Individual and Community and Its American Legacy
Steven Barbone
Those of us who gathered for the conference, Spinoza France États-Unis, are familiar—thanks to the many, detailed, and in-depth works on Spinoza that they have produced—with the names of the most important French Spinoza scholars: Martial Gueroult, Alexandre Matheron, Louis Althusser, and Pierre Macherey. We also recognize the names of many of those who gathered with us at this conference: Étienne Balibar, Pierre-François Moreau, Chantal Jaquet, Charles Ramond, Laurent Bove, Pascal Sévérac, Jacqueline Lagrée, and others. I said, “Those of us gathered for the conference” because in other places, especially in monolingual countries such as the United States, most of these names are hardly recognizable. There are, however, some exceptions, but for those authors who are more known in the United States, it is rather for their work that does not directly concern Spinoza. For example, Louis Althusser is much admired for his work on Marxism, but not for his studies on Spinozism, even though he declared: “We were Spinozists.” But pay attention to the verb tense: we were Spinozists, not that we are today. Very few in the United States think about Gilles Deleuze and Spinoza despite his translated books, Practical Spinoza and Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza. Deleuze is more remembered for his work on transcendental empiricism and his book, Difference and Repetition. Étienne Balibar—who had a position at the University of California at Irvine—is perhaps the best-known French Spinozist in the United States because of his book, Spinoza et la politique, translated into English since 1998 as Spinoza and Politics and also for several other texts, also translated into English. However, among Americans, Balibar is more generally identified with his mentor, Louis Althusser, and as such more of a Marxist thinker than a Spinozist.
Among French commentators who are recognized as Spinozists, their works remain hidden or inaccessible behind the veil of monolingualism in the United States. That is why, despite his monumental contribution to Spinoza studies, even Moreau’s works are not so well known in the United States except for some that have been translated into English and are parts of anthologies. Alexandre Matheron’s contributions have suffered the same destiny with very few translations of his articles, mainly as parts of anthologies.
These opening remarks on the small number of translations and dissemination of French thought on Spinoza does not mean that French thought on Spinoza remains unknown among us overall monolingual Americans. French influence does show itself in American thought on Spinoza, and it’s not hiding. Still, it remains rather in the background, underlying how American scholars even formulate important questions that arise about Spinoza.
But first, let’s look to the past. According to Lorenzo Vinciguerra, despite a few in-depth studies—e.g., those of Victor Delbos, Jules Lagneau, Alain, Léon Brunschvicg, Pierre Lachièze-Rey—interest in Spinoza was relatively less pronounced until the 1960s in France (or the United States, for that matter).1 During the first half of the last century, existentialism was rather more fashionable in France and logical positivism in the United States. Everything changed toward the end of the 1960s with the two great books on Parts 1 and 2 of the Ethics by Martial Gueroult along with, as Moreau notes, Matheron’s “most remarkable” book, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza.2 The publication of this book, largely ignored by Anglophones, caused Louis Althusser to give up his plans on teaching his Spinoza course at the École Normale Supérieure, in 1969, and instead offer a different course on Jean Jacques Rousseau because, as Althusser declared, Matheron’s study had already said everything that he had intended to say about Spinoza.3
However, Matheron—perhaps “the greatest commentator on Spinoza’s philosophy”4—opened the door to plenty of work on the problems of individuation in Spinoza and the priority (or the primacy) of the individual citizen over the community or, conversely, of the primacy of the State over its subjects. On this important issue, I think explicitly of the French seeds that have been sown in American soil, seeds that have already produced their fruit in American thought. The reader may decide if this harvest is any good.
Bove was right when he noted that Matheron’s work opened up a double bifurcation: first, there is Spinoza’s rupture within the heart of modern philosophy itself and then also another rupture, the one Matheron’s interpretation caused in contemporary history of philosophy. I would like to mention there is yet another prong that also finds its origins in Matheron’s reading, and this raises the following question: Does Spinoza give us a philosophy of the individual or a philosophy of the community? Metaphysically and even politically, which is prior, individual or community?
How is the “communitarian” reading of Spinoza characterized? Ted Stolze explains this in his study:
Anglophone Marxists have scarcely engaged with the work of the French philosopher Alexandre Matheron, whose 1969 book Individu et communauté chez Spinoza is widely regarded as a landmark of Spinoza scholarship. Yet Matheron’s book is also a sustained Marxist intervention into the history of philosophy.5
Matheron’s reading of Spinoza may, indeed, qualify as “Marxist” in the sense that it sees the definition of a collective end in the philosophy of Spinoza. For this collective end, Spinoza would have thus written a “politics of the third kind.”6 This means that there is, therefore, for human individuals, a collective life that exists beyond the imperium.7 And, in the same way that in this community (of Marxist obedience) that individuals share all material goods, they share as well the same mind. Stolze writes that for Matheron, the purpose of community is to give “complete satisfaction to our individual and interhuman conatuses: surpassing all alienations and divergences; an actualization of the I in the most complete lucidity, an actualization of the We in the most complete of communions.”8
If we follow Stolze’s commentary on Matheron, we understand that this particular reading of Matheron puts the community above the individual, who is nothing more than a means to an end. The “I” exists only for the “We” who perfects itself insofar as individuals perfect themselves. Stolze’s reading is thus characteristic of communitarian interpretation that has been done in the United States on Matheron’s book.
But this is not the only interpretation of his book, for there are others who instead find support in it for the idea of the priority of the individual over the community. Based on his reading of Individu et communauté, Lee Rice of Marquette University taught this second perspective to his own group of scholars. His reading revolves around a fixed point: the power of the individual. Douglas Den Uyl, one of Rice’s students, argued for the affirmation of the individual in the face of the political community when he published his work, Power, State, and Freedom: An Interpretation of Spinoza’s Political Philosophy in 1983. In this book, he supported the primacy of the individual over the community by emphasizing that Spinoza himself was a methodological individualist.9 There are, says Den Uyl, only individuals who are citizens, and the state is nothing but a human-made condition for their salvation. The community thus is “not something organic, but simply […] the effective organization of individual power.”10 According to Den Uyl, for Spinoza, society is only a dynamic process, a continuous activity of individuals—i.e., the people who make it up—and their interactions. There is therefore nothing but the relationships and connections between the actions of the individuals who are powers in themselves. The community is nothing other than the citizens themselves bound by the common laws that describe all social actions. The community’s laws are, therefore, sustained only by the individual forces of its citizens. In the final analysis, then, we have to say that it is the individual person who is the more important.
Rice continued this Matheronian line of thought concerning the power to act with his studies on nominalism from 1994.11 Rice sees a strictly nominalist metaphysics in Spinoza that allows only discreet individuals. We can thus use set theory to explain how we speak of dogs, things, people, and so forth: these terms are only names of sets of individual things collected in a group. As a student of Rice, in 2002, I again asked the question: What is an individual for Spinoza?12 In that study, I suggest that the political state is not an individual in the Spinozistic sense but only an ens rationis. Together with Rice in 2005, I continued this reflection on the relationship between the individual and the state, and we again definitively concluded that the political State is not an individual but only a means or a tool by which people can preserve themselves.13 The State exists for the citizens and not citizens for the state.
This interpretation of Spinoza is possible thanks to the work of Matheron on the power of individuals, and it also could well be that this reading should be useful in the case we interest ourselves with other big metaphysical questions.
It is questionable, however, whether Matheron himself would agree with this latter interpretation, and the answer is definitely “No.” In a letter he sent me after the appearance of a co-authored essay with Rice in a book prepared in his honor, Architectures de la raison: mélanges offerts à Alexandre Matheron, Matheron confirmed, in fact, that he was not in agreement with our interpretation but that he was happy that it was his thought that occasioned it.14
And I think I know why he was nevertheless happy. It is really thanks to the Matheronian interpretation that Rice and I have been able to apply the Spinozistic power theory to the problems of contemporary society: first the problem of the suicide, then the question of sexual identity,15 then new political actions such as those of feminism, and so on. Matheron’s reading, from the point of view of the individual’s power, has opened the door to contemporary relevance in Spinoza studies. So here indeed is a third way of reading Spinoza: he is a philosopher who belongs to the history of philosophy, of course, but he also belongs to our present. It is this perspective that no doubt pleased Matheron, who himself has done studies on Spinoza and women, Spinoza and sexuality, etc.
Thus, Matheron gives us an interpretation from the point of view of individual power, and his American heirs widely developed this aspect of his work. The second prong suggested in Laurent Bove’s article, namely, the quiet impact of Matheron’s work on contemporary thought, has also borne fruits in the United States where the Matheronian interpretation has produced two types of reading Spinoza: a Spinoza who is part of the history of philosophy and a Spinoza who continues to play an important role for understanding of our own contemporaneity. No one is obliged to adhere to this or that interpretation, but it’s clear here that an American windfall is the result of a French seed.
Notes
Translated by Jack Stetter
1 Lorenzo Vinciguerra, “Spinoza in French Philosophy Today,” Philosophy Today 53, no. 4 (2009): 422–437. See esp. 432.
2 Pierre-François Moreau, “Spinoza’s Reception and Influence,” trans. Roger Ariew, in The Cambridge Companion to Spinoza, ed. Don Garrett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 430.
3 Ted Stolze, “Revisiting a Marxist Encounter with Spinoza: Alexandre Matheron on Militant Reason and Intellectual Love of God,” Crisis & Critique 2, no. 1 (2015): 152–169. See esp. 153.
4 See Laurent Bove’s contribution to this volume.
5 Stolze, “Revisiting a Marxist Encounter,” 153.
6 Ibid., 162.
7 Ibid., 158.
8 Ibid., 163. Stolze is translating Alexandre Matheron, Individu et Communauté chez Spinoza (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969), 613.
9 Douglas Den Uyl, Power, State, and Freedom: An Interpretation of Spinoza’s Political Philosophy (Assen: Van Gorcum, 1983), 67.
10 Ibid., 71.
11 See Lee Rice, “Spinoza’s Nominalism,” Canadian Journal of Philosophy 24, no. 1 (1994): 19–32.
12 See Steven Barbone, “What Counts as an Individual for Spinoza?” in Spinoza: Metaphysical Themes, ed. John Biro and Olli Koistinen (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002).
13 See Steven Barbone and Lee Rice, “Individu et État chez Spinoza,” NASS Monograph 12 (2005): 1–30.
14 See Steven Barbone and Lee Rice, “La naissance d’un nouvelle politique,” in Architectures de la Raison: Mélanges Offerts à Alexandre Matheron, ed. Pierre-François Moreau (Fontenay-aux-Roses: ENS Éditions, 1997).
15 For a recent discussion of Spinoza and sexuality in French, see Bernard Pautrat, Ethica sexualis: Spinoza et l’amour (Paris: Rivages, 2011).