The Order of Reasons: Martial Gueroult and the Structural Genesis of Philosophical Systems

Abstract

In his review of Martial Gueroult’s book on Spinoza, Deleuze claims that it is a perfect example of his own methodology and furthermore that Spinoza’s theories are the most suitable and definitive object for such a method. Gueroult’s method then should not be regarded as a straightforward tool for providing a historical account of past philosophies, but instead as pertinent to a definite philosophy of the history of philosophy whose conditions can be found in the same sort of “genetic rationalism” as is employed within philosophical systems like Spinoza’s. The coherence that Deleuze detects is between the method employed by Gueroult and the objects to which it is applied; and those objects appear as realizations of the historical conditions of philosophy. The article argues that Gueroult’s monographs had introduced Deleuze to the “genetic or constructive philosophy” of Spinoza, Descartes or Fichte in which those philosophers had employed the same kind of transcendental method to address the historical structural changes of the philosophical problems, From this Deleuze came to understood the possibility that becoming applies to philosophy. In order to support this thesis, the article first introduces Martial Gueroult’s notion of the philosophy of the history of philosophy; then it shows how this can be applied as a method to the study of past philosophical systems; and it deals finally with Deleuze’s personal and original application of this method to produce a creative becoming of philosophy.