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

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