfaction for anyone who encountered it, was the lesson in ontological experience dramatized in the Meditations, namely man's ability to move beyond the world of objects, gaining closer proximity, not to say convergence, with Being itself. In general, for Alquié, “system” was a term foreign to true philosophical experience. Access to the eternal required an “ontological démarche.”Footnote ⁴³ Along these lines, in his short book Qu'est-ce que comprendre un philosophe?, the result of a lecture conceived as a response to Gueroult's inaugural lesson, Alquié 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.Footnote ⁴⁴ Philosophy is defined as this “démarche”Footnote ⁴⁵ that moves one toward philosophy's essential discovery of a “subjective universality.”Footnote ⁴⁶ “Philosophers,” Alquié argues, “by showing that the world does not contain its own conditions, go toward a Being which is not a world.”Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Alquié contrasts his position with Gueroult's, 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,” Alquié writes, “Descartes did not want to establish a system that would be Descartes's system; he wanted to find the truth, which is totally different, and he sought this truth with complete sincerity.”Footnote ⁴⁹

In a move that drives to the heart of Gueroult's project, Alquié casts Gueroult's method in the same league as those methodologies—psychological or historicist—that Gueroult so distrusts. According to Alquié, what all of these methodologies have in common is that they make an object out of philosophical truth.Footnote 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 obvious [évident].” But Alquié sees in this systematization the greatest risk for the author to express, “despite himself, his time and the errors of his time.”Footnote ⁵¹

The notion that the philosopher's errors, whatever they may be, conceal some deeper immutable truth is central to Alquié's conception of philosophy. This conviction was given its clearest expression in La nostalgie de l'être, where it was argued that an “eternal relation” exists between our consciousness and Being.Footnote ⁵² Against Hegelianism, and historicism more generally, in which Alquié saw a lack of respect for the “impassible totality of each man,” Alquié claimed, like Gueroult, that philosophies exist in history to be accepted or refused but never to be “exceeded [dépassé].”Footnote ⁵³ In each true philosophical gesture, however, Alquié detected a profound “nostalgia for Being.”

Even if it is no easy task, Alquié 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.Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁵⁶

Throughout Alquié's project one can detect echoes of Heidegger's 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 Alquié's account, but more as a derivative specimen of Kierkegaardian courage before the nostalgia for Being than as a philosophical authority in his own right.Footnote ⁵⁷ In Jacques Derrida's recollection, Alquié thought himself a worthy rival to Heidegger, whom he believed had stolen his idea.Footnote ⁵⁸ But the fact remains that if there is a Heideggerian quality to Alquié's 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 “démarche” central to Alquié's effort “calls upon an unconceptualizable ontological experience, which cannot be replaced by anything that derives from it.”Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁶⁰ Here Alquié 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.Footnote ⁶¹ More important still, this démarche of Alquié's own points to the fundamental disagreement between his and Gueroult's positions: the primacy of subjective experience or conceptual thought.Footnote 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. Alquié began the proceedings with a concession to Gueroult's emphasis on demonstration in Descartes's 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 metaphysics—that is, Descartes's “philosophy”—discovers and “observes.”Footnote ⁶³ Alquié 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.Footnote ⁶⁴ Gueroult's response to Alquié follows a similar rhetorical tack, ceding ground in its acknowledgment of the “ontological experience” that inaugurates Descartes's project. But he then launches into an unforgiving offensive against Alquié's position, centered above all on the issue with which Alquié closed his talk: the location of truth in Descartes.Footnote 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.”Footnote ⁶⁶ From this opening gambit, the conversation between Gueroult and Alquié traverses the text of Descartes's corpus, and quarrels by turns over the status of the “extended thing” versus “extension” or the “thinking thing” versus “thought.” Alquié wants to maintain a metaphysical distinction within both sets of terms where Gueroult sees none; Gueroult claims that Alquié imputes an “extra-intellectual support” with an “occult quality” to Descartes's 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.”Footnote ⁶⁷ Alquié eventually breaks with the banter to avow the following:

But Gueroult maintains his position all the same, ultimately refusing the phrase “reducible to the concept” as relevant to the meaning of “concept” in Descartes's philosophy.Footnote ⁶⁹ He attacks Alquié's 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:

The Aristotle scholar Victor Goldschmidt no doubt spoke for many in attendance when he noted the “disconcerting impression” left by Gueroult and Alquié's 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, that's what is disturbing, humiliating even, for any listener who believes in the universality of the intellect.”Footnote ⁷¹ But universality was indeed at stake in the disagreement. As Alquié said, the evidence of the sum in cogito ergo sum is primary and exceeds all conditions which might intervene to obscure it. Gueroult's untimely celebration of mathematical certainty is directed against the “gratuitousness” he sees at work in this obscure “evidence” and in Alquié's presentation.

In the vehemence of Gueroult's critique as it was presented, however, we see the intimations of this conflict's 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.Footnote ⁷² What is clear from Gueroult's contribution to the debate at Royaumont is that, regardless of the potential justification for his claims in Descartes's 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 Gueroult's work have pointed to the general accord between his hard-line rationalist outlook in the postwar years and Spinozism as a rational system.Footnote ⁷³ This assessment is provocative, but its implications are of course deeply problematic for Gueroult's 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 Spinoza's intentions and Gueroult's method if variable truths can be expressed with the same tools? Can truth retain its constitutive and universal qualities in such circumstances?

Alquié 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. Chaïm Perelman orchestrated this event to be a deliberate resumption of the debate begun at Royaumont seventeen years earlier.Footnote ⁷⁴ At this stage, the positions of both thinkers have modified slightly, reflecting their scholarly accomplishments in the intervening years. Alquié's study of Malebranche has taught him the value of historical work that considers a philosophy's implications beyond its intentions; for example, he sees a strong line of Malebranchist thought stretching into the secular Enlightenment.Footnote ⁷⁵ Gueroult for his part maintains his distrust of phenomenology—which he claims locates philosophy's value in an inaccessible interiority—and rehashes his insistence that a philosophy's construction is “commanded” by the “reality” at its source, even if that “reality” is one that “requires of reason its own detriment.”Footnote ⁷⁶ A new emphasis on plurality nevertheless appears in Gueroult's contribution to these proceedings. Indeed, Gueroult stresses the “multiplicity of paths, rational or irrational, that give access to philosophy.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Once there, however, each philosophy calls upon a “philosophizing reason”—raison philosophante—to justify the reality it discovers. In this way, Descartes's foreclosure of reason's 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 Dianoématique. “The truth of a philosophy is the affirmation of a certain reality, which it estimates truly to be reality.”Footnote ⁷⁸ The systematic philosophical text is not a means of “communication” of a reality independent of it; the chef d'oeuvre is, rather, that philosophy's “optimum” and “maximum” expression.Footnote ⁷⁹

Perelman, a proponent of Gueroult's method, presses Alquié on how a “démarche,” which is not a proposition, could ever be “true.” Alquié 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 position—and his hesitation to present it as such—is significant. Philosophical truth, for Alquié, is “in the same sense” as Christ's response to Pontius Pilate that he is “the Truth, the Way, and the Life.”Footnote ⁸⁰ The point of this reference, directed against Gueroult's 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.”Footnote ⁸¹ The implication of Gueroult's response is that the concept of truth Alquié ascribes to science is more in line with the latter's 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, Alquié 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 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.”Footnote 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. “Descartes's philosophy, that is to say, his system, incites a world of productive reflections that the cogito alone would be unable to incite.”Footnote ⁸⁴

Although Gueroult and Alquié find themselves on the familiar battleground of Descartes's 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 Descartes's 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 place at a time when each scholar had moved beyond Descartes to engage with other rationalist philosophers. The first volume of Gueroult's study of Spinoza had already appeared in 1968, and Alquié's work on Malebranche would be published six years later in 1974, the same year as Gueroult's second volume on the Ethics.Footnote ⁸⁵ The last foray in their protracted conflict would be Alquié's major study of Spinoza, published in 1981 five years after Gueroult's death. In their respective readings of Spinoza, we see that theology is regarded as the privileged threat to philosophical activity. In Gueroult's study, theology goes by the name of the “occult,” which is regarded as the target of Spinoza's absolute rationalism. For Alquié, Spinozism is itself nothing but a hyperrationalized theology that is by turns naturalist or negative. Alquié's 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 Gueroult's 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,Footnote ⁸⁶ the concerns of the political, and indeed the ethical, were far from central or even relevant to Gueroult's study. Similarly, where Deleuze found in Spinoza a concept of ontological univocity that would be foundational for his more politically charged work with Félix Guattari, for Gueroult the peculiarities of Spinoza's ontology were subservient to the elaboration of the rational epistemology, or gnoseology, to use the Scholastic term Gueroult deploys, that was Spinoza's chief aim.

In one sense, however, Gueroult's project was of a piece with this broader return to Spinoza. In addition to elaborating the contours of an absolute rationalism, Gueroult's exegesis is also an attempt to rescue Spinoza's 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 Hegel's interpretation of Spinozism as a negative theology wherein the “attributes” serve as determinations of a Substance that would otherwise remain indeterminate without them. Gueroult argues that Spinoza's decision to have “substance” and “attribute” operate as equivalent—that is to say, synonymous—terms 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 arrière-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 Spinoza's concept of Substance as “genetic, in other words synthetic.”Footnote ⁸⁷ The central paradox of Spinoza's philosophy that Gueroult's 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.Footnote ⁸⁸ In this example, the “comprehension” of a circle as a “being of reason”Footnote ⁸⁹ 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.

Gueroult's 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 Spinoza's 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, “essentially”—distinct.Footnote ⁹⁰ Indeed, one of the most striking aspects of Gueroult's interpretation for readers used to thinking of Spinozism as a thoroughgoing monism is the insistence on two dualisms at the heart of Spinoza's philosophy, that between the attributes themselves—Thought and Extension—and 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 distinct—hence the importance of Gueroult's reading of the first eleven propositions—but 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.”Footnote ⁹¹ The ingenuity of Spinoza's philosophy, in Gueroult's 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, ontological—distinction, 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 knowing—the 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 Gueroult's 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 Spinoza's “gnoseology.” Gueroult insists that the conception of God as immanence in Spinoza's system—which is but another expression of the idea of Substance as relations without outside—is designed to prohibit a conception of God as a transient cause—that is, as an entity capable of discrete intervention in the world—and 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, Gueroult's endorsement of Spinoza's 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 Gueroult's 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.”Footnote ⁹² The opposition of the object and its idea, their distinction, even when the idea's “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 Gueroult's 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 Gueroult's Spinozism with the general current of 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. Gueroult's reading of Spinozism in terms of its integral incommensurability is not only redolent of structuralism; it is exemplary of it. Paul Ricoeur's description of Lévi-Strauss's structuralism as a “Kantianism without a transcendental subject”Footnote ⁹³ is an apt description of Gueroult's Spinozism as well.

We can thus see why Spinozism is so convenient for Gueroult's 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 connaître, 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.”Footnote 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 connaître, which involves an intimacy and familiarity, a kind of burrowing out of the object in question. In Gueroult's reading, the attempt to know God in the sense of connaître came to be the hobgoblin of Descartes's otherwise rationalist project.Footnote ⁹⁵ This same epistemological distinction is in play in Gueroult's reading of past philosophical systems. As conceptual systems, they can be known in the sense of savoir, but it is impossible to “know” a philosopher's consciousness, his inner or lived experience, in the latter sense of connaître. 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 Alquié 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 Gueroult's reading, and to the persistence of their dispute, that Alquié saw fit to make the last major study of his own career an eminently critical work. The advantage of Alquié's study over Gueroult's is readily apparent. Where Gueroult concentrated on the first two books of the Ethics, containing Spinoza's metaphysics and his theory of the soul, Alquié takes the whole of the Ethics for his object. As a result, where the limitations of Gueroult's 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,Footnote ⁹⁶ for Alquié it is these promises of salvation that structure his interpretation of Spinoza's philosophy as a whole. In other words, where Gueroult read each book of the Ethics in “Spinozistic” terms, as structured proofs devoid of teleology, Alquié reads the Ethics in terms of the text's own material telos, the promise of beatitude. In his Sorbonne courses twenty years earlier, Alquié offered that his failure to understand Spinoza was perhaps a personal one.Footnote ⁹⁷ At this later stage, Alquié 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, Alquié maintains that his assessment is most faithful to Spinoza's demands in that other so-called Spinozists must somehow be disingenuous by Spinoza's own standards. If Spinozism “works,” where is their evidence of the everlasting contentment promised at the end of the Ethics?

Spinoza's readers were not the only disingenuous ones. In fact, the heart of Alquié's exposé is an accusation of Spinoza's own disingenuousness in his attempts to produce a rationalism more “absolute” than Descartes's. 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 Spinoza's misguided attempt to make fully rational his naturalist intuition concerning God's immanence. Spinoza's 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.Footnote 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.Footnote ⁹⁹ In this move, Spinoza effectively creates a “new theology” whose insistence on God's full presence paradoxically reinforces a Judeo-Christian image of the Deus absconditus.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The argument runs that Spinoza's intransigent avowal that God is fully immanent and thus knowable is belied on two counts. First of all, turning Gueroult's gnoseological argument against itself by testing its ontological implications, Alquié notes that the attributes are effectively transcendent to the modes in Spinoza's 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 Alquié this admission of God qua attributes as functionally transcendent clearly shows that Spinoza's insistence on God's immanence fails by his own lights. The second issue is revelatory of the persistent confusion at work in Gueroult and Alquié's argument over what it means to “know” or to “understand.” Alquié 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.”Footnote ¹⁰¹ But the insistence on intelligibility, minus the evidence of it, infuses Spinozism with a “promesse du bonheur” that is essentially theological.Footnote ¹⁰² As Alquié remarks at the outset of his study, Spinoza's version of salvation never comes.

Spinoza's 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 Alquié's reading, Spinoza's intolerance for the “incomprehensibility” of God in Descartes's philosophy leads him to strategically displace the “I think,” which inaugurates Descartes's philosophy and which Alquié believes is the essence of the sum as first evidence, with his own formula: “I am thought by God.”Footnote 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.”Footnote ¹⁰⁴ Hence, even worse than being a theology masquerading as philosophy, Spinozism is effectively a doctrine in bad faith. The roots of Alquié's critique of Spinozism are evident in La nostalgie de l'être: the exigencies of critical thought and the virtue of rationalism qua method are submitted to the demands of a will that finds the constraints of finite existence to be intolerable. Much as Gueroult's Spinozism resonated with the currents of French structuralism, we can see here Alquié's 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 Alquié's view, the central event of Spinoza's philosophy is the dissolution of the “I” and its finitude contrary to all evidence. Thus the “seduction of Spinozism”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ is that it answers man's eternal desire to escape finitude and achieve immortality. This seduction aims for the derealization of man “to the profit of God alone.”Footnote ¹⁰⁶ In effect, Alquié reads Spinoza's philosophy in terms of its fidelity to an inaugural instinct. He considers Spinoza's philosophy in light of Spinoza the man's own desires, elements which Gueroult would no doubt call “gratuitous” and irrelevant to the reality of Spinoza's philosophy. More importantly, however, in terms of Alquié's own philosophy, he judges Spinozism's 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. Alquié made a confession of this sort at Brussels, and it is thus no small irony that with Le rationalisme de Spinoza Alquié reverses the charge against Gueroult, making the affirmation of “absolute rationalism” a surreptitious replacement of philosophy with theology.

In the juxtaposition of Gueroult's and Alquié's 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 thinker's defense of his own position. For Gueroult, it is the incommensurability of idea and object that is itself generative of absolute understanding. For Alquié, 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 Alquié, and that Alquié returns the charge, effectively calling Gueroult's 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 Alquié's 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 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. Alquié, for his part, is perfectly cognizant of this. He writes,

Alquié's 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.”Footnote 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 Alquié acknowledges, inadvertently perhaps, that the foundation of Spinoza's 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 Spinozism's first article of faith.”Footnote ¹⁰⁹ For all their shared hostility to ‘“history” and “theology” as surrogates, the agreement between Gueroult and Alquié 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.