A Response: Between Matheron and Spinoza, Something Happens …

Laurent Bove

Alexandre Matheron is known, by philosophers and historians of philosophy, as one of the greatest, if not the greatest, commentators on Spinoza’s philosophy.¹ His oeuvre consists of two major works: Individu et communauté chez Spinoza and Le Christ et le salut des ignorants chez Spinoza.² These works were followed, over the course of nearly thirty years, by a multitude of papers on Early Modern philosophy. These papers, previously published in journals or conference proceedings, were collected a few years ago in a superb volume published by the ENS with a preface by Pierre-François Moreau.³ The publication of these texts came at a significant moment in the reception of Matheron’s work. For Matheron, whose work on Early Modern philosophy had been a reference point for French students and researchers in philosophy since the 1970s, was not only a universally recognized historian of philosophy, but also—and without having had to forsake his specialization as a historian of Early Modern philosophy, and in particular of Spinoza’s philosophy—a thinker whose works had gradually modified (and continue silently to work upon) contemporary thought. This second aspect of Matheron’s work’s reception and its consequences has only been manifest (or effectively recognized) since the 2000s, the years which saw researchers in diverse disciplines and figures of cultural and political life not only pay homage to his works, but also and especially take inspiration from them, while pointing to the power of his works outside the domain of their initial investigation. The re-publication of his papers allow us now to better understand the reasons for these two aspects or effects of Matheron’s work—aspects or effects which are inseparable given that all his studies have had, as their unique object, seventeenth-century philosophy. Matheron has never claimed to be anything other than a specialist of Spinoza’s philosophy and of the Early Modern period. In 1997, when Moreau and I asked him for an interview with the aim of returning to his philosophical trajectory, Matheron was extremely surprised and asked us (with complete sincerity) “who” could be interested in such an interview! As always when asked for advice or when questioned about Spinoza, Matheron proved entirely willing, though he could not imagine that his answers would be read by many people with great attentiveness.

First and above all, Matheron is a thinker with a rigorous method and with great expertise in the history of philosophy; but he is also the thinker and the initiator of what Antonio Negri has called a bifurcation at the heart of philosophy.4 A double bifurcation even, which concerns not only the rupture carried out by Spinoza at the heart of Early Modern philosophy, but also the rupture at the heart of contemporary thought, which Matheron’s reading of Spinoza made possible after 1968. Following our presentation of the works of Matheron and of the place within them of his Études sur Spinoza et les philosophies de l’âge classique, we will return, in conclusion, to the second aspect of this reception.

I. From Methodological Kinship to Hermeneutic Displacement

Matheron, treating the methodological question which every interpreter of Spinoza has to ask himself, writes that there are “two ways of approaching the question of the coherence or incoherence of the Ethics: either one takes into account the ‘order of reasons,’ as Spinoza wanted, or one doesn’t. If one doesn’t take it into account, then one can effectively attribute to Spinoza all the contradictions one wishes. […] But I believe that, if one decides to do it [to take the geometric order seriously], one discovers in the Ethics a great logical coherence.”⁵

Matheron’s commentary strives above all to demonstrate this coherence, not only with respect to the Ethics but with respect to Spinoza’s oeuvre as a whole, whose architectonics Matheron explores by indefatigably taking on points of difficulty and key moments so as to test, and finally to demonstrate, its solidity. In this, Matheron follows the path already laid out by a great work written by a master of the history of philosophy, Martial Gueroult’s Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons.⁶ From Gueroult, who was Matheron’s “godfather” at the CNRS, Matheron essentially takes the structural method put in place in Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons, a work which functions for Matheron as “a genuine ideal model.”⁷ During the preparation of Individu et communauté, Matheron did not know the precise contents of Gueroult’s two forthcoming commentary on Spinoza.8 Gueroult certainly spoke to him at length of his first volume which would appear at the end of 1968, a few months before Matheron’s Individu et communauté, though the second volume would not appear until 1974. And Matheron followed Gueroult in adopting the architectonic approach to the oeuvre, and also with regard to Spinoza’s “absolute rationalism,” as Gueroult writes, which will become, in Matheron, not only a abstract principle but also the Spinozist project to be indefinitely pursued and realized, the “integral intelligibility of the real.”

Nonetheless, Matheron produces an entirely different illumination of the Dutch philosopher’s thought by sharply displacing the oeuvre’s center of gravity. If he remains, first of all, largely faithful to Gueroult’s methodical reading of the Ethics, his commentary on Spinoza, however, commences with the elucidation of two key concepts, that of the “individual” and that of the “community,” with regard to the theory of conatus and the intellectual love of God in Ethics Part 5. This means that he will place at the system’s heart the physical theory of the communication of movement (which defines an individual in Part 2) as well as the theory of affects and their communication (in Part 3). With this, and with what Matheron shows of the political and constitutive applicability of the theory of the passions, the political theory became central. This is a domain that wasn’t of great interest to Gueroult or Spinoza scholarship in general. The latter, following the Anglo-Saxon countries, equated Spinoza’s political theory with that of Hobbes, seeing in it nothing more than an unfortunate act of plagiarism without interest; or else, by contrast, one enacted a fictitious opposition between Spinoza and Hobbes by superimposing onto the author of the Theological-Political Treatise the belief in liberal contractualism as opposed to a Hobbesian theory of the right of the strongest thus entailing two misreadings of both Hobbes and of Spinoza!⁹ By following Gueroult on the methodological level, Matheron was also therefore able to radically mutate Spinoza’s reading, interpretation, and reception.

II. Sublating Gueroult, Rediscovering Delbos

Commentators, Matheron writes in his study “Les deux Spinoza de Victor Delbos,” had taken little interest in the political theory of the philosopher from Amsterdam since the first work of Delbos, that is to say, since 1893!¹⁰ Delbos—whose second book from 1916, Le spinozisme,¹¹ Gueroult claims, according to Matheron, “is never wrong”—was one of the few commentators Matheron read while preparing his own work. Indeed, Delbos is a commentator who, before Gueroult, had already introduced an “immanent critique” of Spinozism.12 Matheron would return in 1998 to Delbos’s first work, to Delbos’s intuitions and to “truths which, [he] believed, had become, as [Delbos] said, our shared inheritance,”¹³ “truths” which the “second” Delbos had, however, further “refined” during a specific historical context—that of the First World War—in which “the criteria of philosophical respectability had changed,” and in which it was a matter of carefully dealing with all the “themes” that give the appearance of “coming from across the Rhine.”¹⁴ Matheron points then to the “expansion of often profound, always fertile sketches” of Delbos’s first book, and to its themes, “full of a promising future,”¹⁵ the exploration of which his own research, in his Études sur Spinoza, will be devoted. Among such sketches, Matheron was drawn to Delbos’s treatment of the theme of “life” which, as Matheron underlines, is not limited to a “vitalist Romanticism” to which it is too often reduced; the (correlative) analysis of the conatus, the effort made by each being to persevere in its being, “in terms of the freedom” which comes to “dynamize” nature and which anticipates Matheron’s own discovery of an ontologie de la puissance (“ontology of power”) [potentia]; and finally, the reading, of the Theological-Political Treatise, certainly brief but irreproachable, wherein one finds Delbos taking seriously, according to the principle of Spinozist politics, the identification of droit (“right”) [jus] and puissance (“power”) [potentia] that moves toward delivering the analyses of the genesis of the State “from all recourses to any contractualism,”¹⁶ and also, already, toward the discovery of “an outline of a theory of History” at the same time as toward “a very refined structural analysis of the self-regulating mechanisms of the State,”¹⁷ a perspective which Matheron himself will not cease to enrich and deepen.

These forgotten flashes of insight from 1893, which Delbos had later carefully repressed during the First World War, are taken back up in Matheron’s first commentary on Spinoza. If we understand the great lineage Delbos-Gueroult-Matheron, it is fitting, if paradoxical, that, as Matheron explains, he will have by that same time “begun to sublate Gueroult”!¹⁸ But this sublation is not fully carried out until the 1980s, as Matheron specifies, those years in which the vast majority of the articles that today compose the collection (Études sur Spinoza) were written. For example, at the very beginning of Individu et communauté Matheron advances the idea of substance as “pure activity” (an idea which, Matheron specifies, comes from Pierre Lachièze-Rey,¹⁹ and which will in turn motivate his reading of Being, in Spinoza, as genesis and productivity). This interpretation is grounded in the Spinozist theory of genetic definition in the Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect, and not in the Ethics itself and its theory of power. Yet during this period, Matheron, still too Gueroultian, had left this point in parentheses. So forgotten was the theory of genetic definition, moreover, that Matheron had to nourish himself solely on Gueroult’s two volume commentary on Spinoza; likewise, the theory of power in Ethics Part 1 will only truly be understood after the fact, beginning with the studies of the 1980s when Matheron, sublating Gueroult, revived his own first ideas.

III. A Dynamic Ontology

If we begin by taking into account this movement made up of primary intuitions, of forgetting them, and then of later returning to them, it is equally possible to outline a hypothesis regarding the general meaning of the trajectory of Matheron’s commentary leading to the Études sur Spinoza. From his two great works to his articles, and across the years in which these studies were written, Matheron, it seems, imperceptibly displaces his approach to Spinozism from a philosophy that could be qualified as a structural philosophy of “necessity” (a dominant style in the 1960s and 1970s, due to both the over-determining effects of the Althusserian reading of Spinoza and Marx and the works of Claude Lévi-Strauss20) to a philosophy of the real movement of productive power and of “freedom.” This approach consists in insisting much more strongly on the dynamic features of a Nature that produces infinite things in infinite ways and which envelops the immanent identity of God-Nature and of the thing. Granted, this is only a displacement of tone: according to either approach, freedom is always substance’s “free necessity” and/or individuals’ “adequate causality.” But this displacement operates a certain theoretical and practical inflection in that it liberates the interpretation of Spinoza not from the real necessity of the Real itself but from its determinist structural hypostasis and from its physico-mathematical model.²¹ And this in order to grasp and demonstrate, from the point of view of a dynamic ontology, all the power, productive diversity and freedom of Nature and/or of singular things. The intuition of Individu et communauté which is asserted from its, that “every individual is partially or totally self-producing […] and due to this self-productivity, it can be considered, under analysis, either as Naturing or as Natured,” could thereby plainly affirm itself in the concept of a self-organizing Nature which “is thus the productive activity immanent to all things, which gives to itself, inexhaustibly, all logically possible structures.”22 Matheron specifies that:

Each singular thing, in as much as it is God Himself to the extent that He gives Himself this or that determinate structure, necessarily produces effects in the frame of this structure: for all things, definitively, to exist is to produce effects. This leads us directly to the theory of conatus, which the entirety of Part 1 has made it possible to rigorously ground.²³

Consequently, Matheron’s interpretation of Ethics Part 1, which is intended to show how Part 1 grounds the conatus doctrine, is at present free from the Gueroultian lineage that, for many years, had been an obstacle to the direct reading of the thought of power [potentia] and of its fertility. Now, by contrast, Matheron establishes an “ontology of power” [potentia] issued from a kind of “second foundation” in the Ethics, one nourished by the whole political theory and the theory of History and which is correlated to a re-appraisal of the unity of the writing of the Ethics itself.²⁴ This taking into account of the political theory and the theory of History has, as another consequence, an ontological radicalization that Matheron also carries out at the heart of his commentary, thereby marking his independence, once again, with regard to Gueroult but also, it must be underlined, with regard to a certain Marxism and a certain, orthodox relation between Spinoza and Marx. Thus, Matheron declares:

At the beginning, I began to study Spinoza because I saw in him someone who had the great merit, beyond the limits that his class perspective imposed on him, to be a precursor of Marx; now, I more have the tendency to see in Marx someone who has the great merit of being one of the successors of Spinoza in certain domains.²⁵

Whence comes the second aspect of the political reception of Matheron, wherein the reading of Spinoza has the effect of making Spinozism itself exist ever more powerfully.

IV. From the “Vulgar” to the “Infamous”

Such is the meaning of Matheron’s impressive study, “Le statut ontologique de l’Écriture sainte et la doctrine spinoziste de l’individualité,” which offers an analysis of the passage from the “semantic” point of view to the “pragmatic” one²⁶—an analysis that is altogether original as a dynamic theory of interpretation and of writing’s reception and effects. “Exister c’est puissance” (existence is power) [potentia] and power [potentia] exists only in and through its effects: this is what this study, extremely prescient for its applicability elsewhere, develops with regard to the example of writing. What, in effect, does Matheron there teach us? That writing, like “every publicly exposed system […] including that of Spinoza himself,”27 is defined and exists more or less powerfully only “according to the use” its readers make of it. “It seems then that the ontological status of writing, and no doubt of all works in general,²⁸ is that of a complex individuality comprised of essential parts, an ensemble of men engaged in a certain type of practice, functioning according to determinate rules. An individuality somewhat analogous, fundamentally, to that of political society.”²⁹ This reflection is directly transposable to Matheron’s own practice of commentary and its consequences. In effect, while many intellectuals, including Matheron himself, take their distance from traditional Marxism, nonetheless the reading Matheron makes of Spinoza in the 1970s and 1980s makes it possible, as Negri forcefully underlines, not only to provide the theoretical and political power to “refuse all the variants, “strong” or “weak,” of the thought of krisis”³⁰ but also and especially to allow us “to start to rebuild, on the terrain of Spinozism, a revolutionary perspective.”³¹

This new perspective is, however differently, also of interest to the sciences. Matheron shows the degree to which the ontology of power was not only a central concern “at the height of the scientific revolution of the 17th-Century: it was conceptually on the same level during all subsequent scientific revolutions.”³² Regarding the social sciences, Yves Citton (a specialist, among other things, in eighteenth--century literature) and Frédéric Lordon (a social and economic theorist) write that, with Matheron, “a meticulous, rigorous and inspired interpretation gives a glimpse of the power, the radicality, and the originality of the Spinozan construction of the social” in that the author, through the specificity of his commentary, carries out “a true translation of the Ethics and the Political Treatise into a language and a mode of reasoning with which large numbers of researchers [in the social sciences] are likely to find themselves spontaneously in accord.”³³ What is thus remarkable and exceptional in Matheron is that it is in holding strictly to his role as a historian of philosophy that his work has escaped its domain and can now respond to the expectations of our time.³⁴

Inversely, it was not without some resistance, nor indignation, from the traditional philosophical world—which Matheron recalls with amusement—that the work was first welcomed. First “totally ignored or despised”³⁵ at the heart of the university, my work, says Matheron, was next denounced for “the crime of inhumanity,”³⁶ then qualified as “vulgarity,” or in other words “infamy.”37 A crime of inhumanity, apparently, when Matheron brutally declares, but not without precise demonstrations, that “Spinoza, strictly speaking, theoretically doesn’t know what man is, and he does just fine: he doesn’t need to know it to edify his system.”³⁸ Spinoza, who does not define the specific essence of man sticks, according to Matheron, to a greater level of generality, that of a supra-specific essence, which, for the needs of practice and/or the use of common life, opens onto the category of the “similar” below and beyond the human. There is indeed a human nature, but Matheron shows that there is no need to base oneself on it to develop an ethics! And that it is even because one can do without its presupposition that an ethics open to what is different (and nonetheless “similar”) is practically possible and necessary. As for the qualifications of vulgar and infamous, it is because of the radicalization of his reading of Spinoza’s political theory that Matheron inherits while also daring to affirm that it is evidently that of Spinoza himself. If the Theological-Political Treatise indeed already clearly identifies droit (“right”) [jus] with puissance (“power”), that book still employs a language of natural right doctrines. Now, according to Matheron, Spinoza would have been able to do without the notion of the contract beginning with the Theological-Political Treatise; and it is indeed for him a proof of theoretical “maturation” that in the Political Treatise the social contract disappears. It is because of this, Matheron claims, that he was accused of “vulgarity, since it is well known,” he mockingly continues, “that a great philosopher, without very special authorization, does not evolve, and certainly not in the wrong direction!”³⁹ When, thereafter, Matheron arrives at considering the contractualism of the Theological-Political Treatise as only, in truth, “an exoteric adaptation of the doctrine of the Political Treatise” (thereby indicating that Spinoza already had this insight in 1670), the interpreter’s so-called “vulgarity” thus becomes, in the eyes of his adversaries, as he puts it himself, an “infamy,” an “infamy” which, beyond academic polemics, overflowed its field to become a material social force.

Just as enlightening and passionate as reading Spinoza himself, reading Matheron’s studies is certainly just as demanding. Yet in both cases knowledge is within easy reach of all those who decide to freely use their reason. For it is only a matter of allowing oneself to be patiently and actively guided “as if by the hand,” following the expression of the Ethics, by demonstrations whose validity we are ourselves invited to verify. We are left with the knowledge that in Matheron as in Spinoza, in the process of this remarkable exercise, it is nearly always ourselves, our lives, and our history which are also in question.

Notes

Translated by Conall Cash, PhD candidate in Romance Studies at Cornell University.

1    Our title refers to a phrase spoken by Louis Althusser at the ENS in 1972, reported in Laurent Bove and Pierre-François-Moreau, “À propos de Spinoza: Entretien avec Alexandre Matheron,” Multitudes 3 (2000): 169–200.

2    Alexandre Matheron, Individu et communauté chez Spinoza (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1969) and Alexandre Matheron, Le Christ et le salut des ignorants (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1971).

3    Alexandre Matheron, Études sur Spinoza et les philosophies de l’âge classique (Lyon: ENS Éditions, 2011).

4    See Antonio Negri, Spinoza for Our Time: Politics and Postmodernity, trans. William McCuaig (New York: Columbia University Press, 2013).

5    Matheron, Études, 457.

6    Martial Gueroult, Descartes selon l’ordre des raisons, 2 vols (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1953).

7    Bove, and Moreau, “À propos de Spinoza,” 171.

8    Martial Gueroult, Spinoza 1: Dieu (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1968) and Gueroult, Spinoza 2: L’âme (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1974).

9    In Matheron, Études, see “Le « droit du plus fort »: Hobbes contre Spinoza” and “Le problème de l’évolution de Spinoza. Du Traité théologico-politique au Traité politique.” See also Matheron’s studies in comparative analysis and his studies of Hobbes: “La fonction théorique de la démocratie chez Spinoza et Hobbes”; “Politique et religion chez Hobbes et Spinoza”; “Obligation morale et obligation juridique selon Hobbes”; “Hobbes, la Trinité et les caprices de la représentation.”

10  See Victor Delbos Le problème moral dans la philosophie de Spinoza et dans l’histoire du spinozisme (Paris: Félix Alcan, 1893). [Republished in 1990 by the Groupe de Recherches Spinozistes for the Presses de l’Université de Paris Sorbonne with a preface by Alexandre Matheron.]

11  See Victor Delbos, Le spinozisme, revised edn (Paris: Vrin, 2005).

12  Matheron, Études, 440.

13  Ibid., 442.

14  Ibid., 443.

15  Ibid., 439.

16  Ibid., 444.

17  Ibid., 445.

18  Bove, and Moreau, “A propos de Spinoza,” 180.

19  See Pierre Lachièze-Rey, Les origines cartésiennes du Dieu de Spinoza (Paris: Vrin, 1950).

20  Cf. Matheron, Études, 180.

21  “In Individu et communauté I have a bit too much of a tendency to want to create a physico-mathematical model for every type of individual. I had the tendency to think that everything could be mathematized ” (ibid., 183).

22  Ibid., 577.

23  Ibid.

24  Ibid., 457.

25  Bove, and Moreau, “A propos de Spinoza,” 176.

26  See Alexandre Matheron, “Le statut ontologique de l’Écriture sainte et la doctrine spinoziste de l’individualité,” in Matheron, Études.

27  Ibid., 415.

28  My italics.

29  Ibid., 413.

30  See Negri, Spinoza for Our Time, 27. Negri writes “krisis” in reference Massimo Cacciari, Krisis: Saggio sulla crisi del pensiero negative da Nietzsche a Wittgenstein (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1976).

31  Ibid.

32  Matheron, Études, 599.

33  See Yves Citton and Fréderic Lordon, ed., Spinoza et les sciences sociales: De la puissance de la multitude à l’économie des affects (Paris: Éditions Amsterdam 2008), 26–27.

34  Unlike the Spinozist philosopher Gilles Deleuze, whom Matheron admires without being influenced by.

35  Bove, and Moreau, “A propos de Spinoza,” 198.

36  Alexandre Matheron, “Modes et genres de connaissance (Traité de la réforme de l’entendement, paragraphes 18 à 29),” in Matheron, Études, 473, note.

37  Ibid., 462.

38  Alexandre Matheron, “L’anthropologie spinoziste ?” in Matheron, Études, 19.

39  Alexandre Matheron, “L’Anomalie sauvage d’Antonio Negri,” in Matheron, Études, 462.