Peden, Knox. Spinoza
Contra Phenomenology: French Rationalism from Cavaillès to Deleuze, Stanford University Press, Stanford,
2014, 384 pp.
Though it is tempting to do so, it would be incorrect to
label Knox Peden’s Spinoza Contra Phenomenology as a history. The book’s
subject, the tradition of twentieth century French Spinozism, is famously
antagonistic to the conflation of reason and history that it sees as endemic in
post-Hegelian philosophy. Spinoza himself counseled his readers to see things
“under the aspect of eternity” (13). A purely historical account of Spinozist
thought, then, would run the risk of diverging too greatly from its object; of
examining it from a position external to its own methods and concerns. Peden is
well aware of this. His command of and sensitivity to Spinoza and his
descendants is too strong for this not to be the case. At best, for these
thinkers, the historical realization of concepts and ideas, their “discovery,”
is external to their value. When asked by his doctoral committee why he had not
covered the history of philosophical speculation on mathematics in his thesis
on set theory, Jean Cavaillès, one of the books primary figures,
“claimed that his work was concerned solely with set theory itself, not with
its influence on the conceptions of philosophers” (35). At worst, reason and
history are seen as opposed: reason the hero, and history the villain.
Discussing Cavaillès’ political activities in the French Resistance during
World War II, Peden paraphrases Georges Canguilhem saying, “If ‘History’ might
explain the advent of Nazism, just as it accounts for Napoleon’s arrival in
Jena, then what explains Cavaillès is the force of reason against history”
(22).
Nonetheless, the book does have a diachronic scope; it is
concerned with the movement of thought from Jean Cavaillès to Gilles Deleuze.
Though history is secondary to reason for the thinkers in question, reason is
understood as dynamic, and consequently its unfolding is of primary importance
to them. Peden writes:
A key terminological distinction for Cavaillès, was that
between histoire and devenir. Histoire was the realm of
the contingent, the world as experienced, in short, the lived. Cavaillès did
not deny that mathematics had an histoire; more important, however, was
the need to uncover the devenir, the becoming or evolution, that
subtended that history and that possessed a rational integrity independent of
historical contingency (42).
While this unfolding may be accessible in purely theoretical
terms, the conceptual diaspora of a tradition is also revelatory of its
processes, tensions, and mutations. Peden purposefully utilizes a capacious definition
of Spinozism for just this reason, covering “thinkers for whom aspects of
Spinoza’s thought played an instrumental role in their own projects,” rather
than only specialists (7). By doing so, he is able to unpack the myriad
resources latent in Spinoza’s thought and trace its otherwise obscure fault
lines. Thus, even the more historical material in the book is only included
insofar as it is revelatory of something conceptual.
Additionally, calling Spinoza Contra Phenomenology a
history neglects the sense in which the“contra” of the title denotes a
relationship. Though this relationship is localized in a time (the twentieth
century) and a place (France), Peden’s principle focus, again, is theoretical.
His concern is with how the two discourses developed out of a tension that
preceded each individual term, at least logically. This is also why it would be
much too simple to say that Peden sides with the Spinozists. He does to the
extent that his book is an attempt to redress an imbalance in historical and
philosophical scholarship, one that portrays twentieth century French
philosophy as irrational and antirational and which identifies phenomenology as
the source of these tendencies. One of his aims is to replace this
understanding with one that gives sufficient weight to the influence of
rationalism, in this case Spinozist rationalism, on the philosophical discourse
of that era. But only roughly half the book concerns die-hard Spinozists
(Martial Gueroult, Jean Cavaillès, Louis Althusser), while the other half
concerns a critic of Spinozist rationalism (Ferdinand Alquié), a thinker torn
until the end of his career between the two positions (Jean-Toussaint Desanti),
and a thinker who attempted to synthesize them (Gilles Deleuze). Disrupting
this dichotomy further, Peden shows us that rationalism itself is a disputed
territory. He begins the book by outlining the German reception of Spinoza and
the widespread fear, maybe best exemplified by Kant, that Spinozism entails an
overextension of reason and moral destitution.
