A Response: Althusser, Spinoza, and the Specter of the Cartesian Subject
Pascale Gillot
Knox Peden’s contribution, centered on the Spinozist conception of the true idea, effectively defines the role that Spinoza, and Spinozist rationalism in particular, can play in contemporary philosophy. More specifically, his analysis highlights the richness of the resources afforded by Spinoza, insofar as the study of a certain contemporary reactivation of the Spinozist conception of truth makes it possible to put into perspective often artificially opposed traditions in the twentieth century, namely, “Continental philosophy” on the one hand, and “analytic philosophy” on the other.
For Peden, it is necessary to understand how the twentieth-century revival of Spinozist epistemology often manifested itself as a kind of integral rationalism, a rationalism of a particular type that is irreducible to either naturalism or idealism. It turns out that a possible meeting point between the continental tradition and the analytic tradition is afforded by the re-reading of the Spinozist conception of the true idea as an adequate idea. Peden cites two authors as having been essential to this re-reading: first, Louis Althusser; and second, Donald Davidson. More fundamentally, Peden’s description of a “suggestive convergence” onto Spinozism by these two philosophers reveals fissures where we would not necessarily expect them, in this case within each of these traditions.
In the case of Althusser, his anti-idealist rationalism, according to Peden, makes use of the Spinozist theory of truth as adaequatio and convenientia as a means of barring the attempt to ground an extrinsic criterion of truth—an unusual approach that leads Spinoza to define the truth as index sui et falsi. Under these conditions, the break between truth and falsity takes place independently of the judgment of a knowing subject, since knowledge, the procession of our ideas, is conceived as being a form of production rather than of representation, namely, rather than as belonging to a knowing subject who would measure the truth-value of his own ideas/representations. Althusser mobilizes this Spinozistic conception of truth and its distinction from falsity to oppose the idealism of theories of the knowing subject (rooted in the Cartesian tradition) as well as the empiricist-positivist tradition. As for Donald Davidson, whose work is defined by its positing an anti-naturalist epistemology, he deploys an “index sui” conception of truth in order to resist an empiricist trend periodically felt in the field of analytic philosophy—a trend embodied by the naturalized epistemology of Quine.
It is worth reiterating, then, that if, for Peden, the analytic philosophy of Davidson and the Continental philosophy of Althusser can be said to converge in their appreciation, Spinoza is nevertheless employed by these authors differentially and strategically, as a means of addressing fault lines that exist within their own traditions. On the side of analytic philosophy, this fault line pits Davidson’s concept of truth against Quine’s (positivist) naturalism. On the side of Continental philosophy, the fundamental partition divides an Althusserian standpoint influenced by Spinoza, itself encompassing both the affirmation of the primacy of the true idea in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect (to recall the celebrated formula “habemus enim ideam veram,” “we have, in fact, a true idea”) and the conception of truth as norma sui in the Ethics,1 from a “Cartesian-Husserlian” standpoint which indexes the theory of truth to a theory of the knowing (or judging) subject: the Cartesian veridical subject, endowed with the faculty of discriminating between clear and distinct ideas, and obscure and confused ideas.
These references to Spinoza thus focus on his theory of truth and on his rationalism, which involve a remarkable interplay of the correspondence or convenientia model—in which, for true ideas, the relation to the object is extrinsic—and the coherence or adaequatio model, in which the relationship to the object is intrinsic, the true idea being defined here as “adequate idea.”
Recall that the model of correspondence is posited axiomatically at E1a6 in a concise statement: “A true idea must agree with its object [idea vera debet cum suo ideato convenire].”2 As for the model of coherence, Spinoza defines “adequate ideas” at E2d4: “By adequate idea [idea adaequata], I understand an idea which, insofar as it is considered in itself, without relation to the object [sine relatione ad objectum], has all the properties, or intrinsic denominations [denominationes intrinsecae] of a true idea [idea vera].”3
For Spinoza, correspondence (the notion that the true idea is extrinsic and derived from the object) and coherence (the idea that the true idea is the adequate idea, and that its veracity is derived from an intrinsic criterion independent of any reference to the object) are not two contradictory models of truth, but rather are two different ways of construing the true idea, considered as such or as referring to something else, following the logic of alternation, that is to say, according to the good old Spinozist terminology, “parallelism” (as described at E2p7). We must, therefore, be wary of taking the exposition at E2d4 purely at face value: “I say intrinsic to exclude what is extrinsic [extrinseca], namely, the agreement [convenientia] of the idea with its object.”4
The exclusion in the abovementioned passage cannot be understood as a contradiction between two regimes of truth, one coherent, and the other correspondent, since, fundamentally, the true idea and the adequate idea are one and the same—that is to say, the same idea, considered sometimes in one way (the idea as an idea, or as wholly intrinsic), sometimes in another (the relation of correspondence between the idea and its referent). Moreover, if the adequacy of the true idea with its object is axiomatic in the Ethics, it is because the correspondence of the true idea with its object [ideatum] is necessarily and immediately given by virtue of the truth of the idea itself. This correspondence need not be guaranteed by any mediation besides that provided by the idea, as would be the case, for instance, with regard to its eventual representative power, which a knowing-subject could measure independently of the formal being of the idea.
In a certain way, we could even say that, for Spinoza, coherence is the basis of correspondence. For although his epistemology excludes any kind of “representationalism”—an idea’s truth not residing in its supposed function as an “image” of the object, but rather in its adequation—still, the referential function of true ideas is posed as necessary. Axiomatically, a true idea must agree with that of which it is it is the idea, there is no need to demonstrate this. The referential function of the clear and distinct idea is, for Spinoza, never called into question. It does not constitute by itself a problem whose resolution could only be acquired by passing through a specific theory of knowledge: this is what separates Spinozist epistemology from the Cartesian epistemological edifice, based as it is on a theory of self-certainty.5
By examining the Spinozist theory of truth through a contemporary lens, it is thus possible for us to strategically show the secret affinity between two seemingly distinct schools of philosophical thought—that of a French epistemological tradition running through Cavaillès, Bachelard, Canguilhem, and here represented by Althusser, and that of analytic philosophy, here represented by Donald Davidson’s coherent epistemology, an epistemology based on the principle that “coherence yields to correspondence.”6
This is what Peden shows us: how, by deploying the Spinozist theory of truth, the two abovementioned schools of thought are able to avoid lapsing into either empiricism (the naturalized epistemology of Quine, the myth of the given, positivism) or idealism (the metaphysical representation of a subject of truth). Thus for Davidson, truth comes first, and does not derive from meaning or signification. The same can be said of Althusser. Yet both thinkers also share in the same conundrum: How does one remain rationalist while resisting the seductions of speculative idealism and the allure of the Cartesian subject? This is the central dilemma of Peden’s text.
Since the analytic aspect of this analysis has been thoroughly treated by Peden in his contribution, I would like to focus more on French philosophy in my comments, and in particular on how Althusser’s view of truth channels Spinoza. The role of Spinozist rationalism appears to be fundamental to Althusserian epistemology, not only in the passages of Lire le Capital mentioned by Peden, but also, it seems to me, in two other texts not mentioned in his essay.
The first of these texts is Althusser’s The Elements of Self-Criticism. Particularly important to my treatment is Chapter 4, titled “On Spinoza,”7 in which Spinoza is presented by Althusser as the first philosopher to make the epistemological break between science and ideology. The second text is the second of the lectures that Althusser gave in his 1963–4 seminar devoted to the question of psychoanalysis and the human sciences, a lecture in which Althusser explicitly opposes the Spinozist model of the mind to that of the Cartesian subject-of-truth.8
In both of these texts, Spinoza is identified by Althusser as the anti-Cartesian philosopher par excellence, able to counter the tradition of a theory of knowledge subordinated to the idealistic representations of a knowing subject. Thus in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, Spinoza, with the model of knowledge as production, propounds the autonomy of adequate ideas which can themselves encompass both affirmation and negation, ultimately proposing a singular theory of truth in which the truth encompasses both itself and the false [verum index sui et falsi]—in other words, a theory of truth without a veridical subject, and a theory of knowledge as a “process without a subject” avant la lettre.9 Althusser’s use of Spinoza makes it possible to maintain a rationalist theory of knowledge, by positing the primacy of truth (since truth is of the register of the always-already), yet not dependent on a Cartesian knowing-subject, supplemented by the certainty metaphysically provided by God, who can guarantee the passage from the clear and distinct idea to the true idea. It turns out that the whole of this Cartesian edifice, involving as it does the interplay of doubt and certainty, can be short-circuited by the Spinozist conception of knowledge as production; knowledge emancipated from the jurisdiction of the veridical subject. This last point is particularly developed in the second lecture of Althusser’s 1963–4 seminar, Psychoanalysis and Human Sciences.
To this end, I would like to focus on the illustrative figure used by Peden in his chapter, that of the “Möbius strip.” The importance of the Möbius strip to the work of Lacan is well documented. It also plays a crucial role in Althusser’s paper, “Psychoanalysis and Human Sciences.”
The Möbius strip there suggests the structurally entangled character, in Spinozist epistemology, of adaequatio (the intrinsic) and convenientia (the extrinsic). Far from problematizing the notion of Spinoza as a coherentist, the inseparability of these two terms in fact affirms the totalizing character of the intrinsic criteria of truth [adaequatio], effectively emancipating rationalist epistemology from the idealist problematic of the subject of truth. It appears that, for Spinoza, correspondence (the referencing of the idea to an external object) and coherence (the intrinsically determined idea, encompassing both its affirmation and negation10) are inextricable. Correspondence is necessarily linked to coherence, to the extent that correspondence, for Spinoza, can be guaranteed by a subject overlooking the procession of adequate ideas. It is the nature of ideas as adequate ideas which are not the ideas or representations of a knowing subject to be able to impose themselves as things, rather than as images.
In other words, the break between truth and falsity takes place within the field of knowledge, independently of any act of judgment—this how Spinoza is able to upend of the question of certainty. The standpoint of the Cartesian subject is expressly rejected by Spinoza, as is any representational conception of how knowledge works. It is in this vein, echoing the “habemus enim ideam veram” of the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, that we can understand E2p43: “He who has a true idea at the same time knows that he has a true idea, and cannot doubt the truth of the thing.”11
This proposition, which points the way to the (non-Cartesian) definition of truth as its own norm,12 suggests the reciprocity of the true idea and the adequate idea within the rationalistic perspective of the Ethics. It is due to Spinoza’s characterization of truth as norma sui that the question of convenientia or the correspondence between an idea and its object appears to Spinoza as a false problem. The true/false distinction is not abolished, but emancipated from a theory of judgment, insofar as, according to the very terms of the Ethics, the “norm of truth” is none other than the true idea. The intrinsic and extrinsic criteria of truth cannot be separated from one another, in the same way that, on a Möbius strip, the inner and outer edges cannot be distinguished. This inseparability is clearly grasped by Althusser when he examines the epistemological implications of what he calls Spinoza’s “resolute anti-Cartesianism.”
Given this, it’s hard for me to abide by Peden’s claim that Althusser, taking up Spinoza’s non-idealist rationalism (a non-Cartesian rationalism, deindexed from the subject of truth), would fail to make the “distinction” between the true and the adequate. For it is precisely the entanglement between coherence and correspondence—as is clear from Spinoza’s astonishing definition of the adequate idea as containing all the intrinsic denominations of the true idea, at E2d4—that grounds the non-idealistic character of Spnioza’s rationalism. This is the entanglement or lack of “style” that Althusser discerns and makes his own, especially when he suggests that his own re-reading is intended as a tribute to the Spinozist theory of knowledge as production, a process without a subject, and to the Spinozist theory of truth as the criterion of both truth and falsity—thereby, in effect, evicting the Cartesian subject from his philosophy.
We can see, from the above, that the question of the break between truth and falsity is a fundamental point of disagreement between Spinoza and Descartes. And in the hands of Althusser, Spinoza’s thematization of the immanent nature of this break allows Althusser to maintain the categories of truth and falsity, opposing relativism while nevertheless rejecting the idealistic hypothesis of a subject of truth.
How can rationalism be saved? This is the dilemma explored with respect to Spinoza in Peden’s article—one that evinces skepticism toward fashionable postmodernist relativism, charged as it is with dispensing with the category of truth.
In this respect, it is probably not irrelevant that Michel Foucault, at the time of The Archeology of Knowledge, specifically directed his criticisms against the “epistemological” conception of the history of science, a conception subscribed to by Bachelard, Canguilhem, and other theorists of the “epistemological break” between science and ideology, among them Althusser himself. According to Foucault, the epistemological history of science is based on the science/imaginary distinction, which itself derives its force from a number of other binary distinctions (truth/error, rational/irrational, scientific/non-scientific). This historical analysis seeks to show
how a science was established over and against a pre-scientific level, which both paved the way and resisted it in advance, how it succeeded in overcoming the obstacles and limitations that still stood in its way. Bachelard and Canguilhem have provided models of this kind of history […] since it shows what the science has freed itself from, everything that it has had to leave behind in its progress towards the threshold of scientificity. Consequently, this description takes as its norm the fully constituted science; the history that it recounts is necessarily concerned with the opposition of truth and error, the rational and the irrational, the obstacle and fecundity, purity and impurity, the scientific and the nonscientific.13
Far from the rationalistic distinction between science and ideology, there is another type of historical analysis—that of the archeology of knowledge, advocated by Foucault. This type of analysis differs from the previous one (the epistemological analysis of Bachelard-Canguilhem) insofar as it aims at resituating such a scientific configuration in the discursive practice which pervades it and to which it belongs. This archeological analysis is capable of de-absolutizing, one might say, the Bachelardian distinction between science and the imaginary, between science and non-science, between truth and error, by employing the (Foucaldian) postulate of an absence of radical discontinuity between knowledge and science. This explains why it is knowledge in its transversality (from scientific to fictional, from literary to legal, from institutions to political strategies) which archaeology aspires to and not science as such, which is reassigned to the more general order of the episteme and discursive practices.
What was untenable to Foucault in the Bachelardian rationalist epistemology was fundamentally that it maintained the categories of truth and error, as well as the notion of a break, characteristic of rationalist thought in general, between truth and error.
Contrary to this Foucauldian perspective as well as to Rorty’s “relativist pragmatism,” which is influenced by Foucault and which Peden opposes at the end of his contribution, Althusser manages to retain the rationalism criticized by Foucault—a rationalism rooted in the Bachelardian thematization of the “break” between the true and the false—while simultaneously avoiding the positing of an idealist Cartesian subject that can guarantee the distinction between truth and error. One measures in this way the importance of Spinoza’s strategic detour as well as the novelty of Spinozistic conception of truth as a norm of itself, instituted by means of the intrication of coherence and correspondence, radically liberated from the Cartesian notion of a subject of truth. To this degree, Spinoza very well does constitute the means to save rationalism and escape the postmodern sirens of relativism. He does this within the framework of what we can call an anti-subjective materialism, which itself is implicated by his affirmation of the primacy of thought (the automatic process of truth as the necessary interlocking of adequate ideas) over and above any “knowing” subject.
Translated by Conrad Bongard Hamilton, PhD candidate in Philosophy at the Université Paris 8 Vincennes Saint-Denis
1 E2p43s.
2 E1a6.
3 E2d4.
4 E2d4ex.
5 On this point of disagreement between Spinoza and Descartes, cf. E2p49s.
6 Cf. Donald Davidson, “A Coherence Theory of Truth and Knowledge” [1983], in Subjective, Intersubjective, Objective (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001).
7 See Louis Althusser, “Elements of Self-Criticism: On Spinoza,” in Louis Althusser, Essays in Self-Criticism, trans. Grahame Lock (London: New Left Books, 1976).
8 See Louis Althusser, Psychoanalysis and the Human Sciences (1963–64), trans. Steven Rendall, foreword Pascale Gillot, pref. Olivier Corpet, and François Matheron (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016).
9 See also E2p48s and E2p49.
10 Cf. in this respect E2p49.
11 E2p43.
12 E2p43s.
13 Michel Foucault, The Archeology of Knowledge (London: Tavistock, 1972), esp. 146–149.