The Idea of Beginning in Jules Lequier's Philosophy 1666927201, 9781666927207

Table of contents :
Contents
Foreword: Process Themes in the Work of Jules Lequier • Donald Wayne Viney
Preface: Historical Landmarks
Introduction
1 Searching
2 Making
3 Beginning
Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Appendix: Lequier Today
Bibliography
Name Index
Subject Index
About the Author

Citation preview

The Idea of Beginning in Jules Lequier’s Philosophy

Continental Philosophy and the History of Thought Series Editors: Christian Lotz, Michigan State University, and Antonio Calcagno, King’s University College at Western University Advisory Board: Smaranda Aldea, Amy Allen, Silvia Benso, Jeffrey Bloechl, Andrew Cutrofello, Marguerite La Caze, Christina M. Gschwandtner, Dermot Moran, Ann Murphy, Michael Naas, Eric Nelson, Marjolein Oele, Mariana Ortega, Elena Pulcini, Alan Schrift, Anthony Steinbock, Brad Stone The Continental Philosophy and the History of Thought series seeks to augment and amplify scholarship in continental philosophy by exploring its rich and complex relationships to figures, schools of thought, and philosophical movements that are crucial for its evolution and development. A historical focus allows potential authors to uncover important but understudied thinkers and ideas that were nonetheless foundational for various continental schools of thought. Furthermore, critical scholarship on the histories of continental philosophy will also help re-position, challenge, and even overturn dominant interpretations of established, well-known philosophical views while refining and re-interpreting them in light of new historical discoveries and textual analyses. The series seeks to publish carefully edited collections and high-quality monographs that present the best of scholarship in continental philosophy and its histories.

Recent Titles in the Series: The Idea of Beginning in Jules Lequier’s Philosophy by Ghislain Deslandes Hannah Arendt and the History of Thought, edited by Daniel Brennan and Marguerite La Caze Rethinking Philosophy with Borges, Zambrano, Paz, and Plato, by Hugo Moreno The Ontological Roots of Phenomenology: Rethinking the History of Phenomenology and Its Religious Turn, by Anna Jani Negative Dialectics and Event: Nonidentity, Culture, and the Historical Adequacy of Consciousness, by Vangelis Giannakakis Marxism and Phenomenology: The Dialectical Horizons of Critique, edited by Bryan Smyth and Richard Westerman Groundwork of Phenomenological Marxism: Crisis, Body, World, by Ian H. Angus Max Stirner on the Path of Doubt, by Lawrence S. Stepelevich

The Idea of Beginning in Jules Lequier’s Philosophy Ghislain Deslandes

LEXINGTON BOOKS

Lanham • Boulder • New York • London

Published by Lexington Books An imprint of The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. 4501 Forbes Boulevard, Suite 200, Lanham, Maryland 20706 www​.rowman​.com 86-90 Paul Street, London EC2A 4NE Originally published in French as Court traité sur la recherche d'une première vérité. © Les Editions Ovadia 2020 English translation © 2023 by The Rowman & Littlefield Publishing Group, Inc. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without written permission from the publisher, except by a reviewer who may quote passages in a review. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Information Available Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Deslandes, Ghislain, author. Title: The idea of beginning in Jules Lequier’s philosophy / Ghislain Deslandes. Other titles: Court traité sur la recherche d’une première vérité. English Description: Lanham : Lexington Books, 2023. | Series: Continental philosophy and the history of thought | Originally published in French as Court traité sur la recherche d’une première vérité. Les Editions Ovadia, 2020. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2022047221 (print) | LCCN 2022047222 (ebook) | ISBN 9781666927207 (cloth) | ISBN 9781666927214 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: Lequier, Jules, 1814-1862. | Free will and determinism. | Metaphysics. | Philosophy, French—19th century. Classification: LCC B2312.L44 D4713 2023 (print) | LCC B2312.L44 (ebook) | DDC 194—dc23/eng/20221130 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022047221 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2022047222 ∞ ™ The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992.

Contents

Foreword: Process Themes in the Work of Jules Lequier Donald Wayne Viney

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Preface: Historical Landmarks

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Introduction 1 1 Searching13 2 Making41 3 Beginning63 Conclusion93 Acknowledgments 103 Appendix: Lequier Today

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Bibliography117 Name Index

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Subject Index

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About the Author

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Foreword Process Themes in the Work of Jules Lequier Donald Wayne Viney

Ghislain Deslandes’s The Idea of Beginning in Jules Lequier’s Philosophy—a translation of its nearly identical French twin, Court traité sur la recherche d’une première vérité—introduces a highly gifted and original thinker whose work deserves wider attention than it has hitherto received. In addition, the book should be welcomed by all with an interest in someone who was arguably a pivotal but, until now, little-known figure in the history of philosophy. Professor Deslandes notes that Jules Lequier (also spelled Lequyer) is one of the least well-kept secrets of recent French philosophy, for as our author makes clear, there is a modest but growing list of francophone scholars interested in his work. Indeed, the French title of Deslandes’s book does not use “Lequier,” but its allusion to the book most closely associated with that name, La Recherche d’une Première Vérité (Search for a First Truth), would be obvious to most philosophers working in France. Not so in the Anglo-American philosophical community. The two English-speaking groups who might be somewhat familiar with Lequier are those working in the areas of process philosophy or theology and those with an interest in open theism. Nevertheless, Lequier’s fertile mind is one of the springs which has fed some of the most important philosophical currents in the century-and-a-half since he was active—at a minimum, pragmatism, existentialism, and process philosophy. When Lequier drowned at the age of forty-eight in February 1862 off the northwest coast of Brittany, in the bay of Les Rosaires, one could have feared that the philosophical work he dreamed of publishing, but which he left incomplete and in fragments, might perish with him. One of his friends, A. de la Noue, wrote an obituary in which he averred that only a congregation of scholars could put Lequier’s writings in their proper order. And he expressed the wish that the monks of the Solesmes Benedictine Abby (240 km from where Lequier is buried in Plérin) would inherit them.1 This was vii

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not to be, but the world of philosophy can be grateful that one of the most well-known philosophers of the time, Lequier’s friend, Charles Renouvier (1815–1903), acquired the manuscripts. At his own expense, he published in 1865 a limited edition of 120 copies of a selection of Lequier’s works, never put up for sale, but which he distributed to interested parties and to which he gave the title La Recherche d’une Première Vérité.2 Unhappily, a proposal in 1866 to the Société d’Emulation des Côtes-du-Nord to underwrite a more widely available edition was prevented by a high school philosophy teacher in St.-Brieuc who opined that Lequier was predisposed to mental illness and that his work was unsuitable for publication as it mixed confusions and errors with incontestable heresies.3 The larger reading public had to wait over half a century before another edition of La Recherche d’une Première Vérité appeared—the Parisian publishing house Librairie Armand Colin issued an edition in 1924 with an excellent introduction by Ludovic Dugas (1857–1943).4 Again, however, one must credit Renouvier with being a tireless promoter of Lequier’s importance. When the American philosopher-psychologist William James (1842–1910) requested a copy of La Recherche, promising to donate it to the Harvard library when he was finished with it, Renouvier immediately responded and offered James a second copy for his personal library.5 In later years, Renouvier published selections—sometimes lengthy—of Lequier’s writings in his own books and in La Critique Philosophique, the journal that he and Françoise Pillon edited. He always spoke of Lequier as his “master” on the subjects of free will and the quest for certainty. Renouvier was right to say that he saved Lequier from sinking a second time.6 Yet, despite Renouvier’s efforts to champion his friend’s work, it was still possible for Gabriel Séailles to publish an article at the close of the century describing Lequier as “an unknown philosopher” (“Un philosophe inconnu: Jules Lequier” in Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, 1898).7 Séailles’s article and Dugas’s 1924 edition of La Recherche helped to bring Lequier out of the shadows of obscurity. As Deslandes’s bibliography attests, the twentieth century saw six more collections of Lequier’s writings published in France, including the Œuvres complètes, the complete works, in 1952, edited by Jean Grenier (18981971), teacher and friend to Albert Camus.8 Since the turn of the millennium, a steady stream of articles and books about Lequier in French have appeared, of which Deslandes’s is one of the latest. An important development in Lequier studies is the founding of Les amis de Jules Lequier by Goulven Le Brech. In 2010, Le Brech launched its publication, the Cahiers Jules Lequier (Jules Lequier Notebooks), which offers material that is often otherwise difficult to find concerning the philosopher’s life and thought. (See: https://juleslequier​.wordpress​.com​/about/.) Le Brech’s

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interview with Deslandes, first published in volume 8 of the Cahiers, provides a fitting conclusion to this book. All of this is to say that the French have taken notice of the one that Renouvier and James (and many others) have labeled a genius. Lequier found a new champion in the American philosopher-ornithologist Charles Hartshorne (1897–2000) after he learned of Lequier’s work from Jean Wahl (1888–1974) during a visit to Paris in late 1948 or early 1949.9 Wahl had just published a selection of Lequier’s writings in the series Les Classiques de la Liberté (Classics of Freedom), with the Swiss-French publisher Éditions des Trois Collines.10 After the encounter with Wahl, Hartshorne did not fail to mention Lequier—“that restless though most brilliant spirit”11—as one who influenced the course of philosophy and who anticipated various aspects of process-relational philosophy and theology. Hartshorne mentions Lequier in all but five of his twenty-one books, and he included a few pages of Lequier’s writing in his seminal 1953 work Philosophers Speak of God, written with the help of his student William L. Reese.12 It was the first time Lequier’s work appeared in English translation. Two decades later, at Emory University (where Hartshorne taught from 1955 to 1962), Harvey H. Brimmer II (1923–1990) completed his dissertation, Jules Lequier and Process Philosophy (1975). The appendix to the dissertation includes two of Lequier’s major works, translated by Brimmer and his French wife Jacqueline Delobel Brimmer (1914–2008). It was Hartshorne who originally inspired Brimmer’s work on Lequier and he continued to serve as an advisor after he left Emory for the University of Texas at Austin. Brimmer’s work was informed by three of the greatest French interpreters of Lequier. He visited Jean Wahl in Paris in 1959 and he corresponded with both Jean Grenier and the Jesuit author Xavier Tilliette (1921–2018), author of Jules Lequier ou le tourment de la liberté (1964, republished in 2022 by Éditions de l’Éclat). It is one of the regrettable episodes in Lequier’s uneven legacy that the critical edition and translation of Lequier’s works by Brimmer and his wife, which he announced in the abstract of his dissertation, was never published. It is also a misfortune that no part of the dissertation was ever published. As with Brimmer, my own writings on, translations of, and preoccupations with Lequier had their origins in my readings of Hartshorne’s works. When Professor Deslandes invited me to write this foreword, he specifically asked that I highlight the connections between Lequier and process philosophy. This is appropriate since Hartshorne was the doyen of process philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century, and he is the one most responsible for making Lequier’s name known in the Anglophone world. By the time Hartshorne learned of Lequier, he was already far along in his own career with well-developed arguments, so there was no appreciable influence

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of the Frenchman on the trajectory of the American’s philosophy. Whatever direct influence existed was less in terms of the content of Lequier’s ideas than of Hartshorne gaining a more robust understanding of the precursors of process thought. Where Lequier and Hartshorne are concerned, it was a case, on a strictly philosophical level, of a pre-established harmony of ideas. In the first instance, where process thought is concerned, it is the resistance to determinism, or what C. S. Peirce called “the doctrine of necessity,” which distinguishes Lequier. Renouvier credited his friend with the turn away from determinism. Likewise James, before having read Renouvier, wrote in a letter to Thomas Ward dated March 1869 that he was “swamped” in a philosophy according to which “not a wiggle of our will happens save as the result of physical laws.”13 His reading of Renouvier changed this; James wrote in his journal of April 30, 1870, “My first act of free will shall be to believe in free will.” He told Renouvier that he was indebted to him for “an intelligible and reasonable conception of freedom.” Renouvier was equally emphatic that he owed Lequier for the same, and he never ceased to insist on that debt.14 One of the hallmarks of Lequier’s philosophy is the idea of freedom affirming itself by a free act; this is the idea that serves as the dramatic conclusion of Lequier’s semi-autobiographical meditation, “The Hornbeam Leaf” (Lequier, Œuvres complètes, p. 13-17). Hartshorne, understanding all of this, wrote to me in a letter dated July 9, 1988: Lequier’s greatest influence was through Renouvier to James, and through James to Dewey, in making clear the connection of freedom (as creativity) with chance, setting limits to what even ideal or divine decisions can determine, and making causal indeterminacy almost axiomatic for later French metaphysics. [.  .  .] No other tradition, least of all the British, has been so resistant to the deterministic tendency of early modern thought.15

It is true that Lequier did not contribute to nineteenth-century debates about social statistics and probabilities which eventually undermined the faith that social forces could be reduced to deterministic laws or that science requires the hypothesis of strict determinism. Nevertheless, his work was surely one factor in what Ian Hacking called “the erosion of determinism.”16 More important than his resistance to determinism is Lequier’s development of an idea of freedom as creativity, that is to say, of an act of making, which brings something genuinely novel into existence and that, once accomplished, remains forevermore an ineradicable element of the universe. The act of making is also an act of self-making. In Lequier’s succinct expression: “To MAKE, not to become, but to make, and in making, to MAKE ONESELF” (Œuvres complètes, p. 71). Renouvier took this phrase as a summary of his own commitment to personalism and, in 1944, Jean-Paul Sartre customized it to express his brand of existentialism; Sartre wrote: “To

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make and in making to make oneself and to be nothing except what one has made of oneself” (emphasis mine).17 In his book Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers (1983), Hartshorne remarked that Sartre’s version of freedom is a “fantastically overstated” version of what Lequier said, for the Breton emphasized not only the ways that we are “independent” of antecedent causal conditions but also the ways in which we are “dependent” upon them.18 Thus, Lequier spoke of being a “dependent-independence” (Œuvres complètes, p. 70). Indeed, according to Lequier, there is no apodictic certainty about one’s freedom, nor is there a clear experience of freedom, for we can never have the sort of insight that would allow us to know we are free of every inner necessity (Œuvres complètes, p. 352). Hartshorne also noted (in the letter cited above) that Lequier’s talk of self-making closely anticipates Alfred North Whitehead’s (1861–1947) concept of the self-created creature. For all three philosophers—Lequier, Whitehead, and Hartshorne—the self-making is never absolute but always occurs within a network of relations of one’s own body, other persons, society, the universe, and God. A third way in which Hartshorne saw Lequier anticipating process thought was in theorizing that time has a modal structure, “the past being necessary condition for the possibility of the present but the future as not in concrete detail necessary consequence of the present, or the present of the past” (Hartshorne’s letter to me). A common complaint about deterministic theories is that they eliminate the reality of time, for in a deterministic world, every aspect of every event is what it must be because of past conditions, but “past conditions” simply names a concatenation of events that could not be otherwise. Necessity and impossibility are the only modalities, thus making contingency, and with it, time, problematic. For process thought as one finds it in Peirce, James, Bergson, Whitehead, and Hartshorne, reality is always and necessarily unfinished, with events coming to be and “coming to pass” (which implies “coming to be past”); in this philosophy, futurity is a mix of what must be (as determined by the past) and what may be only (since it is not determined by the past but awaits the activity of a present moment). A temporal relation like “Socrates died before Aristotle was born” is not an eternal fact; of course, after the events that created this relation occurred, the relation cannot change, but this does not alter the reality that it is a relation that came to exist in a temporal sequence. Lequier anticipates the general idea of time’s one-way direction in his analysis of the free act in which there is an asymmetrical relation between cause and effect: the relation from the cause to the effect is one of possibility whereas the relation of the effect to the cause is one of necessity (Œuvres complètes, p. 473). The free act, considered as an effect, has necessary causal conditions, but from the standpoint of the free act as a cause, the world opens onto more than one possibility. This corresponds to the feeling that

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our decisions always occur within a causal matrix that circumscribes our options—not just anything is possible—but that we are sometimes genuinely free to choose among more than one possible future. Lequier coupled this analysis with an awareness of the importance of habit in the formation of one’s character. Our dependence, described previously, is in part a dependence upon our own past decisions. There is what Lequier called “this happy necessity of doing good which follows the habit of doing good,” and this is what it is to be good (Œuvres complètes, p. 211). Where contemporary process thought departs from Lequier is in generalizing this idea beyond the human, and even beyond the realm of morality, to all levels of reality so that one may speak of dramatically different levels and types of freedom and the habits that make for varying forms of order, from the social and personal all the way down to the molecular and subatomic. A fourth connection—more accurately, a set of connections or parallels— between Lequier and process thought is on the subject of God. It must be said, however, that Lequier was for most of his adult life a devout Roman Catholic, but the relation of modern founders of process thought to Christianity is more cultural than doctrinal. Neither Whitehead nor Hartshorne, for example, made use of the specifically Christian dogmas of the Incarnation or the Trinity, and there is no hint of a devotion to saints or to the Blessed Virgin. Claims of miraculous interventions by God did not interest them, nor did they accept the idea of creation ex nihilo. They showed no interest in defending beliefs in what Hartshorne sometimes called “a career after death.” Finally, there is no place in their thinking for claims of special authority for church traditions, ecumenical councils, or biblical literature. In this sense, they can be called “theologians” only in an attenuated sense. In an unpublished note, Hartshorne said that he was not a theologian if that means accepting any form of revealed truth, but that he might be considered a theologian insofar as he engaged in a form of natural theology after the fashion of Plato. In the final analysis, he identified as a philosopher, albeit with an abiding interest in religious questions. The same is true of Whitehead, although he wrote far less about the idea of God than did Hartshorne. Notwithstanding their critical distance from any form of revealed religion, the works of Whitehead and Hartshorne have inspired many of those within the Jewish, Christian, and Muslim traditions. This is not surprising as Whitehead and Hartshorne (also Peirce, James, and Bergson) were sympathetic to some aspects of religion. The echo of Hartshorne’s Christian upbringing is evident in his identification of the love of God and a God of love as his ultimate intuitive clues in philosophy.19 Hartshorne admired what he considered to be the metaphysically innovative things Lequier argued about God. The line from Lequier to which he most often alluded was “God, who has created me creator of myself” (Œuvres complètes, p. 70). He was also fond of Lequier’s statements that “God waits”

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on human deliberation (Œuvres complètes, p. 71) and that the world “makes a spot in the absolute which destroys the absolute” (Œuvres complètes, p. 74). Hartshorne considered himself to have Lequier’s support in accusing Thomists of equivocating on the question of human freedom. Thomists say both that we make our own decisions and that God causes us to decide in one way, yet somehow allowing that we could have decided differently. Why would Thomists not simply say that it is we, and not God, who decides? In Wisdom as Moderation (1987), Hartshorne explains: Thomists do not follow through with this line of thought. For it implies—what Thomism denies—passivity in God, divine openness to creaturely influence. As Jules Lequier, that neglected genius, so well realized: If we decide, and God does not, what our acts shall be, then we and not God decide to that extent what world God is to know. Freedom is both self-creative and creative of something in all who know the free being. Thus a person, or other creature, as free, is not mere creature but also creator, and God as knowing free creatures is not mere creator but also creature.20

Thomas Aquinas argued that God cannot be said to change or be affected by anything. In the proper sense of the word, only God can be said to create (Summa Theologica I, Q 45, a.5). For this reason, he argued that there is a real relation from God to the creature but only a rational relation—in the mind alone—from the creature to God (Summa Theologica I, Q 13, a.7). Once Lequier had declared that God created other creators, he could not accept the Thomistic view. In direct response to Aquinas, Lequier says, “The relation from God to the creature is as real as the relation of the creature to God” (Œuvres complètes, p. 73). Passivity in God—God as being affected by the creatures—is one of Lequier’s ideas that Hartshorne found revolutionary; it is what Hartshorne called The Divine Relativity (1948), which is the title of his fourth book. In The Dialogue of the Predestinate and the Reprobate—which Hartshorne considered “a literary masterpiece”21—Lequier explored the consequences of this divine relativity for the concepts of God’s power and knowledge. If the creature, and not God, makes its own decisions then, assuming God’s omniscience, the creature, and not God, has determined the content of God’s knowledge to some small extent. Until the creature has made a particular decision, there is nothing for God to know about it except that it has not been made or that the creature is undecided about it. Lequier denies that this places limits on divine knowing. To be sure, creaturely knowing is “limited, obscure, and full of errors,” but God knows things perfectly, which entails that God knows the precise extent to which, at any moment, the future opens onto more than one possibility (Œuvres complètes, p. 210). This also means that God does not see all of the events of time in an eternal instant, contrary

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to the view of thinkers like Augustine, Boethius, and Aquinas. But this is because there is no such reality as “all of the events of time” spread out like the pages of a calendar with all of the events of every day already penciled in. Lequier, like Henri Bergson after him, objected to the spatialization of time. Free decisions are temporal events; temporal events, by their very nature, come to be; therefore, God must know them as coming to be, and only after they have come to be does God know them as settled fact. In his book The God Who Risks, John Sanders, an American theologian, has aptly labeled this dynamic omniscience (2nd ed., 2007, p. 15). Lequier understood that the idea of a God, who in some respects changes, would be greeted like a sour note in the chorus of theological voices of the Church. Perfection was supposed to involve no change, no mutability, and no contingency. What the German theologian Julia Enxing has termed “perfect changes” seemed to the classical theologians to be a contradiction in terms, at least as a characterization of God (Julia Enxing and Klaus Müller, eds., Perfect Changes: Die Religionsphilosophie Charles Hartshornes, Verlag Friedrich Pustet, 2012). One may ask, however, whether this hesitancy to imagine changes in God had more to do with Greek ideals of perfection than with biblical portrayals of God, a divine person in constant give-and-take relations with the creatures. For Lequier, it is the denial of change in God which poses the greater problem: The All-Powerful, the divine poet, in no way brings about the appearance on the world scene of characters who come to fill a role decided for them in advance— these imitations of life are the games of human genius. Who could make of the work of God so frivolous and so base an idea! (Œuvres complètes, p. 212)

It seems possible to conceive God’s existence and character as unchanging— God as necessarily supreme in existence, power, knowledge, and goodness— while conceiving God’s responses to the creatures, continually customized for each situation, as themselves a scene of a bewildering variety of changing interactions. This was apparently the view of Lequier, and it was certainly Hartshorne’s. Hartshorne makes a three-fold distinction of logical type among existence (that a thing is), essence (what a thing is), and actuality (the particular state in which a thing is).22 To illustrate: a woman kneels in prayer. She exists (existence), she is human (essence), and she is in a state of prayer (actuality). The three elements are related as the abstract to the concrete: knowing that the woman is in prayer, one may deduce that she is human, and that she exists. But the inference cannot be reversed. To know that she exists is not perforce to know that she is human or that she is in prayer. Nor is it enough to know that she is praying to know that she exists and is human. To put it another way, the fact of the woman kneeling in prayer is information-rich compared

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to the mere fact of her existence or even of her being human. These ideas are made explicit in contemporary logical notation by the existential quantifier (which merely says “there exists . . .”) and various predicates (X is human, X is a woman, X is in prayer). The very same categories can be applied to God, except that the modalities of existence and essence are different in God than in the creatures. God necessarily exists and is necessarily supreme in power, knowledge, and goodness; the creatures exist contingently and their qualities are contingent. So far, the views of Lequier and Hartshorne are not different than those of the tradition. Nevertheless, according to Hartshorne, in both God and the creatures, actuality is contingent. If the woman is praying, and if God is all-knowing, then God knows that she is praying. But God’s knowing of the actual fact is as contingent as the actual fact. In other words, God’s knowledge could be otherwise. This is not to say that if she were not praying, God would be ignorant of something. God’s omniscience is preserved because God would know whatever state she is in. The American theologian David Tracy once referred to the triad of existence, essence, and actuality as “Hartshorne’s Discovery”;23 the discovery is that there is no incoherence in introducing an element of contingency into the divine life. In his dissertation, Brimmer argued that the triad is implicit in Lequier’s work, and Hartshorne agreed with that assessment. Because Lequier was committed to the authority of Scripture, he addressed the question of how his view might handle prophetic utterances of what is to come, especially those involving the apparently free decisions of the creatures such as the denial of Peter and the betrayal of Judas. These were not Hartshorne’s problems, nor were they the problems of the other modern founders of process thought—Peirce, James, Bergson, and Whitehead. Those in American Evangelical circles known as “open theists” are more likely to be concerned with these things. Open theists share with process theists the twin ideas that God is open to creaturely influence and that God faces a relatively open or indeterminate future. They are also friendly to the Hartshornean distinction among existence, essence, and actuality, and they repeat the kinds of arguments that both Lequier and Hartshorne made about changes in God. An excellent source on this movement which briefly treats of Lequier is Richard Rice’s The Future of Open Theism: From Antecedents to Opportunities (InterVarsity Press, 2020). To read Professor Deslandes’s book, and to compare it to what I have just outlined about process philosophy and Lequier, illustrates how different cultural and linguistic traditions can read the same work and take such different lessons from it. I believe this attests to what Deslandes calls “the fertility of Lequierism.” More pointedly, however, the differences may in part be due to a narrowness in the texts one chooses to interpret. Deslandes is not guilty of this, but Hartshorne is more selective. For all of his praise for Lequier’s

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groundbreaking originality, he never refers to Lequier’s “biblical narrative” of Abel and Abel which was dear to the philosopher’s heart and which definitely counts as one of his major works. In fairness, it was never Hartshorne’s intention to propose a global account of Lequier’s thought. One’s view of a philosopher is also colored by the ideas one emphasizes, the hermeneutical key one supposes to unlock the philosopher’s deepest meanings. One might take as a thematic focus of Deslandes’s book Lequier’s statement in a letter to his friend Mathurin Le Gal la Salle (1814–1904), dated December 24, 1839: “To will is always to will with audacity, with ardor” (Œuvres complètes, p. 501). Deslandes reads Lequier through the lens of Alain Badiou’s concept of antiphilosophy, placing Lequier specifically as an antiphilosopher of Christianity in the mold of Blaise Pascal and Søren Kierkegaard in contrast to an anti-Christian antiphilosopher like Friedrich Nietzsche. The antiphilosopher is ever conscious of the profound discrepancy between the system—the monument—a philosopher tries to build and the individual who is doing the building, a fitting subject for humor. Deslandes reminds his readers of Pascal’s statement that to philosophize authentically is to poke fun at philosophers. This calls to my mind Kierkegaard’s image of the system-builder as one who would construct a château but live in an outhouse. How does one even begin to philosophize? In Lequier’s words, “We are all children of error. Most of the time we only escape our errors by means of other errors” (Œuvres complètes, p. 475). Certainly, Lequier was painfully aware of the difficulty of seeking a beginning in the maze of philosophical problems; one need only read his work How to Find, How to Search for a First Truth where he is continually second-guessing himself and retracing his steps. Anyone who has sampled Lequier’s prose must be deeply sympathetic to Deslandes’s interpretation. The incomplete and fragmented nature of Lequier’s literary remains surely reinforces Deslandes’s view. Lequier began, and began again, but never completed his work. There may still be, however, another link one can make with process philosophy. For none of the philosophers of process that I have mentioned built a system in the sense of an all-encompassing framework that they proposed as an end to philosophizing. For that one must go to Kant, Hegel, or to the early Wittgenstein. In his final book, never completed, James characterized his own philosophy as “too much like an arch built only on one side.” Whitehead used another image, which Lequier might have appreciated. At the beginning of Process and Reality, he says: The true method of discovery [in speculative philosophy] is like the flight of an aeroplane. It starts from the ground of particular observation; it makes a flight in the thin air of imaginative generalization; and it again lands for renewed observation rendered acute by rational interpretation.24

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Whitehead was urging the use of imagination, but he was also providing an image of a process without end. As he says elsewhere, any hint of dogmatic finality is “an exhibition of folly.”25 Thus, every beginning in philosophy augurs an end and every ending portends a new beginning. Before the plane can recommence its flight, there must be a reassessment of evidence, a reexamination of assumptions, and perhaps a different way of conceptualizing problems. As Hartshorne summarized: “All philosophizing is risky: cognitive security is for God, not for us.”26 This is not exactly antiphilosophy, but it is a call to epistemic humility, a quality that is preeminent in Lequier’s work. NOTES 1. de la Noue, A. “Jules Lequyer Necrology,” La Foi Bretonne (February 13, 1862), reprinted in Jean Grenier, La Philosophie de Jules Lequier (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1936), pp. 267–270, see especially, p. 269. 2. Lequier, Jules. La Recherche d’une première vérité, fragments postumes (Saint-Cloud: Imprimerie de Mme Ve Belin, 1865). 3. Grenier, Jean. La Philosophie de Jules Lequier, p. 296. 4. Lequier, Jules. La Recherche d’une première vérité, ed. L. Dugas (Paris: Librairie Armand colin, 1924). 5. The Correspondence of William James, volume 4, 1856–1877, ed. Ignas K. Skrupskelis and Elizabeth M. Berkeley (Charlottesville and London: University Press of Virginia, 1995), pp. 430 and 598. 6. Renouvier, Charles. Esquisse d’une classification systématique des doctrines philosophiques, v. 2 (Paris: Bureau de la Critique Philosophique, 1886), p. 382. 7. Séailles, Gabriel. “Un philosophe inconnu: Jules Lequier” Revue philosophique de la France et de l’étranger, Tome XLV (1898), pp. 120–150. 8. Lequier, Jules. Œuvres complètes, ed. Jean Grenier (Neuchâ tel, Switzerland: Éditions de la Baconnière, 1952). 9. Letter to the author dated May 21, 1986. See Viney, Donald Wayne, ed., Charles Hartshorne’s Letters to a Young Philosopher: 1979–1995, volume 11 of Logos-Sophia: The Journal of the Pittsburg State University Philosophical Society (Fall 2001), p. 29. See also: https://digitalcommons​.pittstate​.edu​/cgi​/viewcontent​.cgi​ ?article​=1039​&context​=phil​_faculty 10. Wahl, Jean. Jules Lequier, 1814–1862 (Genève et Paris: Éditions des Trois Collines, 1948). 11. Hartshorne, Charles. “Philosophy of Religion in the United States,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 11, no. 3 (1951): 408. 12. Hartshorne, Charles and William L. Reese, Philosophers Speak of God (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1953), pp. 227–230. 13. The Correspondence of William James, volume 4, pp. 370–371. 14. For a detailed account of the relations among Renouvier, Lequier, and James, see Viney, Donald Wayne. “William James on Free Will: The French Connection with Charles Renouvier,” in The Reception of Pragmatism in France & the Rise of

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Roman Catholic Modernism, 1890–1914, ed. David G. Schultenover, S.J. (Washington, DC: Catholic University Press of America, 2009), pp. 93–121. Originally published as “William James on Free Will: The French Connection,” History of Philosophy Quarterly, 14, no. 1 (October 1997): 29–52. 15. Charles Hartshorne’s Letters to a Young Philosopher: 1979–1995, pp. 33–34. 16. Hacking, Ian. “Nineteenth Century Cracks in the Concept of Determinism,” Journal of the History of Ideas, 44, no. 3 (1983): 455–475. 17. Sartre, Jean-Paul. Les écrits de Sartres, ed. Michel Contact and Michel Rybalka (Paris, Editions Gallimard, 1970), p. 55; translated as We Have Only This Life to Live: The Selected Essays of Jean-Paul Sartre, 1939–1975, ed. Ronald Aronson and Adrian Van Den Hoven (New York: New York Review of Books, 2013), p. 88. 18. Hartshorne, Charles. Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers: An Evaluation of Western Philosophy (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983), p. 333. 19. Auxier, Randall E. and Mark Y. A. Davies, eds., Hartshorne and Brightman on God, Process, and Persons, the Correspondence, 1922–1945 (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 2001), p. 14; Hartshorne, Charles. Creative Synthesis and Philosophic Method (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1970), p. xviii; Hartshorne, Insights and Oversights of Great Thinkers: An Evaluation of Western Philosophy, p. 231; Hahn, Lewis, ed., The Philosophy of Charles Hartshorne (Peru, IL: Open Court, 1991), p. 700. 20. Hartshorne, Charles. Wisdom as Moderation: A Philosophy of the Middle Way (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1987), pp. 92–93. 21. Hartshorne and Reese, Philosophers Speak of God, p. 228. 22. The three-fold distinction is found throughout Hartshorne’s works. For a discussion of the distinction see Donald W. Viney and George W. Shields, The Mind of Charles Hartshorne: A Critical Examination (Anoka, MN: Process Century Press, 2020), pp. 154–161. 23. Tracy, David. “Analogy, Metaphor and God Language: Charles Hartshorne,” The Modern Schoolman, 62, no. 4 (May 1985): 259. 24. Alfred North Whitehead, Process and Reality: An Essay in Cosmology, corrected edition by David Ray Griffin and Donald W. Sherburne (New York: Free Press, 1978), p. 5. 25. Whitehead, Process and Reality, p. xiv. 26. Hartshorne, Charles. “The Development of My Philosophy,” in Contemporary American Philosophy: Second Series, ed. John E. Smith (London: Allen & Unwin, 1970), p. 215.

Preface Historical Landmarks

Located at the extreme west of the French map, known for the beauty of its landscapes and the strong character of its inhabitants, Brittany is a country that can be described as literary. Indeed, it was here that François-René de Chateaubriand, Félicité Robert de Lamennais, Auguste de Villiers de L’IsleAdam, and Louis Guilloux grew up and received, pen in hand, their first inspirations. In philosophy, however, apart from Ernest Renan, who was more of a historian of religions and a critic, only Jules Lequier can be cited as having had a wide influence on many currents of thought. Born in 1814 in the Côtes d’Armor, this author has a sub-chapter to his name in Emile Bréhier’s famous History of Philosophy, which was for a long time the breviary of all students in French philosophy classes. And yet, despite this notable mention, and the particular career of the man who became the great friend of Charles Renouvier1 at the prestigious Ecole Polytechnique in 1834, Lequier’s name is known in Anglophone circles only to those who today are interested in philosophies of process and to those in the francophone world who recognize him as a crucial author for a better comprehension and analysis of the various branches of French philosophy. Yet here is an author who published little or nothing during his lifetime and whose life was marked by a series of incidents (notably health problems), personal disappointments (the failed engagement to Anne “Nanine” Deszille in 1861), and professional ones2 which prevented him from exercising the talents that all those who came close to him recognized as undeniable. Existential circumstances did not prevent him either. Even though his destiny ended on February 11, 1862, near Plérin—his hometown—following a drowning, the circumstances of which have remained obscure, it has left “brief, dazzling traces in the philosophical sky” (Jean Wahl). xix

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The story could have ended there, but that was without counting the zeal of his schoolmate Charles Renouvier, who a few years after his death erected a statue on the grave of his fellow student, which is still in place today, and on which was inscribed the following statement: “This monument was erected in memory of an unfortunate friend and a man of great genius.” He also circulated a few Posthumous Fragments to some of the leading figures on the intellectual scene in Europe and the United States. Since then, this posthumous document, of which only 120 copies or so were distributed, has had an immense influence on many authors, including Jean Grenier and Jean Wahl in Europe and Williams James and Charles Hartshorne in the United States. As indicated by his main editor in France, Michel Valensi, Lequier will end up being the torment of a philosophy that would exempt itself from the questions that he never ceases to ask in his unfinished work that is now recognized more and more. It is to expose these questions and to link them to the contemporary continental philosophical scene that this book and interview are dedicated. NOTES 1. One of the most influential philosophers of his time and a zealous representative of Neo-Kantianism. 2. Failure to be elected to Parliament in 1848, rejection of his candidacy for the modest position of archivist in the Côtes du Nord in 1860.

Introduction

Jules Lequier remains one of the secrets—perhaps one of the least wellkept—in the recent history of French philosophy. The secret is shared by a few hand-picked philosophers, to the point of constituting a unique story in the narrative of French thought over the last two centuries. Even today, and no doubt even more so today than before, Lequierian philosophy is still being discussed, here and there, as, for example, at a special 2014 colloquium hosted at the École Normale Supérieure de la rue d’Ulm,1 marking the bicentenary of Lequier’s birth. Among our contemporaries, Frédéric Worms, Claire Marin, Michele Sciotti, Marie-Claude Blais, and Vincent Citot frequently refer to him, while Robert Misrahi describes him as “one of the greatest.”2 This somewhat peremptory judgment might come as a surprise to an author who published nothing during his lifetime, apart from a short declaration of intent dated April 1, 1848, when he stood for election as a member of parliament in the Côtes-du-Nord. It is a judgment, however, that would hardly have surprised his contemporaries. Ernest Hello, a Breton lawyer and writer who had some influence, notably on Jules Barbey d’Aurevilly, testifies to this in a text published a few years after his death: The deep thinker was dead. . . . He had disappeared, without having made his place on earth, without having played a role on the world stage. His genius, which was to be the heritage of all, had remained the secret of a few. This genius had enlightened neither others nor himself with the light that he was to produce and give.3

It is to this retrospective evidence, of the work as well as its influence, that the Cahiers Jules Lequier (Jules Lequier Notebooks), initiated by Goulven Le Brech, has been devoted for several years now. These are part of a growing 1

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reception of Lequierian philosophy not only in France but also in Italy, in Sweden with Torbjohn Bergane, or in Norway via the work of Asbjorn Aanes. The Cahiers constitute a rediscovery not only of the philosopher— with, for example, lecture notes by Paul Ricoeur never published and recently rediscovered—but also of the man and his biography and, in particular, his relationship to his native land and to those who formed his network of friends. Lequier’s position within philosophical studies in the English language deserves, however, an additional remark. Certainly, the work was recognized early on as having had, notably through the work of William James, a nonnegligible influence on many currents of the twentieth century—process thought, Bergsonian spiritualism, Sartrean existentialism, and Henryan phenomenology, no less—as I shall explain later. It has therefore been largely translated, notably by Harvey Brimmer and Donald Viney, who kindly accepted to write a foreword for this book, both of whom learned of Lequier through the writings of Charles Hartshorne. Lequier’s thought has been the subject of renewed interest in recent years, particularly thanks to Viney’s many works. Nevertheless, it has to be said that the study of his work has scarcely gone beyond the Lequierian circles, and the attentive exploration of the value of his texts, which can now be observed in France and elsewhere, does not really extend to Anglo-American philosophical research. One of the aims of this introduction is precisely to make up for this lack and to contribute to a better recognition of his central influence on the later developments of continental philosophy, while at the same time highlighting the elements that make the originality of his contribution undeniable. It must be said that Lequier impresses as much by the vivacity of his style and the grandiose philosophical ambition that his fragmentary work, in its very embryonic state, carries within it, as by the pathetic aspects of his life. Marriage proposals refused, a ruined career, almost no recognition and a solitary death: all the events of his life seem to combine to leave no doubt about the cursed nature of his destiny. It is as if these vagaries consolidated, on a symbolic level, to make for the marginalization of his work among the authors of the philosophical tradition. Indeed, Lequier remains one of the most conspicuous missing names from contemporary philosophy curricula.4 As Worms rightly notes, along with Maine de Biran and Ravaisson, he is one of “those philosophers (who) have tried to articulate these dimensions in a singular way, but the university institution has not been able to make them shine.”5 How, indeed, do we know of Lequier at all, knowing that it is thanks neither to the work published during his lifetime nor to the retrospective recognition of the philosophical institution? To whom do we owe the post-mortem, semi-celebrity of the Breton thinker, acquired several decades after his death, if not to the interventions made by Charles Renouvier and Jean Grenier? The

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former, who would go on to be a prominent figure in French neo-criticism, considered himself a philosophical disciple of Lequier and was also a classmate in the class of 1834 at the École Polytechnique. It is to Renouvier that we owe the Posthumous Fragments discreetly published in 1865 in 120 copies; the influence of Lequier on Renouvier was recognized by Renouvier himself and confirmed by his commentators.6 During this period, only a few personalities from the national and international philosophical scene—in particular William James, then a professor at Harvard University—had the opportunity to discover elements of the unfinished work of an author who had died three years earlier in obscure circumstances. In 1924, the Armand Colin publishing house added a volume entitled La recherche d’une première verité (The Search for a First Truth), with a biographical note by L. Dugas, the title taken from the second in a series of eight sections that Lequier had intended to write. According to Renouvier, this second major work was ultimate to be entitled Critique of the explicit or implicit solutions to the question of method. What interests Renouvier is the Lequierian method, its inimitable style, as well as his revival of the concept of freedom. On the other hand, he was far from impressed by the manuscripts in which Lequier discussed his examinations of religious subjects, be it the Mystical Union or the Incarnation. This is something he himself acknowledges in his correspondence with Baptiste Jacob:7 You will see that I have not published any of the numerous notes on the divine persons, their relations, the Trinity. I don’t know if you will find them any more interesting in clarifying these elucubrations than I have myself. He often spoke to me about it and the subject bored me.8

The second author who first became interested in Lequier Jean Grenier is best known today as the mentor of Albert Camus, the author of The Plague, who took the initiative to write and publish the first PhD thesis devoted to the Breton philosopher. Unlike Renouvier, Grenier attached importance not only to Lequier as a philosopher—La Philosophie de Jules Lequier is the title of the composition—but also to Lequier the “speculative theologian,”9 the believer, whom Renouvier refused to consider seriously. From this point of view, with Grenier, we see more clearly what is at stake in his oeuvre in general, where a decisive place is reserved for metaphysics, which we will call “first” and accessible by means of reason, while also leaving room for the truths of Christian dogma. Let us note in this respect that when Grenier submitted the manuscript of his thesis to Gallimard’s editorial committee for publication, he obtained this frank and negative reply from his friend Jean Paulhan (letter dated December 20, 1935):

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Dear Jean, the discussion revolved around Lequier. One of them quickly said that the only thing remarkable about him was his death, that God was no longer of much interest, nor freedom (protest by J. P.) at least as he presented it, and that you would not have written about Lequier if it had not been a thesis.10

This “protest” can certainly be heard in many ways, without us really knowing whether it comes from Jean Paulhan himself, from Jean-Paul Sartre perhaps, or from another member of the editorial committee. It seems, however, that a member of the committee wanted to defend, if not the work of Jean Grenier, at least the passages reserved for the theme of freedom among the scattered notes left to posterity by Lequier. If the specific format of the thesis seems to have displeased Paulhan, it was once again the strictly religious content of Lequier’s manuscripts that played against the publication of Grenier’s work. And yet, in spite of the firmness of the argument, there is no longer any doubt that Gallimard’s editorial committee made an error of appreciation which the enduring philosophical fertility of Lequierism has illustrated over the last century, a fact which I shall try to present in its entirety.

FERTILITY OF LEQUIERISM What is truly remarkable about Lequier is not only his death, but the resonance of his research in the many philosophical currents that succeeded him. We find this influence in the neo-criticism of Renouvier, of course, a current of thought of which Grenier affirmed that Lequier is the founder,11 notably in his Essai de Critique Générale, as well as in the pragmatism of William James, who considered him a “French philosopher of genius.”12 James learned from Lequier that only a bold, audacious affirmation of freedom can save us from integral determinism. This unpredictable succession, which freedom needs in order to exist, also leads to Bergsonism,13 which is itself affiliated with the neo-criticism of Charles Renouvier and the pragmatism of William James. Moreover, André Clair, to whom the editors entrusted the introduction of the re-edition of the Research in the prestigious Epiméthée collection,14 and who has distinguished himself over the last three decades as the most well-informed specialist of Lequierian thought, and to whom this chapter owes much (even if it departs from several of his analyses) notes that Lequier has a certain affinity with ideas of reflexive thought, putting him somewhere “between Maine de Biran and Bergson.”15 Lequierism, praised by Vincent Citot in his essay La condition philosophique et le problème du début,16 can be likened to a reflexive

Introduction

effort in the face of an action carried and chosen by oneself, and which everyone, in reality, can experience. I should add that Lequier was not only considered an important author for the development of a certain current of process thought,17 notably embodied by Charles Hartshorne, but that he undoubtedly exerted considerable influence, even if it was in a roundabout way, on Jean-Paul Sartre during the writing of his essay Existentialism and Humanism. This treatise bears some of the hallmarks of the Lequierian style, but its most significant debt to Lequier is the general idea of an existential construction of the self, based on choices that only we are capable of making for ourselves. Finally, through Grenier, André Breton was also well acquainted with the work of Lequier, which he quotes in particular at the beginning of the re-edition of Nadja and in his preface to the The Council of Love.18 In an attempt to situate Lequier within the broad sweep of Western philosophy, Tristan Garcia argues that he played a central role in defining the very identity of French thought, hinging upon concepts, where German philosophy foregrounds systemic thinking and Anglo-American is more concerned with the study and precision of language. In this essay, Ce qui commence et qui finit,19 which brings together a series of texts originally published in fragmentary fashion, the author makes Lequier the starting point of a tendency peculiar to French philosophy, which he calls the “concrete universal.” In particular, he traces a line of thought which extends from Lequier to Badiou and which constitutes “an exceptional niche within Anglo-Saxon and Germanic hegemonic universality.”20 He thus contends that French philosophy holds a “biased view of the world of ideas and truths,”21 rejecting both the systematization of the unspecified and the systemic rational, in favor of a third way. This path, which Lequier was the first to outline with reference to the existing “great systems” of thought, consists of leaving room for the exceptional and inverting our reasoning by making that which escapes the system its very principle. In this view, the exceptional takes the form of freedom—whereas for Descartes it took the form of obviousness—which gives concrete expression to the possibility of escaping the common rule (in the guise of mechanistic determinism). For Garcia: Based on the founding research of Jules Lequier, who died too young, the majority of French thinkers at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries devoted their work to determining an exception to the mechanical and deterministic model of interpreting the world. . . . The manuscripts of Lequier’s La Recherche d’une vérité

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Introduction

première are haunted by the image of confinement within the universal system of mechanical determinism: causality becomes a dungeon in which the mind, which conceived the causal order, is now locked up. Every effort must thus be made to rediscover the impulse that will allow the mind, by rediscovering the truth that it is the exception to its own rule, to escape this trap.22 Garcia considers Lequier to be the foremost example of a thinker who puts all his energy into challenging his own intuitions, both with regard to human freedom and with regard to his belief in God. In the process, doubt and conviction are pushed to their respective limits in service of the introspective, and essentially Socratic, thrust of the Lequierian method. For Lequier never sets out to prove anything, the doctrine of free will, for example, preferring to single out and highlight exceptions to the deterministic principle by bringing the question to its highest degree of reflexive uncertainty. In this important text, which first appeared in the journal Les Temps Modernes (No.682),23 Garcia’s thesis undoubtedly raises weighty questions about the idea of a break with philosophy, which Lequier would embody in his own way for French thought in the middle of the nineteenth century. But, in doing so, it makes a convincing case for Lequier’s pivotal role in the history of continental philosophy, confirming his status as “precursor” rather than “promoter.”24 Finally, Garcia astutely fends off attempts to paint Lequier as a systematic philosopher; no such system exists, since most of the sections of his magnum opus intended to cover all fields of philosophy were never actually written (only the first book and the last of the eight planned sections have reached us, in very incomplete form).25 Indeed he probably never really made a start on them. It is almost as if the very incompleteness of his “definitive” work finally is an invitation to interpretation. Lequier’s writings and Grenier’s thesis were thus more important than the negative response given to Grenier by Gallimard’s editorial committee would have suggested. Lequier addressed classic questions of philosophy, the search for truth, a first truth on which all the others would depend, but in doing so he applies a thoroughly original method: “How does one begin? By searching. What do we do to find? We search.”26 From this point of view, true philosophy is that which truly seeks the truth, so that here the action of seeking designates the very identity of philosophical activity.27 In embarking on this path, Lequier discards what he calls the criterion of obviousness: twice, he invokes Pascal to express this idea, first when he

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writes: “What can I do? To grasp out of the realm of the obvious a TRUTH which is like a base on which I will lean to raise the edifice of my knowledge”) (Pascal, quotations from the faith . . . above and not against) (OC 369), and again when he notes that “until this truth bears the seal of our nature, this truth is uncertain. . . . To know that it (a point of evidence) is unshakeable, one must have tried to shake it (Fantaisie sentiment. Pascal)” (OC 373–74).28 Lequier sought a founding truth that is above false evidence, a primordial truth that withstands the test of the weaknesses of our own nature,29 in short, a truth that is not supported either in nature or in my own senses: Alas! since I was a child, there have been so many mistakes, so many fluctuations, so many changes! The opinion that I believed to be true during several of the years of my childhood and youth I now hold them [sic] to be false, and I still don’t know if with time I will not change them for others, which will not be more certain. My eyes deceive me, my ears make me hear noises that I then realize do not exist.30

Needless to say, this search is a path marked by difficulties specific to its object; this path toward the search for truth is above all a struggle against what is by definition opposed to it, the fact of searching for what one does not know. This question is at the heart of the Socratic questioning, that of Meno, and of the internal contradictions of such a search marked by a double impossibility, which in Lequier takes the form of a real incompatibility, between, on the one hand, opting for a search without preconceived ideas, which seems impossible, and, on the other hand, searching, but without at the same time giving oneself the possibility of discovering a truth one did not expect. As he indicates in manuscript 268, f°33, the aim is to break the enchantment of a preestablished truth by learning to search, through science and philosophy. However, Lequier, reputedly a Christian, also explains: Christianity itself, which seems more alive than other cults, is interpreted differently by nations and individuals; if this religion were the true one, it would have rallied all minds, and today the whole world would bow before the cross of Christ. If then I seek the truth among men, I find it not; everywhere there is error, everywhere there is contradiction. (OC 313)

In fact, the painful nature of any search is clearly apparent here. The act of searching certainly contains within it the seeds of truth, since as a means of attaining truth it illustrates the human faculty of knowledge, that is to say the possibility of attaining truth, but it also demands the human capacity to be in error. Basically, it remains an endless, bottomless activity, a work of

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doubt, which can wrongly cast a veil of suspicion over the finality of the search itself. It is a research where the aim is to find something to confirm an initial point of view, which may be called into question by the process of the research itself, which by definition may modify the initial belief. And Lequier tries to do this, not so much with “the calm of Descartes, . . . but instead with the emotion of Pascal.”31 Thus, all philosophical inquiry amounts to “seeking the beginning of the search for the beginning of the search” as Clair suggests32 and constitutes a resumption of one of the oldest questions of philosophy itself, namely the conditions of the possibility of a true beginning, while at the same time questioning the necessity, or not, that we still need to philosophize in the actual conditions of the present. For Lequier: True philosophy is not the science of details and facts that can hardly be distinguished in the soul, it is nothing other than the search for truth; and the first question that man who wants to be aware of himself is to know what authorizes him to affirm what he affirms. (OC 338)

We are therefore dealing here with an archeological project: it is indeed a point of attachment that is sought, a firm principle, from which everything else can be attested. Experiences of astonishment, and especially of doubt, are meant to be overcome, possibly through the discovery of a primary truth that is valid for everyone. But possibly also, to a lesser extent, by the reality of an interrogative process that is capable, if necessary, of shaking up false truths. In this case, radical skepticism is condemned by the very fact that such an approach ultimately presupposes the possibility of knowing, even in a negative manner, that which was initially hidden from us. We are therefore dealing with an apologetic project, which comes after the exposition of the first truths of metaphysics; the second truths are indeed the result of an act of faith, in this case, a free belief in Christian doctrine. Faced with this double regime of truths, whose possible concordance we shall investigate, I shall draw substantially upon the central category of antiphilosophy.33 With this term, discovered in Lacan, Alain Badiou sets out to describe an original figure of philosophy, eschewing systematic elaboration in favor of a renewed emphasis on subjective experience. Antiphilosophy, which can be qualified as Christian in Lequier’s work and whose “classic” figures are Pascal and Kierkegaard, is in fact a three-sided system consisting of a search for truth, an affirmative statement, and a reforming act. It is as if, as Citot rightly points out, “the immanent demand of philosophical thought consists rather in referring truths to the acts that preside over them.”34

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Nevertheless, in Lacan L’antiphilosophie 3, Badiou is at pains to remind us that antiphilosophical work involves disqualifying philosophers in their failed quest for truth, then qualifying what lies behind this quest and ultimately constituting a new act, which constitutes a new way of looking at philosophy: There are three formal features of antiphilosophy: 1. The destitution of philosophy in its theoretical pretension, a destitution that always takes the form of discredit, and not centrally, or not principally, the form of a refutation. 2. Updating the true nature of the philosophical operation. In the background of its supposed and discredited theoretical claim, there is a properly philosophical gesture which must be spotted by antiphilosophy itself, because it is, in general, concealed by the philosopher, obscure or inapparent. 3. Opposition to the philosophical act thus reconstituted from an act of a new type, of a radically different act which completes the destitution of philosophy.35

Now these three variations inevitably correspond to the three instants of Lequierian philosophy: the search for truth (disregard for philosophers), making (affirmative gesture of freedom), and beginning, which is simply an act, properly antiphilosophical, and in Lequier’s case consubstantially Christian, which aims at subverting philosophy and supplying it with new existential categories. Alain Badiou’s presentation thus allows us to give an organized form, a structure, to the presentation of this essay, based on three movements, or rather on the three cardinal categories of Lequierian philosophy: (1) The search for truth; (2) the eternal possibility of making; and (3) the insistence upon the beginning as an end, always repeated and renewed. The first impulse—to seek—being turned toward the second—to do—like the third— to begin—is dependent on the second act. For Lequier, the beginning is yet to come: it is the goal at which philosophy aims. It appears to be the goal toward which the antiphilosophical act itself unfolds, as I shall suggest in the third chapter of this book, but it does not constitute its genesis. The method, at its point of origin, takes the form of a search, or more precisely, an exploration of the conditions of a possible search, bearing only on a first truth, which will constitute the initial axis of this inquiry. These three moments should then be conceived as components of a cycle which is an image of life itself, where everything tends toward the beginning, starting from a search set as a condition and an act, “to do or not to do,” assimilated to the inaugural gesture of the beginning itself. The solemn power to begin is here interrogative and reflexive, that is to say, it results from a double duty of investigation and creation. So let us begin, by searching.

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NOTES 1. The ENS de la rue d’Ulm is located in the 5th arrondissement of Paris. 2. Cahiers Jules Lequier (CJL) No. 5, Interview with Robert Mishrahi by Delphine Bouit, 23. 3. Hello, E. CJL No. 3, p. 16. Hello’s testimony echoes the words of Louis Dugas, a disciple of Renouvier, when he evokes Lequier’s impact as an educator, notably at the Egyptian School: “He had the richest discernment: a marvelous intuition of the arts, sciences, letters, as well as of all the realities of life. He had insight on everything. It didn’t matter the subject: everything to which his breath was applied became alive” (Les idées pédagogiques du philosophe Jules Lequier, p. 37). Or again, in Dugas’s 1934 biographical note, he evokes the superiority he inspired in those who knew him: “By the verve of his spirit, his good humor and his grace as much as by the natural distinction of his manners and the superiority of his education, he had conquered this small rustic world and had in his eyes the prestige of a leader. All his life, in all walks of life, by the sheer force of his words, he was to appear as a ‘master’ or ‘enchanter,’ and to exert a kind of fascination on those who approached him” (The Search for a First Truth—Biographical Note, 7). 4. Even so, perhaps a sign of the times is the presence of the Research between the Principles of Nature and Grace of Leibniz and Totality and Infinity of Levinas in the library of the aggregation jury report, for example, in 2013. https://eduscol​.education​.fr​/philosophie​/fichiers​/rapports​-de​-jurys​-concours​-philo​/agreg​_int2013​.pdf. 5. Worms, F. CJL No. 6, 131. 6. See, for example, Wood, H. “L’influence de Lequier sur Renouvier,” Recueil de l’Académie de Tarn et Garonne (1911): 95–106. 7. Professor of philosophy who was awarded first place in the agrégation examination in July 1887. 8. Letter from Renouvier to Jacob, CJL No. 1, 50. 9. Clair, A. Kierkegaard and Lequier, 167. 10. Le Brech, G. Jules Lequier, 2007, 93. 11. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier. 235. 12. Cf. Viney, D. W. The American Reception of Jules Lequyer: From James to Hartshorne, p. 260. Viney here identifies the source: James, W. The Principles of Psychology, Volumes I and II, ed. F. Burkhardt and F. Bowers (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1981), vol. II, 1176. 13. “Even in Mr. Bergson’s philosophy,” says Jacob, “We seem to find the influence of Mr. Renouvier. He, under the philosophical guidance of Lequier, established a firm contrast between the philosophy of things and the philosophy of consciousness. Bergson deepens this opposition by trying to show that if we assimilate mental causality, or that of consciousness, to physical causality, or that of the thing, i.e. if we reduce freedom to determinism, it is through a natural illusion which projects time into space, or, more precisely, which represents to us the continuous life of consciousness, in the form of distinct terms which succeed one another according to regular laws. The conscious subject is an undivided whole, where we mark divisions only by artifice. When, therefore, we say that our motives or reasons determine us, we are

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expressing ourselves falsely: the truth, according to Mr. Bergson, is that it is the life and evolution of our personality, considered as a coherent whole, which confer this decisive character on the reasons which appear to determine our actions.” Jacob, B. Jules Lequier, CJL No. 1, 74–75. 14. PUF, 1993. 15. Clair, A. La recherche d’une première vérité and other texts—Introduction to the reading of the work, p. XLV. 16. The philosophical condition and the problem of the beginning. 17. Viney, D. W. CJL No. 1, 14. 18. See Le Brech, G. CJL No. 6, 25. 19. What begins and ends. 20. Garcia, T. Ce qui commence et ce qui finit, 97. 21. Id., 305–306. 22. Ibid., pp. 294–95. 23. “Does French philosophy have the spirit of a system?” directed by Patrice Maniglier, 2015. 24. According to the nuance brought by Grenier in La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 250. 25. “Of books III, IV, V, VI designated to make up the second volume of the great work,” says Renouvier, “nothing was found in the author’s papers.” OC, 9. 26. Jules Lequier Collection, Msc. 254, F2, Folio 69. 27. It should be noted that several passages proposed in this essay take up the analyses proposed in my PhD thesis Kierkegaard, Pascal, Lequier: Convergences of Three Christian Philosophers defended (in French) at the University Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne in 2000. 28. Note de Grenier on this passage: “Lequier wrote in pencil, in overprint: Good” (OC 373). 29. “One person says that my feeling is fancy, another that his/her fancy is feeling.” Laf. 530, Br. 274. 30. Fonds Jules Lequier (Jules Lequier Collection), Msc 255. This text entitled « Notes » is presented by André Claire in Métaphysique et Existence, 167. 31. Roure, L. Jules Lequier, The Tragic Philosopher, 63. 32. Clair, A. CJL No. 6, 58. 33. See Deslandes, G. Antiphilosophy of Christianity (Springer, 2021). 34. Citot, V. La condition philosophique et le problème du début, 8. 35. Badiou, A. Lacan - l’antiphilosophie 3 (1944–1995), 2013, 163.

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Searching

METAPHYSICIAN OR RELIGIOUS POET? What is the nature of the search that Lequier undertakes? To seek a first truth is at the same time to set out on a quest, to support an intellectual effort, to go beyond the game of appearances by trying to unmask the false in order to finally discover a truth thus revealed, which would present itself as the condition of all the others. But how does this quest take shape? Does it first of all, as some commentators have argued, involve a dual impulse, demonstrative and poetic, critical and romantic?1 Is the general orientation of this research properly philosophical, or more clearly Christian? Choosing the second option, Grenier evoked “an apology of the Christian religion, seen as a great drama, with a romantic sensibility.”2 Faced with a Lequier who was both metaphysician and poet of religion, which one should he choose? Pyguillem himself admitted that it was “difficult to decide.”3 Should we therefore see this double belonging without belonging, this “polyrealism,”4 as a kind of impediment to carrying out the philosophical research that Lequier desired? This is what his closest friend, Le Gal la Salle, seems to indicate in a letter of 1862, who considered Lequier too much of an artist to complete an accomplished work of philosophy. This was also Jacob’s5 position when he noted the delicacy of the first part of Probus or The Principle of Science, which nevertheless left him virtually certain that the author was a theologian, and in any case “very learned and very subtle.”6 As Le Brech points out, Jacob presented him in his 1905 lecture to the students of the École Supérieure de Sèvres as a religious thinker, a believer who turned to philosophy in order to justify his faith.7 Jacob relied on the Cahier H (Fonds Lequier Ms 255), and waited two years after his death, to argue that Renouvier, by downplaying religious writings and the quasi-mystical character of 13

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certain late texts, had gone down the wrong path in denying them.8 We should also note Dugas’s analysis, when he describes the tension, still perceptible in Lequier, between the qualities of dialectician and the poet’s outbursts of irritation: He brings out all the contradictions, clearly sets out the thesis and the antithesis, develops them, giving each one its full force; he moves with ease in arguments and sophistry; he confuses the opponent with haughty irony, he assaults subtlety in dialectical jousting, he enjoys his mastery. But he catches himself in the traps of this dangerous game, his thinking tires and exhausts itself; he cannot stop the march of his reasoning, nor the flight of his images. He abandons himself to his dialectical verve as well as to the inspirations of his enchanting imagination.9

On the contrary, is this not the living essence of the Lequierian style, its surprising singularity? This, at least, is what André Clair seems to hint at,10 namely that his thought was fed by his poetic inspiration, immediately perceptible in his prose, giving it its particular power, as well as its “supremely pathetic yet strictly rational acuity.”11 In fact, the Lequierian enterprise is marked by this profound dilemma, evident from beginning to end. Lequier is certainly a philosopher of dilemma, and the whole point of his program is to initiate a search driven by this tension (that of freedom and necessity). From a certain point of view, this approach is classical, and we can draw parallels with the work of Descartes. And yet, from another point of view, the general orientation appears rather Pascalian, and therefore less conventional, placing itself neither entirely on the side of metaphysics nor entirely on the side of religious belief. “Instincts, reason”12 wrote Pascal, expressing what he felt constituted an aporia between the Pyrrhonians and the dogmatists. For Lequier, aporia is found between different forms of knowledge, some of which seek philosophical obviousness and others religious certainty. This chiasmus is particularly prevalent in Lequier, who had a scientific background and could be readily described, in the Pascalian sense, as a geometrician. Lequier was in search of a first principle which can logically explain the sequence of all the others. However, from the very beginning of the The Hornbeam Leaf,13 the only one of his works which he considered to be complete, it is striking to note that this task is assigned to a child or more precisely to the insignificant gesture of a child. In other words, metaphysical research is put at the level of a childish act, that is to say, not at the level of a theoretical experiment but of a simple existential and practical test. He asserts that a child’s intuitions and early metaphysical torments—which, moreover, play a major role in several of his unfinished works, including The Pitchork and the Distaff, Corlay, and Abel and Abel in particular—are, by virtue of their boldness and probity, superior to the logical reasoning capacities of an adult. Here is an example of what Citot calls “the predominance of the

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testimony of the existing in ontological matters. This is why we can speak of existential ontology.”14 As Evard notes, this should not be seen as Lequier’s disinterest in philosophical systems, which he studied and generally dismissed as a kind of “idolatry of discourse,”15 but which he “read with the resolute intention of finding their Achilles’ heel, with the tenacious hope of reconciling their scholastic teaching, their cold lessons with the tragic feeling of life.”16 Once reconciled with the tragic feeling of one’s own life, a philosophical system would then resonate with the composition of the oeuvre, in its very incompleteness. This invites a programmed and deliberate comparison, with the obscure and troubled demise of the philosopher, who met his end in what some have speculated was a metaphysical challenge in the Baie des Rosaires.17 In this case, we must address the possibility of another dimension of the Lequierian search not only metaphysical and theological but also psychological. LOGIC OF PROUD SOULS If Lequier was able to doubt everything, the existence of a first truth, his friends, even God, he never expressed the slightest doubt about his genius and the importance of his future work. This is undoubtedly a trait of character, in any case, an unfailing desire for independence, a pride too, peculiar to tormented souls, and we catch occasional glimpses of the abyss within Lequier during his correspondence with Gal La Salle. In a letter dated Tuesday, December 24, 1839, Lequier wrote: Remember that there are dangerous things: study, method, thought itself, the feeling of beauty. When we touch them with our fingers, they burn us: they save us when we take them in our stride. Resist all these hyperboles if you want. This is the thought I wanted to stop at. There is a logic for proud souls, which will not be understood by servile ones, bent under the yoke of prejudice and habit. (OC 502) This faith in his own intuitions, however, imbued with the importance of what he believed he must accomplish, would be one of the main sources of his continual torment. Nothing ever seemed to fully satisfy him. The Hornbeam Leaf was the only text he agreed to circulate in his circle, for it was the only one that seemed to him to have reached an acceptable state, enough to be shared with a limited readership. In a letter of July 9, 1862, Mathurin Le Gal La Salle attests to this:

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He had an extraordinary plan in his head which seduced and charmed us all, but within this structure, magnificent in so many respects, there were peculiar gaps, and one of these gaps, one of these defects of balance resided in the fact that he could not arrive at an expression of his ideas which satisfied him entirely.18 Lequier’s concern for formal perfection and perfect structure became a sort of existential and literary drama. This description of the character clearly shows the difficulties linked to his personality, which probably had many illusions about itself and the too perfect structure of what was to be his magnum opus. His “magnificent structure,” as his friend again notes in another letter to Renouvier, also showed shortcomings, among them the failure to alight upon a written form compatible with his ideas. At the same time, however, we must remember the influence Lequier had on his contemporaries, something that Renouvier was always careful to remind his disciple Prat. The latter testifies to this in a correspondence with Dugas: “In his improvisations we only felt the evocative power of images and ideas. And it was so beautiful,” Renouvier told Prat, “These improvisations, often mixed with pieces recited from memory, and by far the most magnificently written things he left behind, there were moments when he was the truly great, noble and pure being he had dreamed of being, and he touched the sublime.”19 Lequier’s eloquence20 can make one think, as Le Brech suggests, of the figure of the ancient master, basing his teaching on the living word, conceived as an original force—contrary therefore to Derrida’s grammatological analyses—rather than on the mode of written language. On the other hand, there was also the vanity which Jacob criticized, Lequier’s manner of living as a dreamer, which can perhaps be partly attributed to the Romanticism of those years, particularly in Brittany, under the influence of Lamennais.21 It was a Romanticism which even intruded into his personal life. In his correspondence with the woman who refused his hand in marriage Miss Deszille, known as Nanine, one can see how Lequier linked his amorous grief to the work in gestation: While, devoured by worries, I traced the imperfect sketches of a work, where your image shone from all sides, which would have been immortal if humble patience could make up for talent (Oh! I was very ambitious for you!), a thousand tender ideas . . . that I cannot express. (OC 517)

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This exchange of letters was brought to Albert Camus’s attention by Jean Grenier one year before the publication of the Myth of Sisyphus and inspired the following remark: “I may be wrong, but one takes away from these letters the impression that exceptional destinies always have their derisory aspect.”22 However, going further in the direction of this psychological interpretation could confront us with a double pitfall or at least with a form of contradiction: either it might lead us back to metaphysics, insofar as psychology cannot exist without ontology, or else it may lead us into the realms of dogma, in this case, Catholic dogma. In reality, in order to overcome this impasse, it is undoubtedly necessary to embrace the hypothesis of a double search, which can certainly lead to contradictions between science and belief but of which the seeker remains the master in the last resort even if it means sacrificing one of the two. As Worms rightly points out, research in philosophy would thus always involve several paths, one being a dialectical route that cuts across the concepts of philosophy to overturn them one by one. While the other would be “that of the trial, . . . directly connected to life’s turning points.”23 The Lequierian dialectic is therefore a philosophical event in which the emergence of rational criticism and the expression of a singular existence, with its beliefs and its history, intersect, without the final result being known in advance. It is also curious to note that if the search begins with a child, it ends in a way with a tale, Abel and Abel, which does not resemble a treatise on metaphysics.24 By bringing the research to a successful conclusion in this way, leading to the story of two singular individuals, Abel and Abel, Lequier reveals once again the existential character of the research he wished to carry out. In fact, Grenier and Wahl seem to us, among the main commentators, to be those who have particularly well perceived the general direction of the work. As when Grenier wonders about what title to give to his own research work: I have not, however, used the title: “Lequier’s Religious Philosophy” because I am trying to give an overview of his thinking. Neither have I entitled this book: “Lequier’s System” because Lequier left only a fragmentary and unfinished work, nothing of which was even published during his lifetime.25

Grenier never lost sight of Lequier’s contradictory aspirations, even though he had a scientific background and was “always wary of rationalism.”26 He also studied philosophical systems, even the most elaborate among them, but he was convinced that philosophy should always remain open to all. This is why, anticipating the work of Jean Wahl, and in particular

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his Jules Lequier of 1948 and the long note he devoted to him in Kierkegaardian Studies, Grenier places him in the family of “existing” (OC xiii) philosophers and classifies his work as a forerunner of the philosophies of existence.27 The search thus begins to resemble an exercise that places singular existence at the center of a dynamic involving the pursuit of first principles as well as the effort of personal reflexivity, which Wahl divides into “the intellectual possible and the felt possible.”28 However, any search implies never quite succeeding, since “the philosophy of the first truth elevates to metaphysical heights the state of incompletion, the constantly-challenged beginning,” as Clair rightly points out.29 FACING THE PHILOSOPHICAL TRADITION Seeking and finding the truth sounds like a rather traditional view of philosophy. Lequier, for his part, says that he is more modestly looking for a first truth, a singular truth that can be universally valid. This is why he trusts the child of The Hornbeam Leaf, rather than the philosophical schools and their way, described here by Victor Cousin,30 of making people believe that such schools are above all only for “the right people.”31 “Philosophy is not a science of erudition like physics, etc.,” says Lequier, because “everyone is capable of practicing it.”32 The leader of the Eclectiques—whose division of disciplines in philosophy Lequier contested, despite its total dominance of the institutional teaching of philosophy in his time, already remarked upon by Félix Ravaisson—embodies the figure of the philosopher scorned by Lequier. We shall soon see why. On closer inspection, one notes that few philosophers find grace in his eyes, as a reading of Part H of the manuscripts entitled Critique of the Philosophers clearly suggests. Admittedly, a few names remain in his esteem, in particular Fichte and Pascal, but they are rare. As for the Greeks, only Socrates and Aristotle seem worthy of interest to him: the former, as the notes of the manuscript MS 286/S4 testify, is praised for having taken man as the point of origin of his reflection and for having recognized the difficulty of stating an absolute science of truth. As for the latter, Lequier admired him for having established the principle of contradiction on the one hand, but above all for preserving the possibility of freedom by the very fact of the contingency of the future. Hence his opposition to the Scholastics in particular, unable as they were to recognize that, faced with a contingent future, notions of true and false no longer have the same meaning. Lequier points out that the incessant and persistent disagreements between the Ancients, the

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Scholastics, and the Moderns are a sign of the randomness of philosophical research in general and their powerlessness to seek and find this first truth. As Renouvier says in explaining Lequier’s thought, it is in this sense that Aristotle is an exception, for having been the only one not to repudiate freedom and to make room for it, unlike philosophers who generally agree to exclude it from their systems in order to better contest its value (OC 3).33 However, for Lequier, this problem of the contingency of the future is far from having been exhausted, and it is with this first conviction that he undertakes to reexamine the philosophical tradition, starting with Cartesianism. Let us note from the outset that he is divided on Descartes, whom he reproaches for locating the absolute within our reasoning faculties alone. Descartes is sure of this fact because he believes that he can depend definitively upon reason, but he is mistaken, because, as Pascal had noted, reason “can be bent in any direction.” This dubious principle, cogito ergo sum, if it is indeed a principle, is obscure in the sense that the operation that posits it is unknown (OC 328–29). He infers from his in-depth study of the cogito that it does not teach enough, and that it cannot be the basis on which a succession of other truths, such as the one consisting in determining whether God exists or not, can be founded. Lequier condemns the criterion of obviousness, which cannot, nor should it be, the basis of belief; the cogito cannot be a first principle. His vanity as a rationalist thinker prevents him from realizing that man is a creature, and does not have the character of being by himself. This is why it cannot and must not be supported in itself, contrary to Descartes’s assurances. The cogito is not so much a bedrock on which to base knowledge, as an opportunity to doubt the uniformity of the self and to grasp its properly affective character. It is true to say that the form of Lequier’s texts borrows several times from the style of the Metaphysical Meditations. It will also be noted that he shows himself in some places to be flattering toward Descartes and that from a certain point of view, the search for a first truth, a first knowledge, finds its original inspiration in the Cartesian approach and the path of Cartesian research. But Lequier does not adhere to the fiction of the philosopher who starts from nothing, or who tries unsuccessfully to make a clean slate, cleansed of all forms of belief, not dependent on an initial choice. In a certain way, his critical reading is reminiscent of the reading proposed two centuries later with great precision by the phenomenologist Michel Henry,34 with echoes of Maine de Biran, who replaces seeing with feeling, and thinking-seeing with affective and primitive feeling, an original videor (an “I seem”) of feeling, amounting to a form of aseity. In a way, Henry accomplishes, in the phenomenological language of the twentieth century, the project of pushing further the Cartesian questioning from a position that does not assert the truth “in us,” but in an apprehension of the life we inherit, which Lequier would call free power.

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In this respect, one could say that the Lequierian search is a philosophy of common sense that aims to legitimize what we affirm from an underlying belief, by taking a path that cannot be at the end of the line of intellectual doubt which can never be completely overcome. Rather, he substitutes it with the power to live, which is not deduced from reasoning, but could just as well be described as an affective, pathetic, and practical cogito, as the very essence of subjective power. Finally, we can see in Lequier an intuition of the self, and thus a distinction between the living self and the worldly self, which is strikingly reminiscent of Michel Henry’s work in which the feeling of self appears before objects. We might even posit an etymological equivalence between the Lequierian “faire” (to do), albeit without the phenomenological reduction, and the Henryian “agir’ (to act), a potentially very promising translation which merits further investigation. AGAINST HEGEL Lequier’s opposition to Hegel, one of the most structurally significant elements of his search, requires closer examination. If the nineteenth century is to be seen as a struggle between Hegelianism and antiHegelianism, then Lequier is to be placed firmly in the latter camp, alongside his contemporary Kierkegaard. Hegel, in fact, as one who seemed to deny the principle of contradiction and who promoted historical necessity, offended Lequier’s sensibilities on the metaphysical, moral, and religious levels. By using a speculative language inaccessible to most people, Hegel shows himself to be a philosopher, odious in the eyes of Lequier and offensive to human dignity as such, the bearer of a truth intended only for scholars and experts (and not for children, objects of contempt in Hegel’s eyes, according to Lequier). But there was one point in particular on which he would never cease to attack the German philosopher, and the fallacious nature of his project, and that was the affirmation of an identity of identity and difference in the guise of the Aufhebung. “What Hegel denied,” he wrote, “is, of all the truths, the most precise and general; the cardinal principle of reason and reasoning: the Principle of Contradiction. The same thing cannot be and not be at the same time” (OC 347). For Lequier, it is the very possibility of rigorous reasoning, which even applies to God,35 which disappears as soon as the idea of contradiction perishes at the same time: The yes and no are not true of the same thing at the same time; or: two contradictory propositions, that is to say: two contradictory propositions, one of which is the negation of the other, are never

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both true, nor both false; or finally: of two contradictory propositions, one is true, the other is false. Without this principle, all is darkness: man who thinks is now only an animal who dreams; he is now only a living contradiction, he is what he is not, he is not what he is, and each distinct idea is a lie in the universal confusion. (OC 347) To avoid this confusion, the principle of contradiction should be established on the basis of our ability to choose yes or no to decide through action. The principle of contradiction—or non-reconciliation— is included in the principle of free will which, in his view, the Hegelian system challenged. For Lequier, it was a question of opposing the impersonal and systemic historical process through the love of life “which is above such discourse,” he wrote, and the recognition of the individual who can choose between opposing options, according to his intellectual and passionate temperament. Wahl adds: The individual, as he will then present himself, will be enclosed in his silence, and in this silence he will above all seek: ‘I am something that seeks itself, something that seeks to know itself’. Rest for him would mean death: You will not find, but it is useful to seek.36 Without this great principle, the cornerstone of all reasoning and all research, philosophy as a whole, theoretically and practically, descends into inanity. The synthesis of the contradictory makes any idea confusing, so it must be strenuously opposed. By synthesis of the contradictions, we must understand a kind of blissful enthusiasm, of “the courage of the absurd,” in the face of the double meaning of a word, that is, to weigh and to take away: “I put down and I take away: I affirm what I deny, I deny what I affirm,” he made himself these two keys to open up the kingdom of knowledge; and he had enthusiastic disciples who followed him into it. (OC 347) Among his contemporary admirers were the Eclectics, for in Cousin’s thought everything is necessary, even philosophy as it adapts to each new epoch, even the freedom that is the fruit of universal consent. In fact, leaving no room for contingency, when faced with the question of divine nature, they arrive at pantheism. “We know that for Cousin, God necessarily creates,” explains Grenier, and that manifestation of God is implied in the idea of God himself; that people represent an idea that they have the mission to

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manifest to the world and play a historical and providential role. In short, it is a dynamic pantheism: each epoch has its necessary philosophy.37 Philosophy and religion in Cousin’s work are two instants of the same idea, one being received by the philosophers and the other by the people. It should be noted in this respect that the reproach of pantheism is also addressed to Fichte (and that of deism to Descartes).38 Fichte says: “‘I am I’ and later he creates God, when he is weary of himself, and by a kind of condescension. It is pure liberality. . . . Fichte does not admit God’s transcendence” (OC 346). Lequier based his opposition on three major points: first, he stresses that pantheism is not contrary to hatred of Christianity. Also the pantheist position destroys the principle of contradiction, by attributing antagonistic qualities to Being. Finally, he observes that all pantheism is by definition deterministic, that it is in fact the ultimate and conclusive point of the most complete determinism. Pantheism and determinism tend toward the same result, which is the obedience of all to a higher form of predetermination. Pantheism would therefore be the ultimate consequence of any deterministic philosophy. In fact, Lequier repudiates all forms of determinism, whether scientific or, more surprisingly, theological,39 because they necessarily lead to skepticism.40 In Lequier’s words, “Skepticism denies that there is truth or that it can be distinguished from error / Necessity therefore leads to skepticism” (OC 368). In his opinion, there is a form of concealed pantheistic religiosity within Christian theology which is largely overlooked, especially scholastic theology. The latter, by giving too much importance to the prescience of God, to the point of ruining human freedom, also takes advantage of it to undermine any possibility of choice and moral life. The pantheistic position is ultimately affirmed as a “system in which God produces everything” (OC 369), and man never produces anything. Determined to follow this line of thinking as far as it will lead, he describes a form of pantheism unbeknown even to its proponents, starting with the latent pantheism of the Scholastics, which he will denounce in connection with the capital problem of the compatibility of divine prescience with human freedom.41 Against this position, Lequier asserted man’s freedom in space and time. And let us not forget that nothing could be worse, in his view, than a religion that does not accept the Christian God but nevertheless retains the notion of freedom: “Free will with the resolute negation of God and grace,” he sums up, “is a religion of demons” (OC 370). For Lequier, all pantheistic systems “result from the

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identification of the self and the world: or the world and me” (OC 369). What he sees in the shadow of Hegelian determinism and becoming is the supposed defeat of the marginal, the unique, and the singular. This is another point of comparison with his Danish contemporary Kierkegaard. KIERKEGAARDIAN ANALOGIES The philosophical, biographical, and literary proximity between Kierkegaard (1813–1855) and Lequier (1814–1862) has never ceased to intrigue commentators. A few curious elements should be mentioned at the outset: a comparably dramatic setting; the moors of Jutland and the Breton plains; the lyricism and similar atmosphere of certain texts—in this respect, Fear and Trembling bears comparison to Abel and Abel—the fateful role played by Régine for one and Nanine for the other, the use of pseudonyms too, deployed in a more sophisticated manner by Kierkegaard but nevertheless present in Lequier. So much so that even today exegetes still wonder about the real name of the Breton author, who never ceased to play on this ambiguity, spelling his name in different ways: Le Quier, Lecaër, Lequyer—the name under which he registered to study at the Polytechnique—Lescaire Lesquère or Lequier.42 These variations, on which the best specialists are still unable to agree (Donald Viney uses Lequyer, while most of his European colleagues continue to use Lequier), were for the philosopher a way, shrouded in Romanticism,43 of affirming his identity as an author44 but also undoubtedly a strategy aimed at maintaining a certain “mobility” so as not to be easily “situated” within any intellectual current, nor to be viewed as the continuator of a preexisting movement of thought. Lequier’s name cannot be fixed, as his work is not fixed either. On the other hand, we know that he had a preoccupation with detail, which was detrimental to him. His first publisher and friend Renouvier reminds us that he wanted to publish “only finished things (finished in the way that nobody finishes things anymore)” and “in conditions that distinguish them from so many ephemeral works of contemporary philosophy.”45 For Clair, who studied Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous procedures in detail, it is very appropriate to make this connection between Kierkegaard’s pseudonymous works and the only philosophical undertaking published by Lequier, distributed to a small number of friends, The Hornbeam Leaf: This text, which can certainly be read as a lyrical outpouring imbued with romanticism, is not only precisely constructed, but thematically very elaborate. Being both a pathetic and reflexive text, it updates a new way of philosophizing, in a genre quite comparable to that found in some pseudonymous books by a philosophical contemporary of Lequier, namely Kierkegaard.46

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Clair was not the first to take an interest in such parallels. The two Jeans, Grenier and Wahl, were the most outspoken on the subject and above all the most prompt. The long comparative note found in the Études Kiergaardiennes is fundamental in this respect. It presents them as representatives of a dazzling subjectivity opposed to the quest for objective certainty, which was very prevalent in the middle of the nineteenth century. Thinkers of subjectivity, Lequier and Kierkegaard are romantic as much as romanticism meets Jean Wahl’s definition of it, as a moment of subjectivity. Synthesis of the finite and the infinite for Kierkegaard, human beings are for Lequier “the point of contact of the two worlds, homo duplex,”47 of flesh and spirit, of the visible and the invisible. In this sensitive desire to go beyond, there is an ardent lyricism and inspiration irresistible to Kierkegaard’s character, and even more so to Lequier’s. A certain exaltation is perceptible in Lequier, especially in his correspondence, a particularly important body of work on a philosophical level, not so much in that it reveals the romantic drama of his life itself, but in that it reveals above all the author’s deep-rooted romanticism.48 As here when he addresses Le Gal La Salle in a letter and calls him his “darling,” his “Daniel”: “Oh I would like to see it again at the hour of my death this holy and beloved note! . . . Oh if I could fly in space like those invisible forces that go through it! If I could follow the wind and open your curtains with it to see you for a moment!” (OC 495). Examples of this type abound in Lequier’s extant correspondence, as well as in some of his thoughts published by Grenier, which reveal his truly poetic nature,49 endowed with a passion overflowing with imagination. They also embody one of the defining traits of romanticism, the cult of friendship, as seen here: “Oh! what man is happy enough to have a friend, to throw himself into his arms and cry and tell him everything!” (OC 470). Above and beyond the differences evoked by both Clair and Delecroix,50 what most unites the two thinkers is a certain style and philosophical way of being. They also betray a sense of tragedy that resonates with the Kierkegaardian analysis of despair, as Jean Grenier described it in a series of interviews with Louis Foucher: The most jaded reader cannot fail to be surprised by the overwhelming tone with which Lequier deals with the great philosophical problems: here is someone who does not juggle with ideas; he does not only take them seriously, but also tragically. The feeling of despair in the face of destiny and choice is expressed with the same intensity as in Pascal and in one of his contemporaries, Kierkegaard, with whom he was rightly associated.51

It is also curious to perceive a certain shared sense of the theatrical. Lequier writes: “The human soul is a real theatre with real actors and a

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tireless, never-sleeping spectator.”52 In manuscript 290, entitled Théâtre, Simples indications, we find some clues about this imagined staging, accompanied by some formulas and more or less precise sketches of the central characters of this play, whose main character is, according to the author, comic in nature.53 In Probus and the Principle of Knowledge: Dialogue, it is striking to note the extent to which the discussion is Socratic in form, that is, theatrical and dialogical: in this Dialogue, the predestined plays a role akin to that of the Jesuit Good Father in the Provinciales,54 and both characters present a discourse against which Lequier and Pascal subtly allow theirs to emerge. In this respect, we can also underline the importance of the conversational form which is clearly evident in this touching letter from Charles Renouvier to Gal La Salle in which he recalls, among other things, the Socratic style which their mutual friend used in his philosophical conversations: As for myself, dear friend, more than once I have believed, from the time Léquyer made me see, in something like fifty or sixty lessons, that I didn’t know how to ask the question, until I was attempting to write down my thoughts on this subject for public consumption, that nothing could surprise me anymore— and I wasn’t there yet! These lessons were, of course, discussions conducted more socratico by my comrade, the master in this matter. / I don’t need to use the bad excuse of the paper that is about to run out. / I’ve rambled on enough, haven’t I? / Dear friend, I embrace you.55

In Kierkegaard’s work, where we learn that theater was one of the author’s passions, especially as a young man,56 we also find many traces of Socratic discussions, perhaps the most famous being In Vino Veritas, in which five characters get drunk and talk while listening to Mozart’s Don Juan, and where the staging and the positioning of the protagonists appear to conform to the rules of theater. Like Lequier, it is in his Papiers that we discover that Kierkegaard had dramaturgical projects, the best example being The Battle Between the Old and the New Soap-Cellars,57 dating from 1838. What is significant here is the intrusion into the philosophical discourse of a narrative, a story, a synopsis, a conversation, a staging, typical of both authors. The manuscripts left by Lequier are particularly striking for the diversity of meditative, dialectical, or poetic genres they contain.58 Deleuze would later note that what we see emerging here, after all, is nothing more and nothing less than a new way of philosophizing, an approach which defies easy definition, which first appeared in the nineteenth century and of which Kierkegaard in Denmark and Lequier or Renouvier in France (“an unjustly forgotten group”59 according to him), are the undeniable precursors.

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CORLAY AND DOMINIQUE Romantic poetry and a sense of theater are two outstanding features of the Lequierian philosophical language. As Le Brech points out: We find in his notebooks mentions of several writers and poets (Lord Byron, George Sand, Etienne Pivert de Senancour, John Milton). Driven by ideas of becoming a writer-philosopher, Lequier sketched out literary and poetic projects, which he discusses with passion in his letters to his friend Le Gal La Salle. These draft texts, which have come down to us in a fragmentary state, all have proper names for titles: Corlay, Dominique, Philippe, Maharit, Milton and Galileo.60 Here, it is less the fragmentary character that is surprising, than the emergence of literary, and therefore fictitious heroes, who in Lequier’s case actually assume the form of conceptual characters: “Corlay represents the artist and his creative freedom, Dominique, the scientist studying the laws of nature, Maharit and Fanche, the poetic contemplation of nature, Milton and Galileo, the power of science, Philippe, human ignorance.”61 Each of the characters, who were supposed to represent a chapter of Lequier’s magnum opus, corresponded to a specific field, important for the understanding of the work as a whole. In these scattered writings, Corlay is undoubtedly among the most valuable and instructive of the characters, having benefited from more advanced and thorough writing than the others. This double, behind whom lurks the author himself, also evokes the name of a small town in Brittany, no doubt to better underline the importance of Lequier’s native land even in his literary project. As Goulven Le Brech points out in a text based on notes found after Lequier’s death, this character is supposed to rely on concepts as well as explicit attitudes: “Sense of beauty, sense of the possible. Origin of Poetry. The ideal. Striving to raise the Real to the ideal. To disregard the forces of man. Aspiration toward the invisible. Pudor. Sensitivity that exalts itself. Synthetic habits.”62 He is opposed in every way to Dominique, who represents above all the idea of order and necessity, but also that of cynicism.63 The opposition between Corlay and Dominique is supposed to confront us with the contrast between the elevation of the real to a possible ideal, and the deterministic position which tends to overestimate a doctrine which claims to be rational, an objectivist metaphysics, to the detriment of any form of creativity. In the notes Lequier left for this literary project, which Corlay surely was, we observe that beauty, as a visible representation of

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human power and the very image of life,64 plays a revealing role in this process of elevation toward an ideal. These texts, which are not as advanced as Lequier himself suggested in several epistolary exchanges (unless, of course, some of them have simply disappeared), show once again the extent to which the question of the dilemma lies at the heart of Lequierian thought, as seen in his more theoretical texts. In Lequier’s work, certain points of view are sometimes elevated by means of a certain “behind-the-scenes” manner of thinking, as evoked by Pascal,65 as if it were necessary to flee at all costs the monolithic temptations of thought, its univocal and uniform character, as if it were necessary, in Lequier’s words, “to be wary of this unbridled and shameful desire for the well-being of the intelligence” (OC 464). And, by dealing with this point in a narrative project, he marks once again to what extent strictly analytical and theoretical discursive modalities alone can never allow us to totally capture the concrete situation of that which exists. These texts also serve to illustrate the personal drama of the author, who dreamt of becoming a successful novelist, alas without the expected success. Lequier had confided his pain to Renouvier as a young man, and this turmoil was clearly compounded by his inability to bring to fruition a literary enterprise of whose value he remained firmly convinced: Ah! Renouvier if only you knew! If I could tell you! You don’t know what it means to suffer, truly suffer, but I can tell you. Alas! The thought of such a sad life, of such a horrible, relentless trap, the frightening beauty of the pages that I would like to pull out of the shadows . . . as soon as possible, except for a few that I wrote through my tears. (OC 541) But in the end, it was in philosophy, and not literature, that his tears had the greatest effect and bore the most fruit. What Lequier himself seemed to envisage when he wrote that “people need a thirst for truth; fine arts only excite a feeling and translate a confused thought; this poetic life is no longer enough for them: philosophy and Christianity will each have their share of minds.”66 The other fundamental point of convergence between the two authors is of course their anti-Hegelianism. Lequier agrees with Kierkegaard on one crucial point, namely the principle of contradiction must not be negated. According to each of them, denying this first principle would amount to destroying the possible. He also agrees with the author of Either/Or on the place that Hegel’s pantheism and dogmatics leave to the individual.

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The confusion generated by the negation of the principle of contradiction results in what Grenier calls “the negation of the personality,” which is to say the negation of the singular. The dispassionate language of abstraction makes this synthesis possible, but it is simply untenable in the field of existence where one cannot “treat the ‘lonely pine’ as another tree in the row,” to borrow the elegant metaphor proposed by Xavier Tilliette.67 Certainly, the terms absurd or paradox are absent in Lequier’s work, whereas they are central to Kierkegaard. “His term,” according to Clair, “is ‘enigma’”: Of the enigma, one can present a certain explanation, but cannot build any; one can expose its elements and relate them, but not, in the strict sense, account for them; one can specify exactly the difficulty, but not give the solution that would destroy its enigmatic character. With the enigma we must abandon the vocabulary of fundamental analysis and embrace the polysemic and labyrinthine vocabulary of interpretation.68

In reality, Lequier does not use the same notion, but in him, we see an identical struggle between abstract reason and, as Jean Wahl states, “the will to accept the absurd, that is to say the contradictory.”69 And it is faith, as we shall see, that will make this possible. Under this enigmatic and sibylline concept, we must therefore see a window that opens up onto the immeasurable and the infinite, precisely that which appears absurd from the point of view of natural laws. In this context, the absurd must be understood as a means of pushing beyond our intellectual limits, a force for transcending the known and attempting to reach the unknown. The absurd replaces the finite criteria of rationality with the infinite criteria of our relation to eternity and the unspeakable. Essentially, for Kierkegaard as for Lequier, there is a truth to be sought, without specifying what the starting point of this itinerary should be, except “the first glimpse of my reason in its first step toward knowledge, the first supposed truth in the first why” (OC 57). This starting point resides in what Grenier calls the personal and idiosyncratic character of freedom: man, adrift in a universe of objects, seeks in solitude and in darkness a first truth which is radically different from an object, and of which he will realize with astonishment and anguish that it is consubstantial with himself, the searcher.70

The first truth is to be sought on the side of interiority, of subjectivity, as when Lequier addresses the reader—“you will fall into error, when you feel that you have made a bad use of your freedom” (OC 375)—a very Kierkegaardian formulation, especially in its use of the second person singular. It is

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not the “conception of the eternity of concepts”71 that is important here, not “horsehood” as Antisthenes would have it, but the actual horse, the existing animal. ANTIPHILOSOPHY AND CHRISTIANITY How can we describe the common style mentioned earlier? The fragmentary state of the writings, which may suggest a “mode of communication (that) resists theoretical thought,”72 their opposition to the abstraction of philosophical systems—Kierkegaard wrote not systematic expositions but fragments, and the highly elaborate organization of Kierkegaard’s work, from Either/Or to the Instant, stands in stark opposition to Hegel’s system—the intersection of ontological, ethical, and religious perspectives, in fact, produce a tangle characteristic of antiphilosophy. For Lequier and Kierkegaard, Christian notions such as the Trinity or Redemption, for example, can be understood as concepts, just as philosophy cannot escape from the foundation on which our beliefs are based, since these cannot be set aside, let alone ignored. As André Clair aptly put it, “to the limit, believing and knowing are one and the same. A true belief is a true belief, and a scientific truth is an affirmation of a subject.”73 One way of qualifying such a “disorder,” perceived from the point of view of philosophical systematicity as well as from the standpoint of a metaphysics which would prefer to carry out its task without referring to any belief whatsoever, would be to juxtapose the two terms, philosopher and Christian, in order to apply them to our two authors.74 Thus Grenier’s remark that Lequier’s efforts to unite philosophy and religion are “not always successful”75 loses its force, insofar as precisely this union is not on Lequier’s agenda. As we shall see later on, the regime of truth, as far as future contingents are concerned, is unique and applies to men as much as to God himself. Any regime of double truth, one for man and the other for God, is simply absurd insofar as it contravenes the principle of contradiction (and incidentally any philosophy). In fact, the partially unsatisfactory nature of this notion of “Christian philosophers,” radical for both Christianity and philosophy, stems from a completely different factor. It is true that Lequier’s critical method, which is not to be equated with criticism, is supposed to embrace and contrast questions of religious faith as well as metaphysical questions. But this confrontation takes place on a double level which appears to be entirely idiosyncratic, and which serves to define with much more precision the situation of Lequier, alongside Pascal and Kierkegaard, in the history of Western metaphysics: the first level is that which operates before the fall of the first man, that unique event embodied in the figure of Adam, where philosophy proves itself competent

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to seek a first truth, eternal, even if it is the product of a first conviction. At this first level, before the eruption of a new order of truths, the competence of philosophy is recognized. The second level is then realized, a domain in which philosophical reasoning loses its primary legitimacy and effectiveness at the same time, in favor of a revelation, an original fall that occurs in time and space, which dispossesses the truths of the first order. So what Lequier calls “the soul of philosophy,” which is the “instinctive claim to explain everything,” can only “deny the inexplicable” and thus prevent itself from “finding” the truth (OC 384).76 As Jacob points out, “in observing himself and the world, (Lequier) encounters everywhere the imprint of a profound ‘degradation,’ which can only be explained as the continuation of an original fault.”77 Thenceforth, as Lequier explains, “it is useful to know the truths of reason in the second order, without Christianity losing anything of its legitimate empire; it is a light which is projected on the revealed truths, and which enlightens them.” (OC 325). This helps to explain why Lequier, throughout these developments, never lost sight of what he believed to be the duties and rights of reason, unlike most of his Catholic contemporaries, who were more sensitive from this point of view to “fanciful” or extravagant ways. His inclination toward romanticism did not go so far as to eliminate purely and simply the significance of reason, which remained crucial for him. To characterize this principled opposition to philosophical discourse, which unfolds its full power at the second, post-Adamic level, Alain Badiou has proposed, as already mentioned, the notion of antiphilosophy.78 For antiphilosophers, philosophy, as practiced by “classical” philosophers, proves incapable of expressing the ultimate ends of existence. Certainly, the antiphilosopher fits well into the philosophical register, where the category of truth proves to be crucial, but in a deliberately marginalized and polemical posture. For Lequier, this attitude was embodied first of all in his polemical attitude toward other philosophers—always determined to vanquish the opposing party—but he was also polemical with regard to the scientists of his time, whom he knew well because of his training as an engineer, and who naively saw scientific research as a means of finally moving beyond the stage of belief. It is with the help of “these sharp and brief phrases, like shards of glass,”79 of this language which sought to produce, according to his aspirations, a strong electric jolt, that Lequier led the fight on the intellectual battlefield. But his stance is also marginal insofar as Lequier refused to consider the study of philosophy as a profession in its own right, even less as a vocation in the sense that philosophy would only be the preserve of a few scholars, but more as an exercise in reflection, encompassing all existence and the search for a first truth, the starting point from which everything else would make

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sense. This is in fact a constant attempt to “purify the notion of truth,”80 not so much to found anything, as Badiou seems to think at times, but instead to leave room for personal choices that have absolute value. This is why one should not be overly surprised by Lequier’s wish to include, in the middle of his great theoretical work, the account of his internment in Dinan that Renouvier, to whom he had spoken and who was naturally surprised by such a device, presents in the terms used by Lequier himself as “a piece unique in all literature” and which he evoked “long after he had returned to his ordinary state.”81 For Badiou, however, it is crucial to distinguish between Christian antiphilosophy and anti-Christian antiphilosophy. These two currents certainly have “essential and complex” links.82 Without dwelling too long on these relations, let us point out a first point shared by all the antiphilosophers, namely the fragmentary nature of their works (Wittgenstein’s Blue and Brown Books, Kierkegaard’s Papirer, Pascal’s Pensées, Nietzsche’s Unpublished Fragments etc.). Clair indeed suggests that it is in the form of the works he has left us that Lequier most closely resembles Pascal and “the editing of his texts poses problems that are no easier to resolve than those involved in editing the Pensées.”83 The first publishers of Pascal’s Pensées and Lequier’s Posthumous Fragments, Etienne Perier and Charles Renouvier, were thus confronted with writings found in an unordered and scattered fashion. I will not return here to the long adventure of successive editions of Pascal’s Pensées, which is marked by doubts and uncertainties, sudden advances and eternal backtracking, but it is certain that the questions raised by the publication of Lequier’s works are just as insoluble. Indeed, such an edition, which would include what has already been published as well as his correspondence, his sketchbooks and all the variants of his works,84 of which it is sometimes difficult to say which one is the most complete and most faithful to the author’s spirit, would certainly require, as Émile Callot observes, “a serious work of erudition and interpretation similar to that which so many editors have attempted on Pascal’s Pensées.”85 Such work is made all the more complex by the fact that the author left no particular indication at the end of his life, and those of Lequier’s writings which have been discovered often give the impression of a permanent struggle between the author and himself. But let us return to his position with regard to philosophy in relation to the reality of Christianity. Might we suggest that he only philosophized to legitimize his faith (a charge often leveled against him), so as to base his religion on a philosophical principle? Or did his philosophical questioning precede his belief in Jesus Christ, as Renouvier wanted us to think when he defended the idea that his philosophy was already firmly established when he decided to return more faithfully to the Christianity of his youth? This alternative, partly

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discussed in the introduction to this book, now seems to me too restrictive. I agree with Dugas that Lequier is a believer as well as a philosopher. . . . Nothing is more common than a child’s candid faith combined with complete freedom of thought. . . . This is how Lequier was able to be, and indeed was, a sincere believer and a free, even bold philosopher.86

But how can we simultaneously maintain these two positions? As I put it in Antiphilosophy of Christianity,87 if one “is a self-sufficient activity, which begins and ends with comprehension of a concept,” as Maurice MerleauPonty writes, and the other requires “assent to things which cannot be seen, but are established as articles of belief by the revealed texts,”88 is the gulf between them so wide that it prevents any real opposition, any possible relationship? Lequier appears to us both as a Christian and as an antiphilosopher: he has an experience as a “Christian” and also an experience as a “philosopher” but it is not possible to say that his philosophy considers convictions as mere abstractions, quite the contrary. Lequier in a sense opposes “conviction” to the Socratic Daemon, by a form of inverted symmetry: “The demon of Socrates is the Dark Instinct that says: ‘Do not do.’ That which says: ‘Do’ is light, is conviction” (OC 397). Basically, in Lequier’s work, the thinker and the believer “develop in parallel, without hindering or harming each other, and philosophical enthusiasm is always coupled with mystical exaltation.”89 On the one hand, philosophical and conceptual speculation, on the other hand, the existence and interiority of the individual from which it can only be distinct, as much by the impossibility of “knowing” the content of a confession of faith as by the impossibility of the concept to “exist.” Nevertheless, this reflection allows the Christian, in the field of religion, to enjoy the radiance of the philosopher, and the philosopher to benefit from the believer’s enlightenment. In fact, among the specialists of his oeuvre, Lequier is often presented as a Catholic of a fairly classical bent. However, it has to be said that his references to the Church are quite rare. Certainly, he writes that “the Church has come to the rescue of the human spirit, tottering on its foundations,”90 but only to then remark that it is “sad to see in the front lines of those defending the Church today men who disguise it under their politics, who slander it by loving it, and find a way to extend to it something of the repugnance they inspire in the people.”91

This passage from the Nouvelles Provinciales,92 the collective work on which Lequier and Renouvier collaborated, shows that the Church is not perfectly

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pure, since it is true that it is made up of people with intentions that are far from flawless (reminiscent of those “bad Christians” who, according to Pascal, tear the Church “from the inside”93). In short, as both Dugas and Grenier note, it is not so easy to consider that the justification of Catholicism was his main aim. In spite of this dominant position, Jacob noted, on the contrary, his astonishment at the fact that Lequier “passed and agreed to pass for a Catholic.” According to him, it was in fact “the whole doctrinal work of Catholicism that he threw down.”94 Another important biographical element: we now know that his attachment to the Church was not free of Voltairian tremors: “Lequyer came out of the brilliant École (Polytechnique) profoundly incredulous and already a vigorous defender of doubt and error.”95 This last testimony clearly shows, in the Catholic Lequier, an ability to introduce a critical dimension which is a sign of his freedom of thought. As we observe here, enthused by the “desire for good,” which he contrasts with the supposed gestures of Christian life (penances, sermons, mortifications), that we see at work in a free spirit such as George Sand: What I love in George Sand is the feeling and the desire for good; whatever else one may say, hers is a noble, generous nature. What is good in her heart is better for humanity than the penances, sermons and mortifications of all the Catholics in the world.96

Let us therefore consider Lequier sincerely and faithfully attached to the Church, without being able to draw any other conclusions, except to say that the rarity of his writings on the subject shows that it was never a major concern nor a completely candid attachment. It seems important to put names to the key elements of Lequieriean antiphilosophy, insofar as the ultimate meaning of existence always seems to escape the philosophers (as is the case with the Scholastics, Descartes, Hegel, the Eclectics, and among others). Here, in contrast to the Ricoeurian effort to separate criticism and conviction, Lequier’s aim is to underline precisely how impossible it is for us to proceed with this ontological separation. As Clair finally points out, “Lequier did not concern himself with a strict separation between philosophy and Christianity, between metaphysics and theology. Nor did he confuse them, and often the registers are clearly distinguished.”97 In other words, his Christianity as a philosopher does not turn Christian revelation into a moment of non-philosophy. But it receives, on the contrary, from the event-one of the new Adam a motivation to urgently relaunch the questioning procedure proper to philosophy (conditioning at the same time the possibility of a new choice). Thus, the separation between philosophy and religion is very real: it is imperious from the religious point of view, without

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being absolute from the point of view of philosophy. From the point of view of religion, in fact, the division is radical. As Lequier explains: A priest who, even as a philosopher, was certain of the truth of a rational doctrine, related to the dogmas of religion, should refrain from making the slightest allusion to it from the pulpit and should stand in the pure dogma and in the moral part; he could have conferences at home where he would speak of his philosophy and the natural explanation of dogmas, or at least of the marked limit between natural and revealed truths, in order to destroy apparent contradictions; but from the pulpit he should withdraw into dogma. . . . The first duty of the priest is to teach the word of the master, and to leave philosophy with its painful and passionate discussions to the philosophers. (OC 487–88)

To announce the Word is to refrain from philosophical digression. Lequier has learnt the lesson of Saint Paul: the Word of God cannot be confused with philosophical discourse because true religion cannot, nor should it, give itself over to philosophy. On the other hand, by the yardstick of philosophy, the division is not so radical, and nothing should prevent it from thinking or studying religion as an object without, however, being able to take full possession of it from a subjective point of view. Lequier writes, “In philosophy, morality and theodicy as a natural religion are one and the same science” (OC 488). It is not a question of reconciling the incompatible or of bringing together two different planes, running the risk of entangling religion and philosophy for their greater mutual and simultaneous confusion, but of constantly glimpsing, although a dichotomy persists between them, the possibilities of mutual clarity. Two limitations appear to frame this reflection: the understanding of the first principles of the world to which we belong, and the way we naturally fit into it, what we might call existence, mark the limits of simple scientific and philosophical reasoning. Hence the pretension of science, as Pascal explained, and of those who claim that science is self-sufficient: The vanity of the sciences—Physical science will not console me for the ignorance of morality in the time of affliction. But the science of ethics will always console me for the ignorance of the law of physics.98

No consciousness naturally preexists science, and without consciousness, science is vain, incapable of solving the tribulations of existence. Pascal, the undisputed master of geometry, finally warns us of what abstract sciences cannot account for. He does not totally disdain geometry, which made him famous during his lifetime, but he diminishes its

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importance, its feigned depth, and above all he denies it the power to probe the depths of the human soul; he reduces it to the rank of convenience, as it were, and disputes its capacity to appreciate the variety of human phenomena. At this stage, it is perhaps worth noting that I take a different view from that of André Clair with regard to Pascal: Pascal’s priority is indeed pyrrhonism and the pathetic drama of the human condition. On the contrary, in Lequier’s work, the emphasis is on affirmation, on the effective capacity to find a truth; this truth, which is perhaps not objectively determinable, can be recognized at least in the simple act of searching and in this is already universal.99

I do not agree with this assertion that Pascal contends that all knowledge of the truth is impossible, any more than I see in Lequier a tendency to think that the possession of absolute truth is probable or even accessible. “As error is only a negation of truth, to say that our intelligence is capable of error is to say that it is only capable of truth to a certain degree, that is to say that our power is limited and that we are finite” (OC 377), he explains. I therefore prefer to underline the profound unity of thought between the two authors. For both of them, the act of searching for truth is something more than a simple search and already resembles, in its embryonic state, an element of truth itself. In order to bring these analyses together, we could stress that truth is in a way the path to truth. For Kierkegaard, the question of the search for truth is posed in the same terms as for Lequier and must be as sincere as for Pascal. Moreover, it must be an authentic search carried out personally by the individual, in this irreplaceable context: “What good would it do to me if the truth stood before me, cold and naked, not caring whether I recognized her or not, and producing in me a shudder of fear rather than a trusting devotion?”100 The search for truth is eminently subjective:101 it is only by assuming, at least in the order of possibilities, a character of individual appropriation that the traces of the presence of truth become detectable. There is truth only for an individual-singular, there is truth only from existence, from subjective truths, whose demarcation from objective ones was first drawn by Pascal. “The thought of the self and the self are united in a way that we would call existential today,” as Jean Wahl put it. What is important, is that “it is I who is alive, it is I who must act.”102 It is therefore toward an act, a positive action, that our investigation is leading us. Because after having sought it, if the truth is to be given to us, only a true act can make us capable of grasping it.

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NOTES 1. Clair, A. CJL No. 7, 32. 2. Grenier, J. Entretiens avec Louis Foucher, 46. 3. Pyguillem, G. Jules Lequier, CJL No.1, 85. 4. The expression is by Lazreff. Cf. Grenier, J, OC—introduction p. XIV. 5. Jacob, B. Jules Lequier, CJL No.1, 70. 6. Letter from Jacob to Renouvier, CJL No.1, 38. 7. Le Brech, G. Introduction à la correspondance Jacob-Renouvier, CJL No.1, 34. 8. Id, CJL No. 1, 35. 9. Dugas, L. La recherche d’une première vérité, biographical note, 48. 10. Clair, A. CJL No. 7, 21. 11. Clair, A. CJL No. 6, 39. 12. Br. 395, Laf. 406. 13. See. Viney, Donald W. Translation of Works of Jules Lequyer: The Hornbeam Leaf, The Dialogue of the Predestinate and the Reprobate, Eugene and Theophilus. Foreword by Robert Kane (Lewiston, New York: The Edwin Mellen Press, 1998). 14. Citot, V. CJL No. 6, 208–209. 15. Citot, V. La condition philosophique et le problème du début, 9. 16. Evard J-L, CJL No. 4, 42. 17. Where Lequier was found dead in 1862, at the age of 48. 18. Le Gal La Salle, M. Trois lettres à Charles Renouvier, 21 March 1862. CJL No. 3, 22. 19. Quoted by Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 28. 20. To which Ernest Hello testifies, in terms quite similar to those of Renouvier as notified by Prat: .”..in the tête-à-tête, when his word reached the heights of his thought, he rose to an eloquence almost without equal. To characterize it, points of comparison are lacking. It was iron and fire. It was nervous, strong; it was splendid and lively.” Excerpt originally published in the Revue de Bretagne et de Vendée in 1874. Cf. Le Brech, G. CJL No. 3, 6. 21. Hugues-Félicité Robert de Lamennais a French Catholic priest, philosopher and political theorist considered as a pioneer in French social Catholicism. 22. Letter from Albert Camus to Jean Grenier dated 23 September 1941, Albert Camus-Jean Grenier, Correspondance 1932–1960 (Gallimard, 1981), p. 66. Cf. Le Brech, G. CJL No. 6, p. 243–225. 23. Worms, F. CJL No. 6, 128. 24. André Clair observes: “We also notice that, if there are two Abels, two children, indistinguishable at the beginning but really singular at the end, there are two singular religious, two metaphysicians expert in speculative debates, two philosophers assimilated sometimes, but with some risk, one in Renouvier and the other in Lequier.” Clair, A. CJL No. 7, 38. 25. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier. 16. 26. Id., 170.

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27. Wahl, J. Jules Lequier—Les classiques de la liberté, 55. 28. Worms, F. CJL No. 6, 129. 29. Clair, A. Kierkegaard & Lequier, 122. 30. Victor Cousin was the foremost figure in French institutional philosophy in Lequier’s time. He was, among other things, the figurehead of the “Eclectiques.” Eclecticism is a philosophical position which consists of selecting elements from various other philosophies in order to construct a more complete system. 31. While religion, explains Cousin, “would be for the masses,” quoted by Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier. 187. 32. La liberté, 65. 33. Vieira rightly notes that only Félix Ravaisson (1832–1918), Lequier’s contemporary philosopher known to Renouvier as their correspondence suggests, will in turn come to re-establish the importance of the value of contingency in philosophy. Viera, A. CJL No. 6, 111. 34. Maine de Biran (1766–1824), author of De l’aperception immediate (1807; Le livre de poche, Paris, 2005), was the subject of an important study by Michel Henry entitled “Philosophie et phénoménologie du corps: Essai sur l’ontologie biranienne” (Puf, 1965). 35. “God cannot make a circle square: because he is the intelligent suppressed being, he cannot fall into a contradiction.” Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 152. 36. Wahl, J. Études kierkegaardiennes, 430–432. 37. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 90–91. 38. As well as in Schelling. Cf. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier. 50. 39. On this point Kierkegaard will say that “the fatalist has no God or, what amounts to the same thing, his God is necessity.” OCXVI, Illness at Death, 197. 40. “Skepticism denies that there is truth or that it can be distinguished from error/Necessity therefore leads to skepticism.” OC, 368 41. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 98/99. 42. See also Le Brech in CLJ No. 5, 61–69. 43. It should be noted, as indeed Grenier does, that among the three philosophical currents of mid-nineteenth century France—utopian socialism, liberal Catholicism and eclecticism—all are borrowed, to varying degrees, from romanticism. In particular, Romanticism is revealed “by a rather great disdain for any rational and well-defined doctrine and by a propensity for a very vague and diffuse religiosity. It is not in vain that the Genius of Christianity (Chateaubriand) served as a preface to the whole period” he wrote. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 186. 44. In his 1924 Biographical Note, Dugas (p. 5) states on this subject: “Our philosopher claimed to choose the spelling of the name he wanted to illustrate. He hesitated for a long time between “Lequyer,” “Lequier” and even “Le Quier” (letter from Michelot to Renouvier, 6 July 1865). His deed of discharge from military service bears “Lequier,” but a judgement of the Saint-Brieuc court, “Lequyer.” Similarly, the Centenary Book of the École Polytechnique wrote “Lequier,” but the Annuaire (official document) “Lequyer.” M. Hémon was very keen to restore to Lequier what he called his real name, his legal name. In our opinion it is as indifferent to write

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Lequier or Lequyer as Leibniz or Leibnitz. Let us say that Lequyer is the surname of the philosopher, and Lequier the name of his choice, but one which he himself did not make.” 45. Quoted in La philosophie de Jules Lequier by Jean Grenier, 32. 46. Clair, A. Introduction to the reading of the work of Jules Lequier, VII. 47. Jules Lequier Collection, Msc 286, 64. 48. Hence the importance of the biographical works of Dugas, Hémon or Jacob, as Grenier rightly notes in his Introduction to the edition of Lequier’s correspondence, OC, 494. 49. As here: “I have often dreamed—blessed dream—that I would bring to your feet, born of the purest blood of my heart, blossomed at the burning fires of sorrow and watered with those tears all the more fertile as they are more bitter, a flower of unequalled beauty, which would intoxicate you with its perfume.” Letter to Nanine, undated, quoted in the Biographical Note of P. HEMON, Edition de l’éclat, 1991, 226. 50. See Delecroix, V. “Critical notes,” Revue de métaphysique et de morale, 29, no. 1 (2001): 119–140. 51. Grenier, J. Interviews with Louis Foucher, 48. 52. Fonds Jules Lequier, Ms 286, 64, University Library of Rennes. 53. Fonds Jules Lequier, Ms 290, cahier C. Another play (P6) is also inscribed in this manuscript, it is a drama. 54. In his monumental Port-Royal, Sainte-Beuve remarks that “if Pascal .  .  . seems to be renewing the form of the Socratic Dialogues, he also harks back to them in terms of purpose and effect. He is acting as a true Christian Socrates, re-establishing and avenging exact morality to the shame of the Casuists, those modern sophists who would falsify it.” Sainte-Beuve, Port-Royal, Volume II, Bibliothèque La Pléiade, nrf, Book III of Volume II, 133–134. 55. Fonds Jules Lequier, Letter from Monsieur Renouvier to Monsieur Le Gal La Salle, former Member of Parliament, 14 February 1891, Manuscript 304/2, Additional Documents. 56. See the four articles published in the Fraedrelandet serial from 24 to 27 July 1848 entitled The crisis and A crisis in the life of an actress. 57. II B 1–21, pp. 285–306, fully reproduced in volume 1 of the translation of the Complete Works (Edition de l’Orante), 111–135. 58. See Clair, A. CJL No. 5, 24. 59. Deleuze, G. L’Image-Mouvement (Les Editions de Minuit, 1983), 163. 60. Le Brech, G. Jules Lequier le spectre du beau, p. 159. See also Le Brech, G. Jules Lequier (Rennes: La part commune, 2007). 61. Le Brech, G. Introduction, CFJ No. 3, 43. 62. Le Brech, G. Jules Lequier le spectre du beau, 160. 63. Lequier adds on his notebooks (Folio 41 of Notebook B): “Origin of Science. Le réel. Strives to destroy the ideal in order to see only the rule (idem [Corlay], in the opposite direction). Observation of nature. Cynicism. Sensitivity that surpasses itself. Analytical habits.” Le Brech, G. Jules Lequier le spectre du beau, 160. 64. Notebook C, MS 250, Fol 89.

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65. Laf. 513, Br. 4. 66. Fragments sur le beau, 176 (Le Philosophoire, 2012/2, n°38). 67. See Tilliette, X. Jules Lequier ou le tourment de la liberté, pp. 53–54. The “lonely pine” is an abiding image of Lequier, since it is the theme of the last known page that he wrote. 68. Clair, A. La recherche d’une première vérité and other texts, p. XXV. It should be pointed out here that the Master’s thesis in Philosophy (University of Rennes 1, 1999), written by Goulven Le Brech under the direction of André Clair, was precisely entitled and on the subject “Jules Lequier et l’énigme de Faire” (Jules Lequier and the Enigma of Doing). 69. Wahl, J. Jules Lequier—Les classiques de la liberté, 77. 70. Grenier, J. Jules Lequier, philosophie and theéologien de la liberté, 4. 71. XII A 328, 1849/1850, nrf Gallimard, p. 300. For the Complete Works of Kierkegaard we use the Editions de l’Orante. For the Papiers we refer to the five volumes of the edition published by Gallimard which serve as references. 72. Worms, F. CJL No. 6: 131. 73. Clair, A. Métaphysique et Existence, 51. 74. This is the meaning of the title of my thesis, defended in 2000, “Pascal, Lequier, Kierkegaard: Convergences of Three Christian Philosophers” (Paris 1— Pantéon-Sorbonne University). 75. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 224. 76. In the margin: “The last effort of this pretension shows itself in criticism.” 77. Jacob, B. Jules Lequier, CJL No.1, 71. 78. Cf. the introduction, and particularly the first two volumes of his “trilogy: Badiou, A. L’être et l’événement (Paris: Seuil, 1988) (in particular, pages 447–458) and Badiou, A. Logiques des mondes. L’ordre philosophique (Seuil, 2006) (in particular, pages 235–246). 79. Tilliette, X. Jules Lequier ou le tourment de la liberté, 176. 80. Badiou, A. Lacan L’antiphilosophie 3, 33. 81. Letter from Renouvier to Jacob, CJL 1: 51. 82. Badiou explains that the first “classical philosopher” is Pascal with whom Nietzsche has developed “essential, fraternal but complex links. This is the first determination of what is meant by Nietzsche’s antiphilosophy. Philosophy, in antiphilosophy, is in reality religion disguised or dressed in the garments of scientificity or rationality” (Badiou, A. Nietzsche, Antiphilosophy 1, 87). 83. Clair, A. La recherche d’une première vérité—introduction, p. XLV. 84. “Dugas points to four handwritten versions of The Hornbeam Leaf. Cf. comments on Jules Lequier, by Emile Callot, 12. 85. Id., 12. 86. Dugas. L, Biographical Note, 15. 87. Deslandes, G. Antiphilosophy of Christianity. Springer, 2021. 88. Antiphilosophie du christianisme, 9. 89. Dugas, L. Biographical Note, 16. 90. Fonds Jules Lequier, Prescience, Pius 8, Pius 9, Pyguillem donation, (Copy/ Renewal of Lequier’s “Prescience” manuscript).

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91. Fonds Jules Lequier, Les Nouvelles Provinciales, Pyguillem donation, 41. 92. In reference to Blaise Pascal. 93. Laf. 858, Br. 840. 94. CJL No.1, Letters from Jacob to Charles Renouvier and Louis Prat, number 7, Jules Lequier Collection, Kérity, 7 September 1890. 95. De la Noue, A. Obituary article on J. Lequyer, Foi bretonne, 22 February 1862, cited by P. Hemon in Biographical Note, 241. 96. OC, 499–500. 97. Clair, CJL No. 5: 37. 98. Br. 76, Laf. 23. 99. “The horizon is indeed much more Cartesian than Pascalian,” he adds. “Even if the emphasis is much more on the truth sought than on the truth found, it is indeed on the truth that can be recognized that the philosopher questions himself. Truth found or truth sought, it is always a truth that can be found. It is not the irreducibly immeasurable truth of a hidden God, but rather the truth that is both indefinitely inexhaustible and yet always within man’s reach, in his simplest actions, of being free.” Clair, A. Introduction to La recherche d’une première vérité, p. XI/XII. 100. I A 75, 1834/1846, Volume 1 of the Papirer, nrf Gallimard, 52. 101. Victor Castre aptly recalls Kierkegaard’s definition of the formation of a “subjective thinker,” i.e. fully pursuing his own intellectual path: “to make a subjective thinker, one needs imagination, feeling and dialectic in the inner life, with passion; it is impossible, indeed, to reflect on existence without being passionate.” And he adds: “Kierkegaard, in defining the subjective thinker in this way, was unknowingly drawing the portrait of a philosopher who, at the same time—1850—was meditating and living in France. Of this philosopher, who appears to me in the full sense of the term as the spiritual brother of the Danish thinker, the latter did not suspect the existence and Lequier certainly did not know Kierkegaard’s work. The similarity of their thinking, sometimes tending towards pure identity, is all the more striking.” Castre, V. Jules Lequier, 70. 102. Wahl, J. Jules Lequier—Les classiques de la liberté, 54/55.

Chapter 2

Making

In the introduction, I mentioned that the counterweight to philosophical disdain is an affirmative and decisive moment. This gesture is the response to the criticism of the defective theoretical apparatus of the most prominent philosophers, where truths cancel each other out and untruths neutralize one another, something that only a specific search is capable of revealing. For Lequier, the gesture in question can be summed up in a term, apparently quite simple, which he himself defines: Making. Lequier’s inaugural gesture, which I will evoke in this chapter, is a proclamation of the eternal possibility of Making, an ever-possible creation. This action at first resembles a discovery, that of the freedom it presupposes in the first place, which will come to “counteract the (Heraclitean) movement of water,”1 which punctuates Lequier’s notes, and which distils into a single word, Making, something akin to a program, an approach to conducting research. “Thus a very banal and common term in ordinary language is promoted as the central philosophical concept . . . from the very beginning, or rather before it really begins, the essential has been stated,”2 as Clair puts it. This verb constitutes the center of the Lequierian project, its metaphysical foundation, and it is from this first formulation, written in capital letters by Lequier himself in his notebooks, that what he calls the “formula of science” will unfurl: The formula of science:   TO MAKE, not to become but to make and, in making,    TO MAKE ONESELF Man, who is the author of his acts through his freedom, is not the author of his freedom. God. Trinity in God.3 Distinction between nature and person, in God and in man. Freedom of God, the type of freedom of man. Creation. Arbitrariness. (OC 71) 41

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This formula, which sounds like the result of an exploration, can be understood as the explicit formulation of Lequierian philosophy. The human capacity to Make is thus posited without a precise definition; it is considered here as a neutral and generic word to indicate the possibility of acting in all senses of the word (seeking, knowing, traveling, loving, undertaking, writing, praying, etc.). Making comes before Being, Being is in fact the flip side of Making, its duplication; Making as such is unspeakable, since it always precedes what is. Here we have a position that may remind us, by anticipation, of that of the existentialists, and which would find its full expression in the twentieth century.4 We can also note the presence, three times in this short passage, of the word freedom. The act performed by man is performed only by virtue of his freedom, a freedom of which he is not the inventor. This component of freedom, its essence, recognized in the moment itself, is present in man as well as in God, but in a differentiated manner: the type of freedom in man is a legacy, an inheritance of sorts, on which he holds a sort of lease, the owner being God himself. God, the creator of free beings, is, according to the biblical model, free in an arbitrary way. This lease arrangement is a condition of all “intentional” creation, and as such constitutes the enigma (OC 395) that the whole of Lequier’s enterprise will attempt to elucidate. It is also what determines the power of life, between the two opposites, to make or not to make, between which only free will can decide. For, as I noted earlier, Lequier’s thought is conceived as a deepening of the problem of choice with regard to the principle of non-contradiction, of the fact that a thing cannot be and not be. Not being able to assert p and not-p means formulating a law of the alternative, an idea reminiscent of Kierkegaard and which Lequier expresses in the form of a dilemma which would be as follows: either acts are free, or they are only the ultimate consequence of necessity and determinism.5 More precisely: either free acts are possible, and then freedom can be identified with “what he himself calls, and what has since been called, existence,”6 or else they are not. Now the advent of the possible as such is recognized by Lequier: it is indeed a theme which bubbles beneath the surface of The Hornbeam Leaf, and, as Bergson pointed out a few decades later when offering a definition of research in philosophy and how to spot an authentic philosopher, this one idea would occupy him for the rest of his life. The formulation of this idea also sounds like a result: it certainly points the way to the discovery of freedom, of its eminent and grandiose character, but not so much in the form of a discovery as in the form of a postulate. In this chapter, I shall therefore present what he calls the “Postulatum,” which he uses to demonstrate the freedom that resists both observation of the facts and demonstration of a hypothetical-deductive nature, before evoking

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the “incomprehensible monster” of freedom. I will conclude by considering the reflexivity of Making, the turning back on oneself implicit in the act of making, which points the way to what must be considered the free man’s ultimate goal: to make oneself.

POSTULATUM If one remains, with Lequier, faithful to the principle of non-contradiction, as well as to the principle of the excluded middle, freedom, and necessity, we can say that if one is, then the other is not (OC 365). And that all other cases are necessarily precluded; there is no alternative to the choice between freedom and necessity. His fidelity to both principles and the rigor with which they are respected is moreover a sign, despite the interest in belief and faith always present in him, of an equally constant attention to the coherency and logic of his reasoning. Admittedly, Lequier is generally presented as a philosopher of freedom. The only text officially published during the author’s lifetime, his 1848 Declaration of candidacy, establishes freedom as the foremost Republican value: “In accordance with the high idea we all have today of the human person, the constitution will proclaim as the supreme principle the principle of absolute freedom, that is to say, the widest freedom that the legislator can conceive.”7 Nevertheless, the faith in freedom of the man who passes himself off as a philosopher of liberty has sometimes been questioned: “One might even wonder whether he really believed in this freedom, which he made the essential affirmation of his life,” Jean Wahl sniffs. And Wahl quotes Grenier, who also wondered whether Lequier fully accepted the primacy of free will.8 Should we then imagine our author as one of those “Rousseauist champions of the ‘general will’ who behave like perfect egoists, Husserlians practicing ‘phenomenological reduction’ between meals, uncritical Voltairians and idolatrous Nietzscheans?”9 Would he be subject to this duplicity, which Pascal calls “contrariness,”10 like these “Pyrrhonists,” who for the Jansenist are professionals of doubt, especially among philosophers, and all those who claim objectivity, but who are generally powerless to profess doubt by doubting? This interpretative path does not seem to me to be the right one, so sincere does Lequier appear in his desire to give the opposing thesis every chance, and to limit his own intuitions, his inner voice (or his daemon, perhaps) in the direction of freedom. Freedom which seems assured to him, but always emphasizing his need for necessity, even though he realizes that necessity itself cannot be assured without a frank confrontation with the notion of freedom. In fact, Lequier’s attitude has value as an example in this

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respect, for “who better than him has sought to prove himself wrong, to put himself to the test of antithesis, to plunge his gaze into the abyss of ‘necessity’ to the point of almost falling into it by vertigo, before rising again, in extremis?”11 Neither freedom nor necessity can therefore be examined and elucidated without recourse to each other. A twofold dilemma thus arises: if necessity is true, my assertion of necessity has no value insofar as I necessarily assert what I assert, without having the means to verify the validity of what I put forward (since I choose necessity as necessary). In this case, there is no possible experience that would allow us to distinguish the good from the bad, the proportionate good from the proportionate bad, the desirable from the undesirable, all having the same flavor and value. All certainty is forever made inaccessible to me. The search for a first truth is aborted before it is even possible. On the other hand, if I freely assert freedom, when reality is based on the idea of necessity, I am in error, in absurdity itself, in short, in a form of contradiction. I do so without really choosing it since it imposes itself on me out of necessity, and I am therefore necessarily mistaken. Indeed, as soon as I imagine a world in which both my mind and the beings around me are marked by the seal of necessity, I do so by definition without real freedom of choice, and then I find myself in a situation of doubt and perplexity where any search is in fact impossible because I am doubly deprived of any proof. To the first scenario invoked by Lequier, namely that necessity is truth, we must add the alternative possibility that freedom is truth. In the opposite case, then, if the reality of the world is based on the idea of freedom, two possibilities are open to me: either I opt for the necessity of our actions and gestures, and then I am in another form of contradiction that necessarily leads me back to error, indeed total error, because all the truths I affirm and the speculations I produce are false by construction since my mind is confined by a necessity that is not, in fact, necessary. Or else I postulate freedom, the contingency of my actions, and then I am in the truth, or at least in the only hypothesis that allows me to affirm the truth, to access it. If I opt for freedom indeed, only then do I find, having sought it, a first truth from which all the others derive and originate. Lequier chooses the latter possibility, and thus shows us that faith in freedom is necessary and that faith in necessity, a posteriori creation of conscience, is necessarily erroneous. The path of necessity leads inevitably to misguidance because freedom is the primordial and necessary condition for any possible or imaginable demonstration. In short, the postulate is necessarily deduced, one could say, from a quadruple dilemma, as if thought functions by studying possible alternatives until the only satisfactory solution emerges, insofar as “if we are mistaken in believing ourselves to be free, then we are still right” (OC 399).

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It is clear that, even though neither freedom nor necessity can be proven by simple observation, since both options are a priori unprovable, getting out of the aporia amounts in any case—even if we observe a posteriori the likelihood of this deliberately chosen option—to prioritizing freedom as absolute causality, as the first truth. There is no other “proof” of freedom than this first truth to which the others are attached: “freedom, which for me is the condition of error, is also the condition of truth” (OC 377). The possibility of using one’s freedom is the ultimate condition for human truth to exist. Without it, we would be deprived of all access to truth, unable to distinguish what is actually false—or even absurd—because everything would be perfectly equivalent and indifferent, even the grip of necessity itself. Without the slightest space for freedom, we would simultaneously lose the ability to be in error, or in ignorance or ambiguity. Ignorance here means the possibility of knowing, which also implies the possibility of not knowing, or not understanding. The very exercise of philosophy would become an impossible thing since points of view would become equivalent even before any decision was reached, the least well-informed ones equal to the most estimable. The discussion would be neither good nor bad, the very possibility of saying something stupid would be eternally excluded. In fact, this reduplication of freedom, both postulated and reaffirmed by the play of representation, is a primary truth. But it is also the locus of a subjective attestation: “I feel that I am free: therefore I am,” notes Lequier. “This conclusion is true without the reasoning being right” (OC 352). In other words, the author seems to recognize that the reasoning is not entirely satisfactory, that it may give the impression of a vicious circle, that it may be questioned, and that it resembles a form of unsteadiness that is above all a matter of existence and not of thought, in which freedom is ultimately understood as a brutal insurrection against the natural domination of thought (as such, The Hornbeam Leaf is a magnificent demonstration of this feeling of freedom bursting forth). In a way, recourse to a Postulatum, even implicitly, is not an ideal solution to the problem. But it is, however, the only one that is possible, the only one that is within the reach of our existence, and the only one that is the very condition of our ability to access truth: If I refuse to believe in freedom, I will have to refrain from making the slightest assertion, because everything will be necessary; I will not even have the right to assert that everything is necessary, or even that I am in doubt; I will have to float in a state of semi-darkness without alighting upon any assertion. (OC 319–20)

Only by freely consenting to the Postulatum can any belief, any certainty, any conviction become possible. And a gesture as derisory as a child’s seizure of a bower leaf is made intelligible if and only if it indicates a freedom in action,

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that is to say, an indeterminacy which presupposes absolute contingency and arbitrariness. To imagine the idea of freedom according to Lequier, it would be necessary to carry out a dizzying thought experiment in which, in two situations, I could imagine choosing either one option or another completely different one, even if each time the two devices and the context remained strictly identical. To be free is to be able to be or not to be, to do or not to do, in short it is to hover indeterminately “between two courses” (OC 157). Yet it would be inaccurate to imagine for a moment that Lequier had then finished with this question, which never ceased to occupy his philosophical meditations. This strange confession appears in a fragment: “Postulatum. (Cry of despair and triumph)” (OC 369). The word despair, which is generally associated with the Kierkegaardian lexicon, appears in Lequier’s work in the place where one would least expect it. Isn’t the Postulatum precisely what is supposed to save us from the despair of necessity, from that awful field of necessity? Alas, the limits of our intelligence do not allow us to push back so easily its unfathomable domain, on whose primacy the philosophers, including Fichte, seem to agree. For how can we be free in a world into which we are plunged through no choice of our own? Let us rather put ourselves in the situation that Lequier suggests, when we dissociate ourselves from the contingent states of existence: The particular state of the mind, its lights, its ignorances; prejudices, habits; the state of the heart too; the need of or disdain for action, the attractions, the repugnance, the dispositions of the moment thwarted or strengthened by natural and acquired dispositions, and the whole procession sometimes so lengthy, of ulterior motives which become lost in the crowd of obscure feelings; studying my determination, I discern and excise these influences and causes: but what will be left of free will? (OC 56)

Can we ever truly isolate what we might call the essence of free will, its primary principle? Lequier is not so sure because, when one of the two hypotheses is chosen, and if it is freedom, then the excluded necessity immediately comes to the fore and resurfaces (matters of the heart, habits, reticence to take action, the dispositions of the moment that are thwarted, etc.). Isn’t a certain degree of necessity at the bottom of things inevitable? Is freedom nothing but a false presentiment, and free will the “stone where one clashes, the stone of scandal, lapis offensionis et scandali?” (OC 411). Is not the pure, indeterminate power that freedom claims to be, just as abstract as necessity? “In a very true sense,” he has Probus say: This man who, at the moment when we believe that he can act otherwise, in reality cannot, is nevertheless free in his act; for to consider this act in its entirety,

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we must not confine ourselves to its last phase, but go back to the causes which determined it and impressed upon it its character; and at the forefront of these causes is the freedom of the agent, this freedom which has been exercised in all the previous actions of which this is the effect, and where consequently it is still exercised. These causes which remain are the multitude of previous actions which the perpetrator has taken, one by one, freely and with knowledge that remorse made sufficient, commitments which culminated, at the right time, in the evil force demanding its due. (OC 211)

Here we see the emergence of a second principle of freedom in Lequier’s work, which stipulates that before the act, before each episode of existence, before it happens, nothing exists. Thus, since nothing exists, we are not permitted to think that nothing is true, or nothing is false. And yet, nothing could be falser than to assume that a person determined to act in such and such a way did not do so freely, for here we must account for temporality. Lequier gives time a quasi-ethical meaning in the sense that, according to him, the free act is defined as much by the past of the free acts that preceded it as by the moment when it is carried out. Nothing is determined in advance of the free act, of course, but the free act as such is determined by the history of the choices made before it by “this man who, at the moment when we believe he can act otherwise, in reality cannot.” It is the use made of freedom, on which depends the advent of the possible, within a vein of continuity, continuity of good, or continuity of evil, that brings truth into being by its very action. What has been freely decided excludes from reality what has not been chosen, so that the possibility of what has been freely chosen sequesters the impossibility of the choice that has not been made. The notion of the possible has no more value for the present than for the future, because two possibilities always take precedence over each other, and it is only after the observation that the postulate of truth can be checked and thus fully justified. Only then can we say that “the chimera of necessity has vanished, like those ghosts formed during the night by the play of the shadows and the glow of the hearth” (OC 17). IS FREEDOM TOO SIMPLE? The freedom of man, or rather man in the use of his own freedom, might put us in mind, to return to a Pascalian quoted earlier, of an incomprehensible monster.12 In short, an abyss.13 For Lequier, sin corresponds, for example, to the state of the person making use of their freedom. A surprising position, because is it not virtuous to “use” one’s freedom, on the contrary, is that not precisely what he is calling for? Surprising as it may seem, Lequier is not a zealous advocate of freedom as such. At least not as clearly as a first reading

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would suggest. In his view, the use of freedom is, among other things, something of a provocation to God. The opposite of sin would rather be to hand over to God the freedom he has bequeathed to us. It would be to use one’s freedom by sending it back to God. It would be to make a first choice, which would also be the last: to choose God freely so as never to want to be free from him again (at this point we would have an elucidation of the aphorism quoted earlier: “God’s freedom, a type of man’s freedom”). Basically, as with Kierkegaard, sin is not the opposite of good but the refusal of God. JeanFrançois Marquet is right to attest that if freedom is therefore the ‘first truth’ on which we must wager, it is to the extent that it is maintained as a choice of the non-choice, on pain of allowing its latent monstrosity to blossom as it unfolds.14

The sinner is first and foremost somebody who knows himself/herself to be the “author of his/her acts” but forgets that he/she is not the author of his/her own freedom. It is also the questioning gaze that human beings turn upon the heart of their own being, in a kind of gnoseological uncertainty: Reality and appearance share me. And how, with these two halves of my being, which in turn abandon me, can I compose a whole that would be me, capable of subsisting only long enough to affirm myself? Neither of these two halves provides me with the means to join it to the other. To confine myself in one and the other are two means of perishing. To extend one to embrace the other is to transform it into the other, it is to pass from one to the other. . . . What is this interval from me to me that I hold within myself? (OC 69)

We thus contain several beings within ourselves, between whom we can freely choose. Behind the decisions I take there lies an infinite array of different men, some of whom resemble me, and others not, being as far away from me as possible. In deciding, I, therefore, opt for one individuality rather than another, but I always remain under the threat of this other who, in a certain way, is also a part of myself.15 “Every man is a stranger to himself and to others,” says Lequier, “who only learns what he really is by what happens inside him during the few moments he appears on the world stage: his life reveals the secret of his nature” (OC 61). In some respects, we are always strangers unto ourselves. And yet, in other respects, it is by our actions rather than by our words or intentions, good or bad, that we can be judged. At heart, this “faculty of making oneself be one person among several possibilities”16 is, according to Lequier, a mystery as inaccessible as that of faith (I will return to this problem later). This is the kind of mystery that

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philosophy is powerless to face, philosophy which always tends by nature to contest the impossibility of explaining phenomena. The question, which constitutes the major issue in the Dialogue of the Predestinate and the Reprobate, is constantly raised by Lequier as to whether it is only possible to escape the validity, and the gleaming orderliness, of necessarist theses. And if The Hornbeam Leaf is his most cited work, it is not only because it contains some of the most brilliant pages of the philosophical corpus in French, recognized as such by many members of the scientific community, but above all because it reveals the definitive meaning and illustration of the work as a whole. If the Dialogue constitutes a famous aporetic exchange, this is not the case with the Leaf or the Abels, where, on the contrary, the simple action of a child destroys in an instant the mirage of necessity. So much so that it would take only a miracle, the unexpected appearance of a child, to erase from our minds the specter of necessity and determinism. Lequier above all takes the time to show that the resolution of this issue deserves to be addressed through multiple approaches. On several occasions, he shows how forcefully this idea of necessity conquers the human mind as often as possible, even in our everyday actions, offering a ready illustration of this idea. Indeed, contingency only intervenes in the causes of our actions, but as soon as these are accomplished then they fall under the empire of necessity (and the calculation of probabilities). Moreover, Jean Wahl suggests that, if the world were indeed governed by necessity, then Lequier should be classed alongside Nietzsche since he would surely make the concept of the eternal return of the same his own. He quotes an edifying passage from Lequier: As time always passes with the continual reproduction of the same effects by the same causes, at what point will the possibility of a difference begin? And how can we fail to see that at the end of the same interval of time, the world will reappear as it is, the same race again and again, the same from the most perfect identity to the smallest detail? (OC 48)

Wahl adds: “We know that the idea of eternal return is found in minds as diverse as Blanqui, Guyau, the English novelist Marryatt. In Blanqui, as in Nietzsche, it is linked to a mathematical thought; the finite nature of combinations as opposed to the infinity of space and time.”17 It seems obvious that Lequier has thought deeply about the possibility of a world driven exclusively by necessity and that this possibility inspires in him a singular horror. This deep-seated anxiety that one can detect also stems from the fact that the empire of necessity is nowhere so broad as in the sciences, which he studied during his higher education, supposedly the freest field (or at least the least subject to necessity). Yet, for Lequier, the generic

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theme of science is precisely the revelation of “the succession of phenomena linked to each other by necessary relationships (knowledge is seeing its relationships).”18 “Science,” Lequier states, has its origin in this general idea of what is necessary. This idea of what is necessary makes all phenomena a long chain that unfurls link by link, summarized in each new link. It is this idea which establishes the unity between all these phenomena (otherwise the succession of phenomena would only take place through the effect of successive creations). (OC 385)

Chains of causality are by definition the field of study of scientific disciplines, in which the necessity of relationships between things is established. Scientific activity is thus considered by Lequier as an activity of viewing these relationships, of representing the relationships that are at work between phenomena, especially in the physical world. On this point, he proposes to make an important distinction between knowledge, which would be an overview of these links in their totality, and learning, which would consist of seeing these links in a successive way, without being able to attain a general view. Hence what Lequier calls the “Difficulties of science”: It is almost completely impossible to distinguish truth from error, and to recognise even if there are truths and errors. Believing that everything is necessary; but if everything is necessary, I am doomed not even to attempt science; because to attempt science is to assume that one has made a mistake, and that one wants to arrive at the truth; but to suppose that one has made a mistake is to suppose that one is free; and if one claims that everything is necessary and yet seeks to engage in science, one claims that man is subject to an absolute necessity and at the same time is free, which implies contradiction. (OC 320–21)

This strikes at the heart of the Lequierian question par excellence, applied here to scientific activity to highlight the fact that, even in the most assured fields, freedom always remains a sense of vertigo and paradox.19 It is as if Lequier is here aware of what Badiou would call two centuries later “the advent of the subject of science” to speak of that moment when Pascal set out to renew the apologetic approach just as skepticism was becoming the norm and the belief of the Scholastics was losing ground to new ideas (those of scientific modernity in the making), a desire to highlight the difficulty of the task at hand. What Lequier is seeking here is a gesture typical of Christian antiphilosophy, which consists of “illuminating the paradox,” a Kierkegaardian concept if ever there was one, “at the very moment when science is demonstrably legislating on nature.”

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A NON-NOTHING STEMMING FROM A NON-CAUSE How, then, can we make an exception to the deterministic model? How to search, how to find the first possible one? Should proof of freedom be put forward? Or should we be satisfied with only an aporia, refraining, where possible, from taking sides on a question that cannot necessarily be answered? If logic, science and even history are, as it were, naturally deterministic, then, in light of the methodological obstacles standing in the way of such an empirical experiment, how do we make room for the internal experience of freedom?20 Formally identical circumstances, rigorously different actions, and perfect memorization of two independent memories would be the three key principles, which also constitute formal restrictions and experiments with the “internal experience of an act of freedom.” Freedom, this indeterminacy between two possible paths, is therefore not in any way observed externally, nor is it demonstrated, since the theoretical conditions required for this experimentation are not fulfilled. In short, while Lequier seems frank to doubt that such an experiment is possible, what can be done? The answer that he proposed in order to illuminate this paradox consists not of making it “shines brightly and brilliantly in our eyes” but, on the contrary, to show us freedom “only half way, and in shadow” (OC 376). This shadow hanging over necessity, the belief in the ambiguity of the future, was defined by Lequier as a non-nothing stemming from a non-cause, as non-being without being pure nothingness. He describes it in the following terms: Something still remains, something unexplained and inexplicable which escapes all laws, which has happened without any reason, which owes itself entirely to its own existence; namely my determination itself, not as such or such an object, but as having taken place, as having become a little more than a pure idea, my determination as it is consumed; its own reality: a completely spontaneous superfetation, a non-nothing stemming from a non-cause, about which we can only say that it could be or not be, and yet it was: it is an absolute accident. (OC 57)

In this, one of his most famous pages, Lequier describes by opposing it to nothing and giving it the character of an accident. This notion of “absolute accident” immediately brings to mind the concept of “event,” one of the most discussed ideas in contemporary continental philosophy (Marion, Caputo, Zizek, Badiou, among others). The event is, by definition, that which could just as well not have taken place but did in fact occur, contradicting the normal course of things. But in Lequier’s case, it is the opposite: before the event, nothing is. Freedom is therefore aberrant, illogical, it is what was not

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possible, and yet it happens, and by the same token generates a new order of truth. Positive impossibility, contradiction in terms, odious test of the inconceivable, such is the non-nothing of freedom. And yet, “quite different from Fichte” as Bréhier says in his History of Philosophy (which, it should be stressed, has the merit of reserving a few paragraphs for Lequier), would it not leave us “in a profound ignorance of ourselves and our destiny?”21 Without saying what freedom really is, only by specifying that it is about something rather than nothing, greater than nullity and nothing, Lequier informs us of an absolute, impenetrable, and unfathomable reality. Thus, freedom belongs to those actions stemming from the “non-cause” because its postulate is guaranteed by freedom itself (but not against an always possible performative tautology). Lequier seeks only to gain, in return for his considerable efforts, an awareness of freedom through “spontaneous” knowledge, an imperceptible superabundance resulting from an act. From the act, this path that leads from intention to operation, which goes beyond the circumstances of existence described earlier, may thus spring forth freedom, existing beyond any (rational) justification, (logical) demonstration, or (deterministic) denial. However, the term “non-cause” deserves further attention. Its negative character hints at the nullity of causes. Nullity of causes in the sense that nothing remains of the multitude of previous actions and their concatenation. This expression also conveys its specificity, distinct from the causes but placed at their point of origin, at their very source. It is an original attribute of any cause, but exists outside the principle of causality, in that in the world there can be no effect that cannot be linked in some way to a first cause, according to the principle that “everything is linked by the relationship of cause and effect” (OC 369). Lequier adds the following: Nothing is done without a cause, a principle by means of which I trace my actions within myself back to my faculties, which are the sources of them, and walking with firm feet out of the solitudes of the self, I make sure of the relations of my existence with foreign existences.22

For “causal science,” as Lequier is interested in it here, focuses its efforts on the why rather than the how. Now, if we remove all the causes that have succeeded one another to explain a gesture—this is the role of the hard sciences—we will have to return to this point of origin, which is precisely that non-nothing that stems from the non-cause, that unexplained and inexplicable something that defies all laws. The genesis of this event can therefore only be described in negative terms, in the sense that what happened did indeed happen for no reason whatsoever, and that owes itself entirely to its own existence. This “non-cause,” indeterminate and indeterminable, is a free cause, a primordial beginning (in the

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sense that today we speak of “primordial soup” to evoke the origins of life on Earth), the only cause that is not determined by anything other than myself affirming freedom. Up to the point, described by the author, where I can claim that “my affirmation saves me, sets me free. I decline to continue the work of an acquaintance which is not my own. I embrace the certainty of which I am the author” (OC 65). In the proliferation of the possibilities of the primordial fact, I discover a unity constituted by an author in search of identity: myself. This doing has left its mark on me, which is expressed in the most synthetic and remarkable distillation of Lequier’s philosophy: “To MAKE, not to become but to make, and in making, TO MAKE ONESELF” (OC 71). MAKING ONESELF Faced with several possible personalities, we must make ourselves. The emphasis is on an element of activity and not an indifferent theory of becoming; the individual does not simply receive herself; she makes herself. Freedom is not arbitrary, since it is part of a partial and progressive renewal of the self. The pure creative potential offered by freedom is destined for the creature who, through this power, is progressively constituted. The concept of freedom takes on its full stature in relation to the existing individual who “makes” herself from this experience, which is certainly difficult to express, but which nevertheless invincibly establishes her as existing, thus building herself on the basis not of contemplation, but of acts which accomplish the person she is. So what to do with this existence? Wahl offers the following response: I have to adopt it in some way, to assume it, to affirm it, to reaffirm it; it will require a redoubled resolution and we are very close to the Kierkegaardian repetition, a conjugated repetition: it will be necessary to go from the will that would like to the will that wants. And then this appearance of duality of possibilities, of duplicity of possibilities, the existence of two equally created possibilities, disappears.23 To be free is to proceed, he comments again, to the choice of “appropriating the contingency of the self, taking upon oneself one’s own particularity, making freedom and virtue out of necessity, living in the concrete and in time, choosing oneself as a product and thus producing oneself.”24 For it is the very meaning of existence that is at stake here, the meaning we ascribe to it on the basis of our determination to make, or not to make.

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Moreover, we cannot be certain that this process is conscious or even discernible. The effort that is produced is, however, actualizing; it is a voluntary leap that sets it apart from nature. In short, it reveals an existing being to itself, that is to say, despite the impersonal character of the formula, a living being torn from the passivity of Being, a pathos. Of course, I have not conferred upon myself the power to make (the freedom which belongs to God), but when I take possession of this power to act, it is indeed a subjective life, glimpsed in its pathetic reality, that recognizes itself. We must therefore regard “every moment,” Lequier says, “as the hour of battle” (OC 465). Does the essential lie elsewhere than in the need to fight as such, or rather in this word, moment, so dear to Kierkegaard, and no less beloved by Pascal (“because there is no doubt that the time of this life is only a moment”25)? What he aims to tell us, in this sentence that mixes freedom of action and temporality, is that freedom is not given once and for all, but that it is constructed for each person in the continuation of the instants that constitute duration (“making oneself”). What constitutes a human being and her value is not so much her power to be free as such, but the use she makes of freedom. The relationship between time and eternity is thus contained in Lequier’s idea of freedom, in the miracle of “making” in the moment. Not putting off until tomorrow the choice to use one’s freedom (“making”), being free whenever possible allows one to be free, this is precisely the struggle that Lequier talks about. Lequier evokes the singularity of man, his equivocal nature and power to act in an allegory entitled Abel and Abel,26 two brothers by convention identical, but who nevertheless differ from one another in that the first is enigmatically the chosen one, unlike the second, who is inexplicably shunned. André Clair holds that the main lesson of this tale is the following: “initially, all men are identical; all are Abel, all are in innocence, if they change, but without differentiating themselves, they do not attain singularity, and their change is only a fall or a decline.”27 What should matter to human beings, equally undifferentiated in their innocence, is the ability to differentiate themselves in such a way as to choose a personal destiny and thus “make” themselves. Now, as we noted earlier, in order to differentiate oneself, one must think of the other within oneself, that other part of oneself which reveals the person to herself. Singularization is precisely the assumed discovery of this other within oneself that distinguishes us from other members of the species. And this is why this process is an “accession,” a promotion that gratifies the individual leading this struggle against the “decay” which is its faithful mirror image. To make oneself, one must disunite and dislocate oneself, observing the self at a distance and remarking its varieties, its possibilities, its opposites, its virtualities, and its ambiguities, which

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define its differences and therefore its singularity. It is only by abandoning that within them which is common, or shared, that the Abels can awaken to themselves, because, as André Clair explains: They are in that indeterminate state between the innocence of the perfect coincidence between them (i.e. simply to oneself) and the split between the two of them (i.e. within each one) which will result from the father’s favour. This state of indecision, lived in sadness, corresponds exactly to what Kierkegaard28 describes as a state of angst before the nothingness where the spirit is still dreaming in man. The sadness of the Abels awaiting their future singularization is the expression of their anguish in front of the unknown of themselves, in expectation of themselves.29 This anguished expectation, which Kierkegaard would also call fright, reflects the impression of being a mere repetition of a precedent. Yet Lequier multiplies the alternatives in his narrative: at first, the chosen one boasts, the disgraced one demeans himself, and the result is a situation of failure for both. In the second part of this parable, we see the chosen one begging God to save his twin brother. Then it is the reprobate’s turn to ask that the decision taken against him be confirmed for the good of his brother. Here we find again, but in different ways, the concept of love as Kierkegaard analyses it, which he contrasts with egoism, which is summed up as wanting an advantage that one wishes to see denied to others. Love, on the other hand, consists precisely in wanting a good to be attributed to the other without wanting it for oneself. In the last section of this book, I shall return to the question of love as a major principle and ultimate destination of Lequier’s work as a whole. The free individual is thus capable of exercising the ability to override the “relative accidents” that necessity and chance offer to us, as soon as the suspension of the laws of Nature engendered by the free cause has occurred. And a philosopher is not to be defined as somebody who seeks to “prove” freedom, as a superficial reading of Lequier might suggest. Deep down, as Citot points out, in this field, “the burden of proof lies above all with the defenders of determinism—freedom being as obvious and immediate as the perception of time.”30 A true philosopher is somebody who thinks about the relationship between necessity and freedom through to the end not only in an aesthetic sense, at a time when “beauty is like disorder in the order of necessity, or rather the power of the possible without which the very idea of a necessary order would not hold,”31 but also in the ethical sense, and in the sense of moral requirement, to which I will devote the last section of this chapter.

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RESPONSIBILITY AND FREEDOM Would believing in freedom, against all odds, and making a postulate of it, which reveals myself to myself, be an exercise in pure liberation? Not for Lequier, who is struck primarily by the frightening character of this postulate and also its experimental value. Because, in his view, freedom is not given once and for all but is built for each person in the continuous flow of the constituent moments of time. Freedom does not save man from the moment, from choice, and from trial. So the relationship between time and eternity is to some extent contained in Lequier’s idea of freedom, in the miracle of “doing” in the moment. On the subject of this ambiguous relationship to freedom itself, and even to the threatening nature of this relationship, Clair opportunely specifies, in the form of a reminder, that the act of taking a hornbeam leaf makes a bird fly away that a sparrowhawk comes to seize, as if the affirmation of freedom could only be achieved through an original murder, a crime against nature; in this sense, freedom is freedom for an evil. The initial text of the work is a meditation on the original conjunction of freedom and evil.32

But then how can we interpret the occurrence of a massacre (of the bird) of a resolution that is in fact a crime against nature, at the very moment when freedom is posed as inevitable? Well, for Lequier to be free, which amounts to taking sides for certain “motives” (OC 428), is at the same time equivalent to taking responsibility. To be free is to do, or not to do, it is to be oneself subject to an alternative between several possible choices, and it is to me, in person, that this alternative is addressed. This alternative, to do or not to do, if one cannot avoid it, necessarily creates a new situation with respect to absolute determinism. It makes no sense to “get indignant when a stone falls from a wall and smashes the head of a passer-by,”33 but everything changes if I take the initiative, simply because I can. In short, Lequier does not confuse freedom with arbitrariness: freedom “is reasonable and normalized; it is a freedom of responsibility,”34 Clair is at pains to emphasize. In this respect, we can readily agree with Xavier Tilliette when he writes that “no one is more hostile than Lequier to dilettantism, to volatile spontaneity, to indifferent freedom in the sense of exemption from constraint.”35 There is thus a moral dimension involved in postulating freedom, for just as it would be impossible to know the truth if everything were determined, there are moral duties only to the extent that there is freedom. This dimension is like an imprint of freedom itself. There may ultimately be something more serious at stake than a crime against nature, revealed by

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the child’s gesture: the failure to become aware of the responsibility which is thereby revealed to me. Knowledge and duty, conditioned by the bursting forth of freedom, are in a way intimately linked and conditioned by each other. Now that “I” know, I must: “If then I had the right to speak like that without being mad, I would also have the right to add: ‘I am the author of this absolute accident; I recognize it and I adopt it’; and I would be sure to be free.”36 I would have no duty if I were not in possession of the slightest knowledge. Lequier’s research thus establishes a course of action on the dual planes of knowledge and responsibility; it is because I seek truth that it exists, and it is because I have a responsibility that I know where true and false lie. “Guilt,” Kierkegaard would say, has “the dialectical character that it does not let itself be transferred to another account; whoever becomes guilty also becomes guilty of that which occasioned the guilt. For guilt never has an external occasion, and whoever yields to temptation is himself guilty of the temptation.”37

As for Lequier, he insists that error is “man’s own creation, an image of his weakness that is sometimes sumptuous in his eyes, but always profoundly humiliating” (OC 376). Freedom, which reveals me to myself, which gives me the power to be myself, does not leave me, at the end of the day, with any impression of true power, and on the contrary, confronts me with the possibility of error, repentance, and guilt. But, by the same token, perhaps it is this same movement that will allow us to escape the romantic tragedy (or, closer to our time, the Sartrean tragedy)? For Lequier, in terms quite close to those of Kierkegaard again, and to use a Pascalian formulation, romanticism enjoys strength of spirit, but only to a certain degree. He rejects its purely aesthetic side and distanced himself from it as soon as he realized that romanticism leads to an “abstract,”38 diffuse, inconsistent, irresponsible self, which attempts a conciliation between the religious and artistic realms (impossible for Kierkegaard), and which gradually becomes alien to sin and repentance (irreconcilable with Lequier’s philosophy). Man’s inherent responsibility is a completely alien sentiment to romanticism. Laziness barely veiled by the veil of darkness, “relaxed life”39 and dreamy recklessness: the world may have appeared to be rejuvenated by romanticism, but this impression was to be resisted as diluting moral life in the nebulosity of a falsifying discourse far removed from the concepts that would soon invade Lequier’s vocabulary (faith and revelation in particular). However, the ethical question brought Lequier closer to a conception of life, which he considered to be more elevated. By insisting on this responsibility, and on man’s inherent power to choose between several possibilities, he

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incites us to face up to our choices and shoulder the burden of our resolutions. The power to choose between two hypotheses contains within it a legitimization of a way of life, grasped by the individual exercising their decision-making power. If, as Sartre says, we are condemned to freedom, we must indeed grasp the “deep feelings” that determine us. The individual must open herself up “to this kind of light that Lequier tries to describe in an obscure way.”40 But for Lequier, this kind of light, which peeps through here and there, was to be connected with the infinite being who is the author of freedom. Lequier’s God, who could be defined as the creator of freedom itself, its author (which the individual is not, hence a quite distinct “type of freedom”), is not a God who speaks to the mind, or to reason, but to the heart, where I receive these deep feelings of responsibility. “The only thing that matters,” asserts Jean Grenier, summing up Lequier’s position, “is our attitude to the fate that God has dealt us.”41 Freedom is as much an opportunity to please God as it is a danger of displeasing him. We are, Lequier said, independent in our dependence and dependent beyond our independence. For divine freedom, which merges with absolute knowledge, is from a certain point of view irresponsible, whereas human freedom, the type of human freedom, highlights our “humiliating position,” our weakness. Thus, if the individual is responsible for the use he makes of his freedom, God is responsible for the freedom granted to the individual. One is responsible for his actions, the (absolute) “other” is the author of this responsibility, to which he grants us access. “To make oneself by making,” on the one hand, “to make things happen” on the other. In this regard, Lequier makes it clear that “The Idea of Immensity, of Eternity, of Aseity does not imply that of Personhood. . . . It is not so with the Idea of Making: the Idea of Making cannot be conceived without the idea of a Person who possesses the power to make” (OC 437). There is therefore a nature of God, which implies his immensity and eternity, but also a Person, who understands his capacity to “makes things happen.” God is more than the author of geometrical truths and the order of the elements, the God of the deists, and in a certain way, he is not subject to the laws of human reason because it is he who submits us to his own reason, which surpass ours. In a sense, we could also say that God has the power to escape necessity.42 Freedom of thought ultimately turns out to be spiritual freedom, and the test of freedom is above all a test of faith. Given by God to human beings,43 freedom is subjected to the trial of choice, to the point that it is less important to be free than to know what to do with this state. Do they wish to be as God wants them to be, or do they prefer to boast of a freedom that gives them the possibility of being in opposition to their “deep feelings”? There is no doubt that for Lequier the most accomplished freedom in humans would be the

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choice of God, a choice which, at any moment, engages the whole scope of all their actions. It is clear here that “rather than striving to reconcile freedom and determinism, Lequier abandons the latter and turns to religious questions. Mysticism and theology (rather than the positive sciences) are for him the horizon of philosophy.”44 But it is also clear that our investigation, which led us from the search for an initial truth to moral questions and the religious dimension of this endeavor, obliged us to grapple with the whole of philosophy. Hence the term “beginning,” the foundation of Lequierian philosophy (“to choose freedom is to begin” writes Jean Wahl45), the first word of all philosophy in reality, can only be pronounced at the end of this long process, as if seeking and doing ultimately lead us the idea of beginning, the horizon of thought but also its endpoint. It is this last key idea, which I now propose to explore in further detail. NOTES 1. Viera, A. CJL No. 6: 110. 2. Clair, A. CJL No. 7, 18. 3. Clair notes that this phrase was omitted in all previous editions, an omission that, according to Clair, “was nothing insignificant.” See Clair’s edition of La recherche d’une première vérité et autres texts (Paris: Presse Universitaire de France, 1993), 72. 4. Notably from Jean-Paul Sartre and his short essay L’Existentialisme est un humanisme. 5. This second term of the alternative represented in the sketch by Vincent

Tailhardat which features on the cover of the French edition of this book. 6. Wahl, J. Jules Lequier—Les classiques de la liberté, 51. 7. Declaration of 1 April 1848, reproduced by the Société d’Emulation des Côtes du Nord, Volume CVIII, 1979, 170. 8. Wahl, J. Jules Lequier—Les classiques de la liberté, 103. 9. Citot, V. Pourquoi bon bon philosopher? p. 53. Citot continues (p. 54), referring to his contemporaries: “My comrades are libertarian in theory and authoritarian in their homes, egalitarian on paper but hierarchical in life, for ‘redistribution’ in the ideal but anti-taxation in reality. Men and women ‘of the left’ with right-wing ideas, they will never vote for the right.” 10. Laf. 655. 11. Citot, V. What’s the Point of Philosophizing? 55. 12. Br. 420, Laf. 130. 13. For Pascal duality is the fundamental mark of human nature, while for Lequier it is the seal of human nature as it is expressed in “this confused project” that is the question of choice: “What man has glimpsed without vertigo the greatness, the

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majesty, the divinity of its nature, when the real idea of freedom, an explosion of consciousness, suddenly revealed the depths of his being? A lightning bolt showing an abyss! And then the quick idea that came to dazzle him with its double-edged blade, leaving no memory save for the uncertain reflection of one half of itself” (OC 67). 14. Marquet, J. F. Pascal et Lequier ou l’enjeu des jeux de Dieu, in Leduc-Fayette Denise, Pascal au miroir du XIXe siècle (Mame Editions universitaires, 1993), 101–114. 15. Kierkegaard proposed an original elucidation of this problem. Before being “himself again,” man must put his natural inclinations and personal aspirations to one side before becoming the man he is again, the man who reconciles himself (any reconciliation presupposes a prior rivalry) while putting his relative freedom on hold. It is this movement, this “storm,” this new birth, this “reduction,” by definition originating from oneself, that he calls “repetition.” 16. La Liberté, 97–98. 17. Wahl, J. Jules Lequier, 21–22. 18. Jules Lequier fonds, Ms 251. 19. “‘I become aware of my freedom without taking any knowledge of it’. Freedom is the paradox.” Wahl, J. Tableau de la philosophie française, 107. 20. “To do so,” Lequier explains, “would require, firstly, to have found oneself twice in perfectly identical circumstances, which can only be imagined by means of the extraordinary hypothesis that I set out above; secondly, to have acted, there and then, in the same circumstances, in two different ways; thirdly, then to bring together in a single memory the two distinct memories, which would be the act. This third memory, supposedly infallible, would give the only conceivable equivalent of a feeling that no one can have: that of internally experiencing an act of freedom of any kind, in the same way that I experience within myself the acts of thinking, imagining, believing, desiring and even deliberating, wanting and choosing, under the idea of freedom reduced to the sole exemption of constraint!” Here we find a number of ideas that would reappear a century later in Bergson’s work (OC 52). 21. Bréhier, E. Histoire de la philosophie, 842. 22. OC, 57. 23. Wahl, J. Jules Lequier—Les classiques de la liberté, 65. 24. Wahl, J. Sur quelques catégories kierkegaardiennes, published in Recherches philosophiques in 1933, 173. 25. Laf. 428, Br. 195. 26. “This double Idea presents of itself in the future, this double Project of existence, this Double Face of being before being.” OC, 383. 27. Clair, A. La recherche d’une première vérité et autres textes—Introduction, p. XXV/XXVI. 28. Strangely enough, Kierkegaard’s Papers also contain a reference to two twin brothers: “A piece of still life. / The two brothers. / Once upon a time there were two brothers who looked exactly alike, except that the black silk umbrella of one had one more mother-of-pearl button on the handle than the other. Thus the resemblance was perfect, the brothers entirely, the umbrellas almost; if the umbrellas had disappeared, the resemblance would have been complete.” VII A 245,1846/1849, Volume 2, 88.

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29. Clair, A. La recherche d’une première vérité and other texts—Introduction, p. XXXIII/XXXIV. 30. Citot, V. CJL No. 6: 211. 31. Citot, V. Jules Lequier : le possible, le nécessaire et la beauté (about Cahiers Jules Lequier No.3), 178. 32. Clair, A. Metaphysics and Existence, 42. 33. Dugas, L. Analyse de l’acte libre, 9. 34. Clair, A. La recherche d’une première vérité et autres textes—introduction, p. XXIV. 35. Tilliette, X. Jules Lequier ou le tourment de la liberté, (Jules Lequier or the torment of freedom), p. 179. 36. OC, 56–57. 37. OC VII, The Concept of Anguish, 208. 38. “If there is one thing Hegel and Kierkegaard have in common, it is to have considered with suspicion the ironic and divine genius of the early Romantics, and this because they saw in it the metaphysical production of an abstract self,’ analyses Jacques Colette. Colette, J. Kierkegaard et la non-philosophie (Tel Gallimard), p. 24. 39. Wahl, J., Kierkegaard et le romantisme, article taken from L’un devant l’autre (Hachette Littératures, 1998), 232–233. 40. Wahl, J. Jules Lequier, 61/62. 41. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 170. 42. “If God could without contradiction want the contradictory, he would only have to decree that two contradictions are not contradictory, then the science of God would also see without contradiction that two contradictories are not contradictory; so that God might see as indeterminate the effect of a free cause, and the freedom of man would be saved: on the other hand, he could see as determinate the effect of this free cause, and prescience would be saved without freedom being destroyed” (OC 214). 43. “There is one thing that God cannot take away from man, and that is free will—which is precisely what Christianity demands,” explains Kierkegaard. OC XV, Christian Discourses, 169/170. 44. Citot, V. CJL No. 6: 211. 45. Wahl, J. Jules Lequier, 63.

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Beginning

In my introductory remarks, I announced the extension of the affirmative and critical gesture into the realm of philosophy, with the production of new (anti) philosophical categories, and as such a demand for a beginning. To act is to begin, Lequier tells us, to the point of evoking a vicious circle where effort is its own cause, beginning from nothing. Nevertheless, he never ceases to wonder about the very possibility of a beginning: How to form the project of searching, setting a goal, deliberating, hesitating on the path to take, abandoning old mistakes, breaking (as I was saying) with habit and prejudices, trying to place myself in conditions of independence and sincerity, pretending to rid myself of my mistakes, comparing ideas, judging, if my thoughts prepare, occur, continue each other in an order of which I am not master, in a way that I cannot control, each of them at every moment having to be precisely what it is, and not capable of being anything else? (OC 46)

How to escape from the beginning as command (and government)1 is the question Lequier asks here. Is the beginning ever anything more than a first time perpetuated, an invariable novelty, making it nothing but an eternal beginning? How can I find my own way, without falling prey to the choices—and therefore to the beginnings—of the past, to the habits that follow one another, to the prejudices that impose themselves on me—and which will no doubt lead to some of the beginnings of the future—without being myself at the source of their original impulsion. In the light of these questions, the words of Tristan García’s last book can be better understood when he admits his preference for showing himself “capable of never confusing dawn and dusk, what begins and what ends.”2 “Beginning is a big word” wrote Jules Lequier, as indicated by Vladimir Jankélévitch in Le je-ne-sais-quoi et le presque rien (vol. 3, 63

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p. 47), “it would perhaps suffice to say that freedom itself, in itself and of itself, libertas ipsa, the ipseity of freedom, coincides with the power to begin.” In reality, this beginning of oneself, this first choice of oneself, which Lequier wants to undertake, is littered with pitfalls. This freedom constitutes the prerequisite for all forms of choice, and therefore for the choice of faith (Lequier puts free will at the center of the Christian faith, giving it absolute primacy). But freedom, that power which is at the heart of human existence and the necessary condition for a possible beginning, is above all that which allows the affirmation of the contingent character of the future, opposing in this way the champions of the “sense of history.” Beginning is a big word, as Lequier states, who is not unaware that from the moment that it reveals itself, the beginning is already nothing more than a counterfeit, a stand-in, a rehearsal of sorts. And yet, without the practical reality of a beginning, which is nevertheless denied to us theoretically, nothing seems possible: neither philosophizing, nor doing, nor thinking. It is therefore advisable to search for this possible beginning, hoping to find it at the end of the investigation, at the risk that the point of arrival may turn out to be only the point of origin, a sort of true and absolute beginning. Husserl, moreover, described the philosopher, in general, as “a perpetual beginner.”3 This intuition is particularly striking when one considers the tragedy of Lequier’s life: as a student (he did not finish his studies at École Polytechnique), as a lover (he did not manage to marry), as an author (his habit, noted by Renouvier, of always starting over again without ever being able to finish his work), or as an archivist (a profession in which he never truly got started, since he was refused the post at Saint-Brieuc). In this chapter, I propose to study this “beginning at oneself” to which Lequier aspired. This third dimension, which is new, replaces the discourses of the philosophers and the strictly philosophical field of experimentation, supplanting them with the task, to borrow Pascal’s expression, of “listening to God.”4 This is no longer a matter of evaluating freedom on a speculative level, but, through a radical bifurcation (which a philosophical “system” would not be able to predict, a system never being able to predict its own refutation), on a religious and theological level. For the “classical” Christian antiphilosophers, this moment of “beginning at oneself” is in fact a point, an intersection between time and eternity, which in Pascal’s case takes the form of wager and in Kierkegaard’s philosophy is a choice or alternative (aut-aut). Each time it is a question of ordering “the seal of will over action” explains Wahl, who adds: “There is a path that runs from resolution to action, from resolution to the summit, which is called an act.”5 These three movements have indeed provided the structure here: a resolution (seeking), an action (making), and finally, for the latter part, the reaching of a summit (beginning). This point, which is presented as an act, the antiphilosophical act par excellence, establishes the modalities of a surpassing of the traditional framework

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of philosophy, marking the occasion of a baptism of the will, by an act, which allows the singular-individual to grasp the transformative presence of eternity in time. André Clair comments: This is where the philosopher reaches the end, which would be the beginning, by revealing the singular existence of the self. Crossing the interval between past and future, between what has just happened and what is about to happen, between what is already no longer and what is not yet, crossing this interval which is precisely underlined by the very act of crossing, is to begin, to allow the self to exist.6

In fact, Lequier receives the Gospel as the word of absolute truth, that is to say, not as a fragmentary or situated truth (in the religious register for example) but as an existential path of truth, which is offered to the singularindividual, to the living being that I am, in the conditions of subjectivity that are mine, and to which Christian discourse is directly addressed. Lequier is antiphilosophical in that, as Badiou points out, “Everything begins, or begins again, with the subjective singularity. . . . It turns out that to exist in what one thinks is always a matter of choice. In short, exposing subjective truth to the test of a point.”7 To sum up, Lequier is not interested in the philosophical biography of an individual, the story of some kind of “existential conditioning” (because in this case what is the use of philosophy?8), but in the definition of an aseity, in short of a new subjectivity, a place for the self.9 “Is it enough, then, to say within myself that the light exists, in order for it to shine?” (OC 43), he wonders. One would be tempted to answer positively in a double sense: not only as the beginning of truth (the self being its locus) but also as the truth of the beginning (in that to act is always to begin something, notably oneself). What is at stake is therefore no longer so much the objective truth of the sciences (human sciences or otherwise), nor the God of philosophers and scholars, but the belief in a word that fixes the point of truth and whose register is neither really that of philosophy nor quite that of organized religion. This point is, of course, only accessible through an unprecedented act, that of “conversion”10 and faith, which marks the point of a definitive break with the philosophical device and which easily explains Renouvier’s reluctance to include in the Posthumous Fragments writings that obviously had no place within any philosophical corpus. In my opinion, this Lequierian philosophical device can be described with the five statements below: First statement: “Not being my principle, I was the principle of nothing” (OC 16). Second statement: “True philosophy casts a bright light on revealed religion” (OC 324).

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Third statement: “I turn to God, and then I see everything that follows”11 Fourth statement: “Faith is a victory” (OC 235). Fifth statement: “You were right, O Pascal!” (OC 246) FIRST STATEMENT: “NOT BEING MY PRINCIPLE, I WAS THE PRINCIPLE OF NOTHING” In his search for a first principle along the lines of that espoused by Descartes, Lequier soon discovered that he was not his own principle, and that he was therefore “the principle of nothing”. As for Pascal, “The end of things and their principles are for him (man) invincibly hidden in an impenetrable secret, equally incapable of seeing the nothingness from which he is drawn, and the infinity in which he is engulfed.”12 Lequier notes in this respect that bringing the certainty of God to bear on one’s awareness of the self constitutes an inversion of the key principles, implying that the first principle is only significant in relation to itself. This is the opposite of what needs to be done, needlessly prioritizing that which is not a priority. More precisely, it amounts to preserving a character relative to what should be absolute (the principle of principles) and a character of sovereign anteriority (the “I”) to what has “been done,” a sign of “its defect and (its) weakness,”13 of its provisional, precarious, and uncertain character. What Descartes thus failed to sufficiently recognize is that human beings do not hold within themselves the principle of their own existence. Birth is the most inexplicable moment in our lives, and one whose reason, along with all memory of the event, eludes us. I was created without wanting it, without knowing it, my place in the universe is therefore, and has been from all eternity, secondary; this is what Lequier seems to tell us. And yet, never am I more conscious of this second and subordinate place than when a feeling of responsibility assails me, even in the experience of freedom. It hints at an ultimate relationship with “the infinite being who created me.”14 God, who is above all the beginning (OC, 333), is thus what gives meaning to my power of freedom; He is the invisible and inevitable referent of the responsibility that is attached to this gift. This analysis may be reminiscent of Kierkegaard’s two-tiered analysis of these relationships: Major / There is an infinitely gaping qualitative difference between God and man / This means or can be formulated as follows: man can do absolutely nothing by himself, it is God who gives everything, He who gives man faith, etc. / This is Grace and this is the first principle of Christianity. / Minor/ Even though we naturally draw by no act whatsoever to claim absolutely nothing meritorious, however little faith may be meritorious (for in this case the major would be

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abolished and we find ourselves here in the minor), it is nevertheless a question of daring to relate to God like a child. / If the major must be everything, then God is so infinitely elevated that there is no longer a proper or real relationship between God and the individual. This is why we must be very careful with the Minor, without which the life of the individual has no real impetus.15

Lequier is confronted with the same dialectic: how to consider the major proposition, that we are nothing by ourselves and that it is God who gives everything while maintaining the principle of meritorious acts, where we retain a power of initiative and action? How indeed can we affirm human freedom when at the same time the desire to be born, or not to be born, is denied us? How can we be completely free without ever knowing the date of our birth or the hour of our (natural) death? The first proposal is said to be major, which Lequier would not dispute, quite the contrary: it is major because it is in principle. But the second one, as we can imagine, is also worth preserving for Lequier, because it embodies his whole idea of Christianity, determined by the emergence of a moral experience16 but also of the figure of the child. There is herein a double relationship of responsibility and communication with God which designates precisely their relationship: by overemphasizing the major proposition, we can lose our sense of responsibility toward God (we can do nothing by ourselves, so let us hurry up and do nothing). If we become too attached to the second, we could imagine ourselves giving the primordial impetus to this relationship, when in fact it is the principle of nothing. This minor proposition, as originally proposed by Kierkegaard, nevertheless resonates well with Lequier’s exclamation about what he calls the human person: A being who can do something without God! Who can, if it pleases him, prefer himself to God, who can want what God does not want, and not want what God wants, that is to say a new God who can offend the other! Frightful prodigy: man deliberates and God waits! A truly worthy homage to God, if man is not rebellious, but what an insult, if he is not submissive! (OC 70–71)

In this way, Lequier suggests that it is in this ability to act and choose that human beings are ultimately most like God himself. And it is when he lowers himself to our level that he is at his greatest, that he demonstrates that for which we should strive to be worthy. The humiliation of God exalts us. By this very fact, our possible rebellion is blasphemous. But God also shows himself to us as we are, incarnate, while giving us a part of what he is, the power to act. Futures are no longer infallible because free acts are by definition creative, adding new purposes to what exists. Thus, Xavier Tilliette is not wrong to remark “that the intersection of Lequier’s anthropology and theology is the idea of creating, of doing,

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univocal for God and for humans.”17 There is a similar power of creation, of foundation, of initiative, of beginning in both.18 Is man absolutely independent of God? Not exactly. Is he perfectly dependent on the one on whom he originally depended? It would be inaccurate to say so. For Lequier, we are certainly dependent: it is not for us to know what it is possible for us to do, to judge what is in our power. But we are also independent, in the sense that, as Wahl points out, “God has a very great respect for his creature and withdraws, as it were, to give us our freedom. God leaves us to our solitary reflection. A sentence that only a Lequier or a Pascal could write.”19 We are indeed independent, in that we can relate to ourselves in our choices, but dependent, in the sense that we are not self-created. But this is the whole point of the nuance with regard to the problem of freedom and necessity: without limits, absolute independence would take the form of absolute necessity, it would be insignificant. Relative independence would therefore be the mark of a second freedom, “effective and existential, namely the affirmation of a personal subjectivity in a physical, social and ethical world,”20 with the power of opposites, but within the limits of a higher power that Lequier describes as the power to “make things happen.” THE ASEITY OF FREEDOM We have already touched upon the definition of an aseity, a new subjectivity, a space for the self. The Lequierian experience can once again be situated in relation to the Kierkegaardian position, which accentuates the personal and idiosyncratic character of freedom: man, adrift in a universe of objects, seeks in solitude and darkness a first truth which is radically different from an object, and of which he will realize with astonishment and anguish that it is consubstantial with himself, the searcher.21 It seems to me that, contrary to Misrahi’s reading of Lequier’s failure to address the question of desire22 (while nevertheless according to him a prominent place in the history of philosophy, precisely for having “begun at oneself”23), Lequier does have a way of approaching this question that is subordinate to the self. Indeed, it is through affectivity, the sensitive life, the heart that we gain access to things, but “it has been given to us to be by ourselves in certain respects, this is what no philosophy will ever explain” (OC 384). This self is constituted by acts of freedom, not in the manner of becoming, but of making. It is therefore

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advisable to place aseity at the beginning, even before “the distinction between practical and theoretical reason,”24 and it is this aseity that opens up the multiple modes of desire such as seeking, doing, or believing. For it is also a philosophy of life that Lequier proposes,25 whose powers are, he tells us, “in the hands of my aseity” (OC 32), this turning back on oneself which is the very creative act, the first act of “beginning.” It is in this sense, in fact, that Badiou writes that, for Christian antiphilosophers, “to know is useless. . . . Everything begins, or begins again, with each subjective singularity.”26 Whereas philosophy had enabled us to discover freedom, it is only “with the individual that philosophy can put an end to the circularity of the beginning and finally find the first truth.”27 Citot adds that we are here at the “antipodes of speculative philosophy, building systems in which the individual gets lost.” In short, it is not “the brain that thinks” (OC 476) but the singular individual28 who begins and who seeks: For what purpose have I been placed on earth? What are the means I have to reach it, what is the road I have to follow to get there? (...) Oh! That we had followed that divine inspiration! that it might have decided our entire existence.29

SECOND STATEMENT: “TRUE PHILOSOPHY CASTS A BRIGHT LIGHT ON REVEALED RELIGION” This quotation could probably sum up by itself any Christian antiphilosophy, which exposes the concept of faith to the risk of philosophical doubt, and at the same time confronts this practice with Christian truth. This double confrontation by alternation is constantly taking place, and Lequier specifies this by adding that the bright light that illuminates revealed religion is reflected and turned back upon it, in the sense that it is the latter that begins, in return, to illuminate the former. He is convinced that pre-Adamic truths take nothing away from Christian truths, that these have their own justification and legitimacy but that they ultimately add to their intelligibility, and that at the same time metaphysics participates in the renewal of religion. But this also prompts Lequier to say that true metaphysics and true religion are not to be confused: Christianity is based on a contingent fact (the fall of the first man) and philosophy on truths that are sub specie aeternitatis. This is true even if, as Lequier says, “philosophy has its act of faith like religion” (OC 324–25). Let me evoke as precisely as possible this fall.

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ADAM In order to clarify the distinction between philosophy and religion, we shall indeed have recourse to Adam, whose story constitutes the first act, the beginning, of religion. Indeed, in Lequier’s work there is a very clear separation between the truths that are accessible to us and those that were accessible only to the first man. Our “first parents,” for Lequier, does not forget that Adam was not alone, marking the line of rupture between two regimes of truths, which he presents as follows: Perfect in soul and body, enjoying the sovereign freedom that resulted from this very perfection, capable of deserving because they were free, exposed to failure, our first parents had only one duty to fulfill: to obey the Creator who had filled them with heavenly bliss. They used the most magnificent of his gifts against God, and sin entered the world, leading to death and the fear of death. The guilty did not transmit to their descendants that flower of holiness and grace which divinely crowned the work of the Creator in them, but a nature violated in its noblest instincts, since to become ungrateful they had to make some effort, and the patrimony of humanity, irreparably damaged, was increased, with a sad compensation, by the full knowledge of the evil that had cost them so dearly. (OC 71) The world after Adam is profoundly transformed, and the initial perfection is only a shadow of its former self. Evil, here concretized by the introduction of the idea of necessity, has entered the world and definitively penetrated our minds. By refusing to make good use of their freedom, Adam and Eve introduced the idea of necessity, and thus evil—mysterium iniquitatis—which can therefore no longer be understood speculatively; it is only intelligible by virtue of the dogma of original sin, which makes men, in the very fault, stand in solidarity with one another, generation after generation. This principle of intelligibility of the human world is recognized by Lequier as it was before him by Pascal: “Man is more inconceivable without this mystery, than this mystery is inconceivable to man.”30 The corruption that original sin represents, he presents it as it is. It is Adam who brings evil into the world, and so the truths to which he had access are no longer accessible to us. There is therefore no “Christian philosophy”31 here, in the sense of an intersection, or a possible synthesis, between the truths before Adam and the truths after Adam, but rather a formal opposition between the two orders, without, however, prohibiting reflection and the possibility that the two might cast light upon one another.

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Ultimately, Lequier remains in agreement with Christian orthodoxy. Incarnation and redemption are the two fundamental dogmas around which his theological conceptions are articulated. These two principles, centered on the person of Jesus Christ, appeal to the faith rather than to the reason of Christians.32 However, Grenier notes on this point that “Lequier’s anthropocentrism is obliged to retreat under the pressure of his faith, without however going as far as theocentrism which would make the Incarnation itself unintelligible.”33 We see here that Lequier’s thought coexists between a Christian conception, which encourages the recognition of the divine person in Jesus, and a more philosophical conception, which attempts to take into account the human dimension of the Incarnation. For Tilliette, “the incarnation and sacrifice of Jesus Christ, second Abel and new Adam, repair the disorder committed by human freedom intact in its essence and deviated in its exercise.”34 It was by an unprecedented gesture of freedom that God became man, and that He deliberately suffered, precisely to save His creature from a deficient use of freedom. The Christological inflection (OC 438f) of Lequier’s theological positions turns the spotlight firmly upon the concept of freedom, which is, ultimately, “of a theological nature; it (freedom) is linked to the concepts of grace and election.”35 In these terms, André Clair asserts that Lequier’s reflection on the theme of freedom is inseparable from his reflection on grace and predestination. Similarly, Paul Ricoeur, in the notes collected under the title Essai de jugement sur Lequier, asserts that the “problem that interests him at heart is predestination.”36 Admittedly, this statement may seem a little hasty, but it is not lacking in rigor, for it is indeed on this thorny issue that, for Lequier, philosophical reflection instructs Christian truth, which in turn instructs it. All this is particularly perceptible in Probus or the Principle of Knowledge, a dialogue between two monks, one predestined and the other rejected, articulated on the theme of initial asymmetry and the adjustment that nevertheless takes place between divine prescience and human freedom (and where all the solutions proposed by Pelagius, Calvin, or Molina, for example, are contested).37 We know from Grenier that on the question of grace, Lequier’s preferred Catholic authors were Pascal (from whom he quotes the text of the 18th Provincial) and Saint Thomas (commented on by Vasquez and Campanella). Was Lequier himself a Catholic? He was certainly intent on maintaining his free will, but he also questioned the traditional dogma of God’s omniscience. In this respect, Jacob, who frequently remarked upon the independence of Lequier’s theological conceptions from his “theological

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Credo,”38 contended in a letter to Renouvier that, although he consented to pass himself off as a Catholic, it nevertheless seemed to him “that it is the whole doctrinal work of Catholicism that he is throwing down, pointing out the impossibility of reconciling the ens realissimum with human free will.”39 Grenier also notes that the predestined do not only receive sufficient grace, they also receive effective grace. Indeed, it would not be enough for them to have a help without which they could not persevere (auxilium sine quo non), they still need a positive help that makes them persevere (auxilium quo),

while being “sensitive to Pascal’s formal contradictions.”40 Lequier wants to save human freedom more than the Jansenist would wish: we are, in terms of action, perfectly free to Make or not to Make. In this, Grenier tells us again, he refutes certain theories put forward by Bossuet in his Treatise on Free Choice—notably chapters III and VIII—which made a radical difference between actual freedom and potential, which can only lead to a negation of freedom as a whole. Lequier’s aim here seems to be to get past a “dry understanding of prescience” (OC 417) which imagines that God only has to contemplate the world without reason, since he knows from all eternity what is going to happen, in order to take a more direct interest in the even more fundamental question of predestination. According to Grenier, this second subject was of more direct interest to him than the first; nevertheless, he starts from the former, which he narrows in order to better refute the alleged predetermination of man’s destiny. He endeavors to restrict the divine prescience in order to leave room for the indeterminacy of man’s future. The question posed is essentially the following: how can we seek, and hope to find, a first limitation to God’s prescience, knowing that man is free to choose between two indeterminate possibilities? An umpteenth reformulation, in fact, of the question of predestination. The question of predestination thus arises from questioning man’s freedom: freedom is first of all an incomprehensible power, which nevertheless allows us to better understand ourselves, and God’s self-limitation is indeed what underlies His eternal knowledge. The future is known to Him, since it depends on man’s original choice; God’s knowledge is thus the knowledge of “possible objectives.” God foresees that which can be predicted, “the simultaneous series of possible coexistants, of which we know little or nothing” (OC 415), and leaves us free to act in matters pertaining to the exercise of our freedom.41 But it is precisely that which is specific to us as humans that stems from our freedom. And what should we think of a God who knows from

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all eternity how things will happen? In short, it is not a question of limiting God’s power, but of sublimating it. The situation of the Reprobate, amply detailed in the Dialogue (where he serves, at least in part, as Lequier’s interpreter), is described in terms, often ironically, that make it, humanly speaking, absolutely unbearable. This is not so much for reasons that have to do with his actions as for the impossible situation in which God subjects him to the law of a world in which the quality of his actions would no longer have any value. The Predestinate never really succeeds in demonstrating to the Reprobate that his destiny could have been different if he had known how to make good use of this freedom which, despite the necessity of his sad fate, is by no means lacking. The Reprobate also ventures this significant proclamation: Try to hold up to the light of the idea of being that imagined vision of a determined human will that God wants to be, and that God wants to be in such a manner as might be called free. You will see what you find: God wills it that in such and such a soul, at such and such a moment, such a will should exist, and God wills it that in that same soul, at that same moment, that same will does not simply and truly exist, but exists in the possibility that it could either exist or not exist! (OC 157)

In Lequier’s case, “God almighty” is not “God all-doing” (OC 152). God can “see” things to come (Judas’ betrayal, Peter’s denial, etc.) without “freedom being disturbed in any way.”42 On the level of Making, the future remains open. As for betrayals and capitulations, they should be considered as warnings, alerts, perhaps omens, rather than predictions. God knows all the possible, the probable too, probably, but not the contingent futures. Let us take the case of Jesus’s prophecy, when he tells Peter that he will deny him three times; Jesus has a certain knowledge of the event that will take place. Thus, according to Lequier, God obviously has knowledge that we do not have and which is exercised in particular through prophecy. Probus states, among other things, that you have to go back to free acts to find the root of contingency. For example, although this may seem forced, it could be, at least in some cases, that as soon as the hand enters the urn, the choice, blind as it is, of what the hand will do among the balls, was already future, and I simply mean future: in such a way that the possibility of the exit of this or that ball, other than the one that will in fact exit, was not real; and yet as we would be in ignorance in this respect, this fictitious possibility would be equivalent, for the gamblers, to a real possibility. (OC 189)

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Here we must examine more closely Lequier’s idea that freedom is committed from the first choice onward. Any “second” freedom depends on this first act of total freedom. When Lequier describes several probability experiments, he shows that the results obtained can be predicted because they are the logical sequence of events from which they result. The truly free act, in its most sovereign sense, that is, first, absolutely first, cannot be understood or predicted by mathematical experimentation because it predates all such experiments. Only God has this superior faculty of prediction, in the sense that God alone can identify authentic free acts, which are moreover as exceptional as they are imperceptible, amid the tangle of other free acts, in the secondary sense this time, which follow them in a movement determined by the weight of the free act, in the first sense, which is at the basis of the first truth that the author seeks (knowing that the more time passes, the more the share of necessity increases, so much so that the repercussions of previous events invade reality and spread throughout it). God would therefore be capable of an analysis enabling him to recognize such a first act of freedom. Here, as often in Lequier’s work, temporality plays a decisive role in the reasoning: before an event, there is neither true nor false (a peripatetic principal par excellence in the matter of future contingents); only afterward can we have any certainty about the nature of the result. God, therefore, has no absolute knowledge of future contingents, and as Jean Grenier points out, “it follows that predestination is only hypothetical. Lequier embraces this doctrine, not daring to go openly as far as Pelagianism”43 (i.e., without quite considering that man’s salvation depends solely on his own merits). We can provisionally conclude that God does not change—the predestined reminds us that “if God did not always see the same thing, his nature would change: he would no longer be God” (OC 120)—but that he has a superior science of contingency, of change, which makes him aware of future situations in their most probable form. The limitation of divine prescience is thus correlated with respect for human freedom, which means that there is a kind of double prescience in God: one is predictive and forms his opinions on future things as they are induced by past events; the other is hypothetical, in so far as it depends on the choices made by men. This prompts Jean Wahl to suggest that a certain ignorance must be admitted on the part of God. A square circle cannot be the object of divine power. The evil will of the wicked is not willed by the will of God. Therefore, just as we say that there are things that God cannot want, we must say—and this is where the thesis becomes bolder—that there are things that God cannot know.44

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We can finally conclude that it is the very term “predestination” that is equivocal. In matters of Making, man’s action is perfectly distinct from God’s action, it is free. Perhaps in man’s free will, is it still God who acts in such a way that he knows, in the order of the world to which he has given birth, what man can do with his free will—whereas men, often full of ignorance, or deluding themselves, believe they are free whereas they are determined, which Lequier, moreover, knew very well. God “knows” in the sense of a “conjectural,” incomplete knowledge: “acts still exist in potential form; when they are realized, God knows them as realized.”45 But he can hardly grant us the freedom to Make with one hand and take it away with the other. Hence the above-mentioned quotation in which Lequier invites us to partake in a thought experiment which consists of imagining a God who knows everything but cannot do everything, having placed in our hands the power to act in a certain way, or to act differently, to follow this direction, or to finally opt for another. This passage from the Dialogue between Probus and Caliste is eloquent in this respect: PROBUS: A square circle cannot be the object of divine power; the evil will of the wicked is not willed by the will of God; likewise, a will which I am free to follow or not to follow is not known in advance by God /. CALISTE: What language! Then God would know nothing about it.46 / PROBUS: What he wouldn’t know would not be a thing: as you said earlier, a square circle is not a thing. / Listen. You are free to do something. God does not know that you will do it, since you can do it, and God does not know that you will not do it, since you can do it. God only knows that you are free, and just as by making us free he himself has freely restricted the exercise of his power in the government of the world, so He has restricted his knowledge of our actions. If God willed it, there would be no ambiguity in future events: everything would, so to speak, run in a straight line and nothing in the future could be hidden from this providence which in advance would have determined everything that should be. (OC 171)

Lequier’s thought here differs considerably from Thomism, which assimilates time to a kind of false pretense that can be reduced to a single point, in a movement somewhat akin to a successive eternity. Yet Lequier refuses to reconcile the idea of man’s freedom with the absolute omniscience of God. If God could see all human decisions in power and in action, it would mean that temporality itself would disappear and human freedom would be annihilated at the same time (OC 318). Lequier applies time to humanity as to God, which according to him amounts to saving its objectivity and thus avoiding turning it into a collective hallucination, a deceptive sun, a simulacrum:

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If there were only a single, immutable, eternal substance, time would not exist, or at least it would have no measure (1). “The great problem of identical existence swallows up everything. There is neither space nor time, neither possible nor necessary (2).” But it must never be forgotten that freedom according to Lequier has nothing to do with timeless freedom according to Kant.” Succession, he says elsewhere, is a condition of freedom (3).47

The relationship between God and his creation is in fact conditioned by the question of how time relates to God himself. Yet, according to Lequier, God contemplates man’s actions without any change in himself: “With regard to time,” he explains, “man participates in the contingent and the absolute, he endures and changes, it is always the relationship that unites man to God and which participates in the finite and the infinite.” Conversely, “If you now admit that God does not endure, that he is immobile in a point, that eternity is a point, then there will be no interval between God thinking a work and God doing it; His acts will all be equally and similarly eternal, and God will not be free; and God himself will not be in relation to the world, for that which is immobile has no connection to that which is mobile.” (OC 420)

The specific nature of God is thus a matter of time. Lequier sees this as the necessary condition and foundation for a relationship between the temporal and the eternal. Kierkegaard would call this point of contact “the instant,” contact between “time and eternity in time”:48 in time, the Danish philosopher regarded the instant as “a decisive value,”49 which “constantly interrupts eternity” in order to “remain connected to it”50 (which allows, in the Lequierian context, to place oneself after the act).51 From this point of view, human freedom is ultimately not a mere function of what God has decided for the individual. By authenticating human freedom, we also prevent God’s freedom from turning into a “monstrosity.” By depositing in us this “force by which it is in our power to act thus and to act otherwise,” God has divested himself of a part of his own, of a part of his knowledge too, preventing the world from functioning in the linear mode proper to universes where any possibility of choice is forbidden. Probus uses the word “Providence” in the form of a repulsive; indeed, Providence only makes sense in a unilateral world, in which the linearity of facts would take the place of a universal and absolute principle. If Providence is, freedom cannot be. God’s power is in no way questioned; his infinitely superior strength lies precisely in his will to limit his own doing (a compulsion to Make). If God deprives himself of part of his knowledge, it is to give the world its salt, its flavor, and perhaps also “a new motive for adoring the goodness of a God who would have consented to strip Himself of a privilege.”52 If he does not

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do so, if God does not accept to ignore in part what we will do with our freedom, then the world would be for us, and no doubt also for him, only a line without depth, a signature without identity. If creation is to be judged by its creator, the power of the creator can only be measured by the strength of those created in his image. THIRD STATEMENT: “I TURN TO GOD, AND THEN I SEE EVERYTHING THAT FOLLOWS.” The actual maxim proposed by Lequier is: “I am free, that is to say responsible, and I meet a necessity, something else that is imposed on me; I turn to God, and then I see everything that follows.”53 “Everything that follows” is therefore not immediately the fruit of a possible philosophical investigation that would lead from the search for freedom to the discovery of responsibility and necessity, but of a path toward God. The God of whom he speaks is the God of the Bible. In the pages he devotes to it, Lequier stresses that God is the Trinity: “Let us return to these great words: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen. I showed you earlier that God is three persons.”54 This Trinity is therefore composed of three Persons, associated with the same divine nature (“In God there is one nature and three persons”55). Man, capable of good and evil, is a union of two natures merged into one being (“In man there are two natures and one person.”)56 Would revelation, then, be the only way to make God knowable, the only way to “turn” directly to God? In fact, one alternative, somewhat complementary approach would consist not in knowing him directly, on a cognitive level, but in extrapolating what we know about ourselves in order to deduce elements about his nature. The method proposed by Lequier is equivalent to raising us “from what is in us to what we think is in God” (OC 487). Knowing “only himself,” man would therefore have to, as Lequier states in his notes, “transpose to this infinite person the perfections he finds in (his) soul, taking care to raise them to infinite power” (OC 315). However, this inquiry would prove unsuccessful because it would be based on a calculation of probabilities, with a very uncertain result. All the more so since God is not subject to the regime of succession. God sees things as eternally present; he enjoys every moment independently of all instantaneity because his light is eternal. He is the “peaceful, eternal, immutable covenant of the possible and the necessary united and merged in an absolute identity” (OC 473). How, then, can we envisage the relationship between God and humans, how can we get a more precise idea of what he means by the expression “I turn to God?” And what is it then possible to see, what is it that

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“follows?” To answer this question, Lequier postulated a separation between the quale and the quantum. QUALE AND QUANTUM In the preceding chapters, we have seen that freedom exists on two levels, one applying to man and the other belonging to God. The truth as it exists for humans and the truth for God turn out to be quite different. It can be assumed that the limits of the one and the other are not the same, and that it is from their dissimilarities that the possibility of attaining God can be understood. In order to specify these differences, Lequier sets out two points of view, the quale and the quantum. In terms of the quale, humans are free, and this freedom is a sign of the utmost perfection of the created world. On the quantum level, their freedom is limited by the temporal and spatial conditions of their existence. For God, the relationship is logically reversed. From the perspective of the quale, he is not free in the sense that evil is beyond his reach. But from the perspective of the quantum, it is God who is free because he is not bound by the spatio-temporal limits imposed on men/women. Here we are dealing with two different forms of freedom, but which nevertheless share between them the possibility of choice. From the quantum point of view, God grants freedom to us, but according to spatial and temporal conditions that he himself has determined. As for God, he is subject to no one and answers for nothing (this is the meaning of the word “arbitrary” which Lequier uses several times). Lequier writes: The irresponsible person contemplates man deliberating and acting, and daily achieving several of the possible objectives of which God has the knowledge from all eternity; God knows perfectly well the future in all the legitimate senses in which this word can be taken; but God does not see as determined what is not determined, because God has given man freedom, that is to say the incomprehensible power to act at a given moment in one way or another, taking counsel only from himself. (OC 318) From the point of view of the quale, God has determined an order, which is that of the Good, a perfection that he can no longer modify: “arbitrary” and “creation” are identical. The quale is called the first order where creator and creature remain in a kind of harmony. For Lequier, finally, divine knowledge is absolute and straightforward. It is the postulate that God possesses every possible truth at once. Divine intelligence is God, God is all intelligence. Is God’s superiority to be summed up in

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this intellectual supremacy? No, replies Lequier, because to do so is to misunderstand man, as is the case with philosophers: “Reducing man to intelligence, they (philosophers) also reduce God to being an intelligence” (OC 437). “God is the almighty sovereign whose will be done.”57 The way to God is through freedom because “God wants us to be free” (OC 153). In the end, the originality of the world, the wellspring of all value, lies in the ambiguity that reigns over the future. We have been spared this hideous world which “would walk in a straight line,” which “would determine everything that should be.” From where we see “all that follows,” we must therefore rejoice and be pleased that the first beginnings are possible. This is a proof of God’s attachment to his creation, of which he is almost equal58 in that “the human person .  .  . can do something without God! We can, if it pleases us, prefer ourselves to God, want what God does not want, and not want what God wants; man is thus a new God capable of offending the other!” (OC 70–71). Here we see glimpses of a more optimistic, or at least less tormented, Lequier. “God did not create evil, nor did He create death,” he writes, adding that “God does not want us to be lost: but God wants us to be able to lose ourselves so that we too may not lose ourselves, and may find our salvation in God” (OC 266). This statement is further evidence of the tendency noted by Tilliette, who highlights the anxiety of the dialoguist at the moment of staging the Predestined and the Reprobate in a particularly dramatic formulation, and his gradual transformation into a more temperate, and also more confident, author in Abel and Abel.59 Predestination is therefore not as abject as initially envisaged, since it is in fact a “post-destination.”60 Adopting a similar stance to Tilliette and Grenier, Wahl adds that “The state of our being, strictly speaking, is to be all that God wants us to be.” It is from this quotation from Bossuet that Lequier concludes that God makes human beings as they would be if they could be of themselves. It would be, he tells the Reprobate, commenting in turn on Bossuet’s quotation, “a just punishment for some and a beautiful reward for others.” The solution Lequier borrows from Bossuet is not so far removed from that of Kierkegaard, for whom our will in its freedom is founded upon the active strength of God.61

Human actions have a bearing upon the action of grace, which depends, at the moment of trial, on the “visible signs of his love, encouraging us to persevere and not let ourselves be discouraged” (OC 488). The condition of grace is the tension that humanity imposes on itself in order to be able to benefit from God’s superior help. The a priori of grace is the constancy and tenacity of God’s creation.

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CARITAS We should perhaps clarify at this point that God’s active force, which could be called love, is related to the spirit that unites power (the Father) and intelligence (the Son). Love is the communion, the “third principle,”62 of the other two divine principles in humanity; these three principles also exist, but not simultaneously.63 In this way, love enters into a theory of relations, as illustrated by the multiple alternatives in the allegory of Abel: in the first instance, the chosen one boasts, the disgraced one lowers himself, and a situation of failure for both results. In the second part of the presentation, the chosen one begs God to save his twin brother. Then it is the Reprobate’s turn to ask that the decision taken against him be confirmed for the sake of his brother. Love consists precisely in wanting a good to be attributed to the other without wanting it for oneself. In short, this triple gift of intelligence, power, and love refers both to the holy trinity and to mankind with regard to their intrinsic faculties. So much so that for Lequier this need to be loved concerns us as much as God Himself: “By an excess of love He wants to attach himself to His creature,” he proclaims, “and He wants the bond between them to be indestructible” (OC 324). It is through love that this “equality,” mentioned earlier, is felt between the creator and his creature, without it being possible to speak of a relationship of equivalence, quite the contrary, because the abyss that separates them is never as great as when they are close to each other. Love has the power to break down hierarchical boundaries and differences in scale. True love is always about equals. Two equals who can say “you” to each other, and who then form a “we” (OC 442–43). In fact, the primacy of love appears without the slightest ambiguity as a major theme in Lequier’s philosophy. “There is only one good, and that is to love,” he writes in a letter to Deszilles, “and another good is to be loved” (OC 518). Clair suggests that “it is even only through this movement from freedom to love that Lequier’s philosophy reaches a balance and achieves its fulfilment by coordinating all its elements.”64 He also specifies that love, alongside intelligence, freedom, and necessity,65 is one of the elements that contribute to belief (OC 320). He adds that “Love has never said in vain: I want / That the pride of love is different from that pride which rises up in its fierce and solitary joy!” (OC 274). In his Études Kierkegaardiennes, Jean Wahl put forward the idea that love is one of the Christian concepts that most closely unites these two

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authors, a love that “both recite as a form of litany.”66 For Lequier, love is that which does not know itself but can overcome everything; it is an enthusiasm, a supplement of soul, which is lacking in the simple and solitary will, which he characterizes as “frozen faith” (OC 470). More than a voluntary movement, love is an act of pure audacity—audacity of love and that which most naturally leads to faith. This is an idea that links all three of the Christian antiphilosophers we have considered in this book: Pascal, Kierkegaard, and Lequier. Faith is audacious to the extent that it is a wager concerning something which is, on an objective level, very hypothetical. It is audacity that makes the miracle of faith possible and that consecrates the grandeur of this “great struggle” (OC 235), and it is Abraham’s boldness, his madness, and his love for God, despite his “impossible situation”67 that consecrates his triumphant faith and makes him the Father of all believers. This exceptional character of the faith of the “simple,” his “miracle,” which is laughed at by the “proud.”68 Yet it is this faith which in the end triumphs over reason and the capacities of the intelligence, which “cannot themselves elucidate the designs of Providence.”69 FOURTH STATEMENT: “FAITH IS A VICTORY” Freedom, love, cooperation: in a way, we have here the expression of the trinity that determines the happiness of we mortals in our relationship with God. “It should be noted here that Christianity alone has understood the human person and the divine person,” says Lequier, “with the relationship that unites them” (OC 324). Penetration of our deep nature in its very freedom, a conception of the person of God centered on love, and even more a Trinitarian representation of the bond that unites the two are, in short, the key points that distinguish Christianity from any other religion. If we recognize God as the end of all things, this does not mean that we have a perfectly adequate perception of him, for he remains distant from us. But his distance from us is relative in Christianity, which “always places us in front of God.”70 A new covenant is expressed here, to which “the Lord is calling us all, each by our own way, to the Mountain of Vision. This is the way to go to the bosom of Abraham” (OC 281). Lequier invites us to take a look from the finite to the infinite, as he is well aware that the existence of God is eminently problematic, and that it is the object of free belief. From this point of view, his position may be reminiscent of the situation of two lovers, as described by Kierkegaard, who

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however intimately united they may be, cannot go beyond the point that each believes that the other loves them (they believe, they do not know). Lequier’s faith, like that of Kierkegaard, protests against the abandonment of mystery and miracle that theology usually entails.71

The mystery and miracle of belief, which is only possible on the condition of freedom, is recognized, even if this recognition is made in a hypothetical way. It is here that we can confirm that for Lequier freedom is the central concept of Christianity, “where all truths really come to pass.”72 It is precisely this experience, miraculous and mysterious, that Lequier identifies in Abraham, through the difficult battle, finally won, that the Father of the monotheistic faith freely leads in the face of the parricide that God commands him to commit. The question of faith in Lequier, as in Kierkegaard (Fear and Trembling), can only be apprehended in light of the story of Abraham’s sacrifice, which consecrates the victory of faith and the path that leads to this mountain of vision. What is proposed to Abraham is not a master–slave relationship, but a purely spiritual (not intellectual) relationship. It is a question of what position we are going to take in the face of the choice submitted to us, in which God himself voluntarily supports a share of responsibility. But what we learn above all from this study of this relationship to God, this bond of blood, is that humanity has a principled obligation, demanded by God, namely faith. In a passage that may recall the Mémorial of Pascal, Lequier describes the moment of grace constituted by the recognition of faith, inseparable from Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob: I recognized God, I understood all, I guessed, my eyes opened, I succumbed to the onslaught of grace gathering these testimonies like the boiling waters of the raging wave. I fell on my knees, defeated and victorious all together, etc. . . . I struck my breast at the foot of the slaughtered lamb, and as I adored it I felt that I was worshipping as a true Israelite, the God whom Abraham, Isaac and Jacob had all three adored. (OC 450)

The connection with the Mémorial is not limited to the style of the passage quoted here. It can also be read in the reference to the three patriarchs, as well as in the circumstances of Lequier’s life. Tilliette indeed recalls that during the summer of 1845, following a period of abstention from religious practice—but not of indifference to the problems of faith—Lequier experienced a kind of visitation, he passed through days of grace and spiritual emotion. . . . The high peak of fervor was reached on August 15, feast of the Assumption, and over the ensuing week. Lequier then had the adorable and poignant revelation of the love of God and the suffering of Christ. This light was not to waver any more.73,74

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Abraham is the first name by which belief supplants simple rational reasoning, thanks to which the act, in its very implausibility, is trusted. In essence, Abraham is the one who believes in God. “God commanded: Abraham was to obey, not to reflect on God’s order,” he explains. “And if it was up to the magnanimous child to keep his peace of mind in the face of the threat of death, how would Abraham have done to be trouble-free and fearless when it was Isaac’s life?”75 The patriarch is not the one who knows, but the one who believes beyond any object of knowledge, beyond all knowledge, he is the one, subject to the alternative, who does not waver in his will to obey.76 Abraham is therefore not the one who calculates or knows that he has been subjected to a test, the result of which would be known in advance, but the one in whom absolute trust in the love of God always prevails. “O wondrous bonds! O prodigious novelty!” (OC 232). Abraham, who does not think in the usual manner, is not at rest, for faith is a struggle. This leads Lequier to declare, with vigor, that “faith is a victory” and that “for a great victory a great struggle is necessary” (OC 235). Abraham illustrates in the most prodigious way possible the phenomenon of belief which passes through an act of freedom, which transcends the opposition between truth and belief. It is not any sense of prescience that indicates to Abraham the path to follow, but his loyalty to God and the conviction that only His love can save the son of the promise—Isaac—and himself. This loyalty that he is free to have or not to have: herein lies the scandal that Lequier calls freedom, which offers the possibility of choosing in God’s place: “No solemn stupidity, no extravagance, no stupidity should be surprising when it is a question of this capital truth of free will, which can be said to be the stone of stumbling and rock of offence, lapis offensionis et scandali” (OC 411). It is as if, in anticipation, Lequier defended himself from the criticism that his contemporaries, beginning with Renouvier himself, although he hardly expands on the subject, would direct at this series of texts grouped together by Grenier under the chapter “L’union mystique” (mystical union). In this series, we find astonishing texts of ingenuous and bold gentleness, as in this second stanza of “The Holy Virgin and Child Jesus”: As on the glorious peaks / Put down the sun for a moment. Like to the blessed brest / Where suckles the glowing child / The Mother where grace rests / Kissing her divine son / Dew in the middle of a rose / Violet under a lily! (OC 451)77

Yet it is in these texts that the deep meaning he gives to forgiveness above all, but also to trust, to this freely consented and revealing trust of faith itself, is best expressed. This faith that stands out among the hypotheses, that sacrifices determinism thanks to freedom, which chooses, and in making this sacrifice chooses itself.

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FIFTH STATEMENT: “YOU WERE RIGHT, O PASCAL.” This fifth statement presents our author as an admirer of Pascal, with whose work he was well acquainted.78 Lequier was essentially a Pascalian, so aligned were his philosophical and spiritual horizons (antiphilosophical and Christian) with those of the so-called Jansenist. Certainly, as Viera rightly notes, “he feeds on the substance of two giants, Descartes and Pascal.”79 However, we have shown in the previous comments that in philosophy, especially in Descartes, too much importance was given to thought. According to Lequier, one must in fact hasten “to turn one’s eyes away from the extravagances to which human reason condemns itself by despising what faith teaches,”80 for nothing would be more perilous than to consider only human reason in order to understand what is beyond it. For Descartes, God is only the ultimate foundation of our knowledge, and from this point of view, this conception appears to Lequier, in the last resort, as useless and uncertain as it did to Pascal. If reason “can be bent in any direction,”81 can we rely on our slightest intuition, on our “fancy?” Where does “feeling” begin (principles “can be felt”) and “fancy” end?82 Grenier wonders, recalling that Lequier quotes Pascal’s famous passage (OC 329). Therein lies the whole thrust of Pascal’s, and Lequier’s, philosophical investigations. Of course, in the face of this convergence of views, Lequier’s objections to the Jansenists on the question of grace are raised in a semi-pelagian formulation, leaving more room for the affirmation of freedom, the power to do, and less for the pathetic situation of humans in the world.83 Truth is considered freely attainable in Lequier, while it is announced as immeasurable in Pascal.84 It is true that Lequier was no Port-Royalist (assuming that Pascal was himself, as he has never been a loner). Nevertheless, it is not entirely certain that for Pascal all knowledge of the truth is impossible, any more than we see in the Breton thinker an inclination to think that the possession of absolute truth is probable, or even accessible. Our intelligence, he explains, “is capable of error, that is to say that it is only capable of truth to a certain degree, that is to say that our power is limited and that we are finite” (OC 377). On the other hand, they agree that, according to the draft note left by Lequier at the time of writing the Dialogue (Insist on the similarities between Pascal’s argument and mine. I can never insist enough on this point, which is the central point), the truth for God is not the truth for us. In these two fragmented works, whose similarities are sometimes striking,85 the profound unity of thought appears positively, in that for both of them there is something more than a simple search for truth in the act of seeking it: there already exists, in the embryonic state, an element of truth itself. As

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for the will of God in his relations with humanity, for Lequier (of whom it is one of the deepest intuitions) and Pascal, it is situated in a movement that goes from the affirmation of human aseity and its relative independence to the help of God—through grace, in order to prevent us from being destroyed by the weight of the infinite—until we recognize that our will can do nothing by itself, for the simple reason that we do not have the initiative of the first will, which belongs to God alone. Lequier is the more prolific of the two on this theme: according to him, God does not command but “makes things happen.” We are thus not solely dependent on ourselves, even if we see ourselves as free,86 but we are nourished by the power of God within ourselves. As Vieira notes, Pascal’s influence in this domain is obvious, as this passage from La Recherche testifies: “Providence. May God read better in our heart than we do ourselves.”87 Despite the intellectual dimension of their work and their scientific dimension (as well as their respective talents for geometric abstraction), they both wanted to keep in close contact with concrete reality. Finally, and this is the axis from which their thoughts demonstrate a “stellar friendship,”88 it is indeed the problem of wagering, of believing or not believing, of doing or not doing, which constitutes the central plank of their respective antiphilosophical devices. In a letter to Anne Deszille, Lequier wrote that “one must choose between that which is vulgar and that which is great: there is no possible pact between freedom and slavery, between the great and the small, between one thing and its opposite” (OC 513). Lequier and Pascal both propose a theory of choice: “As for the decisive proof of human freedom, Lequier repeated it a hundred times,” explained Jean Grenier, “it is impossible, since no experiment can be performed: you have to bet.”89 If there is no assured proof of freedom, then it will leave no trace, in the classical sense developed by Saint Anselm, Descartes, or Kant, of the existence of God.90 The publication of the first Cahier Jules Lequier revealed this truth with a commentary from Gérard Pyguillem: It is not impossible that it is on the interplay of these double-possibilities that Lequier’s real freedom ultimately rests; that this interplay is the reality of the freedom present in everyone. Renouvier, in a notebook that I did not find in his library, recognized that play is an essential form of life. There are people who play with their lives; when we are looking for something, we proceed “as if” in thought; we risk it. It is true, sometimes with great prior reservations, but in the end you play it in a certain way.91

This experience of gambling, of this “victorious blow of freedom, which is called choosing” (OC 67) brings our two authors back to the side of existence. Indeed, for Pascal and Lequier, there is no more human disposition than that

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which consists in choosing, in playing, so it is even this disposition which defines me, which makes me. I am my choice, one might say, that is to say, I choose myself. In other words, I choose to be this or that: the proof is that I could choose to be different from the one I chose to be. This self that I choose to be faces this self that I have chosen not to be. This disposition that makes me the way I am, I receive it from reason but above all from the heart, from a “feeling,” a pathos, which refers to a subjective mode of apprehension. It is precisely this point that has inspired several commentators to suggest that Maine de Biran is the missing link between Pascal and Lequier. The heart, which is moved by a discordance in favor of belief, submits the two faces of intelligence, from which it is not completely separated, in a form of “dialectical conciliation,”92 to something deeper than itself. Only the heart is the bearer of an absolute knowledge, which consists in “seeing all the truths simultaneously and possessing them all together.”93 This precedence of the heart is recognized in that it is the heart that pronounces the judgment as to what is true, which leads Ricoeur, in his Essay on Lequier’s Judgement, to say that “certainty is therefore indeed a choice. This is the meaning of the formula: freedom determines knowledge.”94 Lequier turned to belief to attain a clearer view of reality (OC 491). Between science and belief, it is up to “the wisdom of the heart” (OC 34) to decide, because it alone has the power to satisfy me, to strengthen me, to make me as I am. In it alone resides the power to give an account of what I believe, because it alone can attest to my own aseity. NOTES 1. Agamben, G. Qu’est-ce que le commandement? (Rivages, 1993), 12–13. 2. Garcia, T. Ce qui commence et ce qui finit, 11. 3. Quoted by Maurice Merleau-Ponty in his Phénoménologie de la perception (Editions Gallimard, 1945), IX. 4. Laf. 131, Br. 434. 5. Wahl, J. Jules Lequier—Les classiques de la liberté, 56. 6. Clair, A. CJL No. 6, 69. 7. Badiou, A. Logiques des mondes (Seuil, 2006), 449. 8. Cf. Citot, V. La condition philosophique et le problème du début, 12. 9. To quote the title of Jean-Luc Marion’s book on Saint Augustine. See Marion, J. L. Au lieu de soi (PUF, 2008). 10. Badiou, A. Lacan L’antiphilosophie 3, 2013, 222. 11. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 79. 12. Laf. 199, Br. 72. 13. OC 70–75.

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14. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 89. 15. XI A 59, 1849/1850, Volume 3, Nrf Gallimard, 36–37. 16. Kierkegaard echoes these Lequierian sentiments, in the Works of Love: “A question of conscience is inconceivable in a matter where we do not relate to God, because to relate to God is precisely to have a conscience. This is also why a person would have nothing to do with conscience if God did not exist, because the relationship between the individual and God, the relationship with God, is conscience; and this is why it is so terrible to have the slightest remorse of conscience which, in turn, burdens us with the infinite weight of God.” OCXIV, The Works of Love, 131. 17. Tilliette, X. Jules Lequier ou le tourment de la liberté, 46. 18. Grenier specifies: “What makes the person of man and the person of the Word analogous, says Lequier elsewhere, is the Idea of Doing which precedes any free act.” Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 207. 19. Wahl, J. Les classiques de la liberté, Jules Lequier 1814/1862, Introduction et choix, p. 81. 20. Clair, A. CJL No. 6: 48. 21. Grenier, J. Jules Lequier, p. 4. 22. “Since he did not make room for desire, he did not make room for affective life, even though he is someone, a true existential in his theory; he did not make room for desire, nor for the link that there could be between desire—i.e. spontaneity—and the capacity to begin. He did not make the link between concrete life and the capacity of the mind to begin an act in search of truth. He did not make this connection. It is like Kant, like Descartes. They did not make the link between affectivity and intelligence.” CJL No.5, Interview with Robert Misrahi, by Delphine Bouit, 21. 23. Id., 29. 24. Scarcella, RM. CJL No. 6, 88. 25. On this question, see: Evard J. L. CJL No. 4: 48. 26. Badiou, 2006, 449. 27. Citot, V. CJL No. 6, 210. 28. “In a letter of November 1900 to Le Gal la Salle, Jacob, with his characteristic eloquence, compares the thoughts and personalities of Renouvier, Le Gal La Salle and Lequier: “In essence, the whole work of Renouvier is the glorification of individuality in its unintelligibility, free will or, as Lequyer said, contingency. This idea was common to all three of you; only it resonated above all in Lequyer’s imagination, in Renouvier’s moral conscience and in your sense of life. It is the same sound spreading in three different circles. Lequyer draws from the notion of free individuality a very beautiful poetic motif; Renouvier brings out the law of duty from it; and you, apart from any aesthetic or moral consideration, bring out the law of rational equilibrium which alone can ensure the happiness of men. Lequyer, Renouvier and you, you are three brothers who have to varying degrees imagined, conceived and lived the same idea. The present glory of Renouvier glorifies all three of you.” Le Brech, G. Introduction à la correspondance Jacob-Renouvier, CJL No.1, 35. 29. Jules Lequier fonds, Ms. 282, notebook G, Notes by J. Lequier: Analysis of “Degérando’s moral perfection.”

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30. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 49/50. 31. Tilliette, X. Jules Lequier ou le tourment de la liberté, 49. 32. “In general.” as Wahl concludes, “Lequier is opposed to explaining dogmas with the help of the lights of reason: “The truths of Christianity are of a different order from those that Adam had.” Wahl, J. Jules Lequier—Les classiques de la liberté, 91–92. 33. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 212–213. 34. Tilliette, X. Jules Lequier ou le tourment de la liberté, 50–51. 35. Clair, A. La recherche d’une première vérité and other texts—introduction, p. XX. 36. Ricoeur, P. Essai sur le jugement de Lequier, CJL No.4: 63. 37. Grenier explains: “In any case, the predestined is charged with the thankless task of demonstrating to the reprobate that, if the latter is damned in a certain way, he could, in spite of everything, have been saved by his own will, and that his loss is both free and necessary. It is an opportunity for Lequier to parade through the predestined all the theological arguments that claim to reconcile human freedom and divine prescience, arguments that will be refuted by the reprobate, here the author’s spokesman.” Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 107. 38. “It seems to me that there is such a solidarity between the articles of the theological Creed and metaphysical conceptions that the mere fact of dealing freely with the latter is an act of independence from them.” Letter from Jacob to Renouvier, CJL No.1: 47. 39. Letter from Jacob to Renouvier, CJL No.1: 42. 40. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 144/145. 41. Kierkegaard will speak of “the presupposition where the individual surpasses himself, because sin presupposes itself not, of course, before being posed (which would be predestination), but by posing itself.” OC VII, The Concept of Anxiety, 163–164. 42. Wahl, J. Jules Lequier, 70. 43. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 144. 44. Wahl, J. Les classiques de la liberté, 79. 45. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier. p. 172. Fonds Jules Lequier (Jules Lequier Collection), Ms 255, 19. 46. As a reminder here, in the 1952 edition, reference is made to an important note (MS. 248, F° 24): “Truth to God is not truth to man. Insist on the connection between Pascal’s argument and mine. I can never insist enough on this point, which is the central point. (Why I didn’t tell Renouvier this)” (OC 171). 47. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 97. 48. OC VII, The Concept of Anguish, 187. 49. OC VII, Philosophical fragments, 14. 50. OC VII, The Concept of anxiety, 189. 51. Probus: “What you say is correct, there is between past contingent things and future contingent things the difference of two contradictory assertions, concerning past contingent things, one is true and the other false; and that of two contradictory assertions, concerning future contingent things, neither is true; both are false. Thus,

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such a man has committed such a bad action, or he has not committed it; of these two propositions one is true, the other false, and of these two propositions: Such a man will commit such a bad action, though he may not commit it, and the contradictory proposition: this man will not commit this bad action; of these two propositions neither one is true. Of course, we are talking about certainty, not probability” (OC 194). 52. La recherche, 170. 53. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, p. 79. See also Ms 255 f° 70 and 78. 54. Clair edition of La recherche, 320–321. 55. Fonds Jules Lequier fonds (Jules Lequier Collection), Msc.256, I, Folio 294,Verso. 56. “God. Trinity in God. / Distinction of nature and person, in God and man. / Freedom of God, type of freedom of man” (OC 71). 57. Lequier expresses in these words the traditional view of divine power through the character of the Predestinate: “Because being the sovereign master of all that is, free or not free, everything he wants is as he wants it” (OC 152). 58. Wahl, J. Jules Lequier—Les classiques de la liberté, 101. 59. “The trial of the two Abels is like “the counter-test or the replica of the biblical episode of Cain and Abel, or even of the fault of Adam.” Tilliette, X, Jules Lequier ou le tourment de la liberté, 50. 60. Grenier, J. Jules Lequier, Philosophie et théologien de la liberté, 7. 61. Wahl, J. Jules Lequier—Les classiques de la liberté, 89. 62. Clair, A. Metaphysique et Existence, 142. 63. “This symbolism, which is not found in any theologian, is a textual reproduction of the ideas that Lamennais sets out in his Esquisse d’une philosophie, and particularly in Book I, ch. I-XVI.” Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 204. 64. Clair, A. Métaphysique and Existence, 142. 65. André Clair, CJL No. 5: 27. 66. Wahl, J. Etudes kierkegaardiennes, 430–432. 67. Grenier, J. Jules Lequier, philosophie et théologien de la liberté, 7. 68. The pascalian word par excellence here. See Research, 320. 69. Grenier, J. Jules Lequier, philosophie et théologien de la liberté, 7. 70. Jules Lequier Collection, Msc 286, 39. 71. Grenier, J. Jules Lequier: philosoophie et théologien de la liberté, 7. 72. Jules Lequier Fond, Msc 286, 44. 73. Tilliette, X. Jules Lequier ou le tourment de la liberté, 32/33. 74. Lequier testifies to this even in his notes, as here (with the year 1846 as a reference, unlike Tilliette, who refers to the previous year): “I experienced all these feelings vividly almost for the first time, such was the clear and distinct view of this great immolation of God revealed to me on 17 August 1846 in the church in Paris; I was looking at the reproduction of the Passion, and very soon I became indignant at all the infamous treatment inflicted on Jesus Christ” (OC 454). 75. La recherche, 233. 76. “If Abraham, after an initial movement of terror, would have laughed and said: Lord, invent some other test, for I have guessed this one, what else would he have

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done but to show the same trust in God as Isaac showed in himself, laughing at the stake? But would he have been greater? That would be a bold statement. Was not the blind obedience of love here something more beautiful than the whole penetration of love? God commanded: Abraham was to obey, not to reflect on God’s command” (OC 235). 77. Cf. also in the third paragraph of the “Song of Mary to put the Child Jesus to sleep”: “O Son whom heaven adores / O my Child! O my God, / Who of the flesh in this place / Veil the eternal dawn / Sleep, beautiful little Jesus, / Let not your eyes be opened!” (OC 452). 78. Grenier specifies: “discussions on grace. On this last subject, he may well quote St Augustine, Luther and Calvin, but he knows them only through Pascal” Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 105. 79. Viera, A. CJL No. 6: 115. 80. La recherche, p. 320. 81. Laf. 530, Br. 274. 82. Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 44. 83. “Lequier borrows the expression of this doctrine from Pascal in his Dialogue. But it is worth noting that he sought the interpretation of pure theological doctrine in a Jansenist writer, who was therefore inclined to limit freedom in favour of grace. Lequier’s quotations from the 18th Provincial (addressed to the Jesuit Annat RP, defender of the Thomists) show that he is sensitive to the formal contradictions in Pascal’s text.” Lequier’s great commentator does not fail to specify, in what we cannot oppose here, that Lequier cannot agree with him. And indeed he hastens to add that his conception is subject to other influences that go beyond the strict framework of Pascalian thought, notably that of St Thomas.” Grenier, J. La philosophie de Jules Lequier, 144. 84. See Clair, A. Introduction to La recherche d’une première vérité, p. XI/XII. 85. Clair notes that “some of Lequier’s texts can even pass for an imitation of Pascal and a reprise of his rhetoric. Thus this one: O weakness! O uncertainty! O wretched pride of reason! / Where then is this immutable base, this absolute unity, this term of comparison to which I can relate everything else? / Dwarf among giants, giant among dwarves. . . . World or atom according to the eye that considers it, what is man?” The commentator is referring here to thoughts devoted to the disproportion of man and the thinking reed. Clair, A. Metaphysique et Existence, 91–92. 86. “Therefore, necessity and freedom can be united in a ‘double act by which human reason poses and conceives itself,’ an act that is not very different from the one by which, according to Kierkegaard, I base my ‘self’ on God and take upon myself all my acts and my very nature” writes Jean Wahl. Études Kierkegaardiennes, 430–432. 87. Viera, A. CJL No. 6: 108. 88. Deslandes, G. “L’amitié stellaire de trois chrétien philosophes : Kierkegaard, Pascal, Lequier,” Études, 7/8, no. 397 (2002): 53–62. 89. La liberté, 30. 90. “It is impossible to prove the existence of God,” writes Lequier. “First, one can deny that one has the idea of infinity within oneself; second, one can deny that this idea has an objective reality. But, it will be said, one must either contest the objective

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reality of all ideas, or admit that of the idea of infinity. First of all, I can question the objective reality of all ideas; but moreover, as the idea of infinity appears to me with a new character, and astonishes me, I am more inclined to doubt that it has an object, and I do not see that it can be proved to me that it has one. One can only show the truth; we can choose to believe it or not to believe it, but as for proving it, that is an impossible undertaking” (OC 340). 91. Pyguillem, G. Jules Lequier, CJL No.1: 92. 92. Clair, A. La recherche d’une première vérité—introduction, p. XIV. 93. “Let us conceive of an intelligence in which an uninterrupted sequence of mathematical truths is assembled, in accordance with the rules of logic, chained by identity; let us suppose that these successive perceptions take place by virtue of a necessity inherent in the very nature of this intelligence, it will possess science, it is true, or rather science will be in it, but it will not know that it knows something. It will be like those scholars of whom Pascal speaks, who know, but who lack the knowledge that they know something. This absolute science, all positive and so to speak direct, which consists in seeing all the truths simultaneously and possessing them all together, belongs only to the Supreme Intelligence, to the principle of all truth, to God” (OC 373). 94. Ricoeur, P. Essai sur le jugement de Lequier, CJL No.4: 65.

Conclusion

Lequier left in his work several images of himself: the young man who marvels at the feeling of being master of his actions, the mature man who does not know whether he is predestined or rejected, the lonely pine tree, struggling against the winds of the Great West, gradually dispossessed of its strength. These three images merge to form the backdrop to a life and work revealed only at their conclusion, whose end only makes sense when folded back on itself, all the way back to childhood. But the background of such a work, especially one that is incomplete and published after the author’s death, is also revealed through the successive interpretations to which it gives rise. In this book, I have attempted to describe, as accurately as possible, the place of this retroactive movement that is Lequierian philosophy within the Western philosophical tradition. Or, more precisely, what I have tried to do is above all to describe the Lequierian journey and define its scope, from the search to the beginning. Badiou describes the “space” occupied by antiphilosophers as being forever under threat, the threat of a philosophical reversal in which the act may be forced to return to a philosophical argument and of which Lequier was perfectly aware, as is shown by the dialectic proper to his philosophical project. If Kierkegaard was determined to demonstrate that philosophy “abstracts existence” and Pascal to show that “it ignores the real God,”1 for Lequier the priority was to offer a glimpse of an economy higher than the simple logic of causes and effects, in response to the practical question: “what is to be done?” From this point of view, according to Worms, a choice had to be made between “an existential philosophy of religion” and “an objective theology of Catholicism.”2 In fact, the first option, in line with the readings of Grenier and Wahl, was my preference, but I have clarified the terms of this choice by pointing out the extent to which Lequier belonged to a line of qualified 93

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thinkers, alongside Pascal and Kierkegaard. Indeed, the “stone of scandal” of his philosophy of freedom, in its manner of preparing a new point of departure for reflection and action, never ceases to repeat the PascalianKierkegaardian gesture, both with regard to the philosophical tradition and to the Christian one. His antiphilosophical and Christian gesture, which overturns the universal, notably Thomistic and Hegelian, puts freedom back at the heart of philosophical discussion, while questioning the concept of freedom conceived as an event without cause. As for his discourse, unfinished for the reason that he never stopped beginning, or starting over, it is addressed to living, breathing human beings, facing up to the demands of the outside world, and confronting their own internal convictions. Perhaps in our post-religious culture, the Lequierian mode of questioning may appear outdated, or even faintly ridiculous, in the case of texts on divine persons. On this first point, quite the contrary is true: Lequier’s anguished search, his constant struggle against “the fallacious prestige of necessity,”3 and its utterly hideous character—which a film like Irreversible,4 a kind of visual experiment showing the obscene using a narrative ascent of the chain of causes, allows us to grasp in the most radical way—is bringing his thought to an ever-wider readership in contemporary societies. His constant struggle against the “false prestige of necessity”5 in favor of the pure event, which is defined neither by an afterthought nor by a before, but by an absolute present, remains thoroughly relevant today. The rise in power of predictive tools, such as those based on so-called artificial intelligence, particularly in the political and economic fields, has resulted in the co-production of remote-controlled affects that are no longer entirely ours.6 It appears highly likely that even our deepest desires will soon be drowned, if we do nothing about it, in the cold waters of algorithmic calculation. The aseity which Lequier talks about would then become at best a skill, while any sense of autonomy, which would then no longer be possible to access, would disappear. In this context, we can easily appreciate why the possibility of the emergence of a free act—that is to say of true creation, of a possible “bifurcation” or “branching off,”7 in which the mind interrupts the infernal succession of causes and effects—have never been so vitally necessary as it is today. We must now act to defend the very act of searching for a truth, of making the choice of such an enquiry, staking out our “freedom of (philosophical) enterprise.” On the second point, the fear of ridicule, it should first be recalled that Lequier was fully aware of this risk. “One of the most disastrous things in the world is the fear of ridicule,” as he bluntly stated. “If one were to look closely one would find that the movements which give rise to ridicule in the world are hardly those torn [sic] by the exceptional audacity of a moment from habitual shyness of character” (OC 466). To worldly eyes, the Christian will always be ridiculous. On this point, Lequier has little doubt. As he does not seem to

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doubt either, like Pascal and Kierkegaard, that suffering is as consubstantial to the authentic Christian life. For Lequier, however, this suffering is one that he chooses,8 a suffering that voluntarily recalls Christ who himself decided to suffer. For Lequier, who frequently evoked the mistreatment and scorn endured by Christ,9 freely consenting to suffering, the human evocation of the suffering Christ, necessarily leads to martyrdom. It seemed to him, therefore, that suffering was a trial, which he categorically had the duty to accept, like a challenge to be taken up. Finally, to the reproach of ridicule, it should be remembered that Lequier, as can be seen in particular in his Dialogue, must first of all be considered an ironist. His work is, indeed, as André Clair put it, a “conquest where irony is present in deed.”10 This irony is to be found not only in the Socratic dialogues with their exemplary characters, but in all the corners of his dazzling and crumbling work; for it is indeed, it must be remembered, to a child that Lequier ultimately entrusts the fate of metaphysics. This is why—to borrow Badiou’s explanation of his admiration for Pascal, with regard to whom there is “a French secular tradition of regret that such a great genius wasted his time and effort attempting to save Christian gibberish”11—Lequier retains a certain grandeur, a nobility in the face of the vicissitudes of existence, battling against the current to open up a new chapter of philosophy, while at the same time reviving an old, “outdated” idea—freedom—as the herald of new possibilities that break with the parade of causes and effects. LEQUIER’S GREATNESS Bergson’s phrase, found in his correspondence, that one should be a man of thought who acts and a man of action who thinks, resonates with Lequier’s philosophy in a particularly striking way. The practical orientation of his thinking can be grasped in two main ways. The first hinges upon the fact of having re-established that philosophy is everyone’s business: The coalman (is) as apt to discover as the experienced scientist, by this alone that the coalman is a man, and that as such he has rights to the truth, and that God had to put it within his reach and as if it were within his hand. (OC 344) This is what philosophy, before him, had ceased to believe, having become a theoretical exercise, too often dogmatic, tinged with vain conceptual accumulation, and disconnected from practical priorities. The second way of appreciating this practical bent in Lequier’s thought, and a point on which I have barely touched, is the interest

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that Lequier demonstrated, even in the general plan of the great work he was aiming to write, in social and political life. Questions of education (he had been a tutor in the humanities at the Egyptian School in Paris), of the personal development of the citizen, of the functioning of the State, and of institutions were all to be covered in his magnum opus. In a series of notes entitled Les Nouvelles Provinciales, a thinker of public affairs appears, which perhaps sheds some more light on Lequier’s decision to stand as a parliamentary candidate in the canton of Saint-Brieuc in 1848, but above all gives an account of the practical uses of freedom in the sense Lequier evoked in other areas of his work. As a political thinker he can be described as a liberal and republican Catholic, in opposition to the ideas emanating from the two other major philosophical currents of his time, utopian socialism and eclecticism. The major concern that emanates from the few written traces that have been found reveals a Lequier who was very attached to social justice,12 fighting against indifference toward the misery of others. Wanting as much as one’s brother, if he has more, was for him the very definition of selfishness. The true meaning of equality, over and above the social inequality that reigns among men, is to wish, like a good neighbor in the Christian sense, that the brother should indeed possess more. Here we can begin to perceive the social and religious as well as political contours of Lequier’s worldview. Let me specify that Lequier’s greatness is never more striking than when we observe the sincerity of his existence, the permanent reaffirmation of his philosophical beliefs in his life choices. When Kierkegaard referred to an authoritative judge on the subject said that it is rare to see an author speak humbly about humility, doubt in doubt etc. . . . But even rarer than such an exposé (identical to the thing exposed) is the fact of seeing understanding translated into action, the intelligence of a thing to be accomplished expressed—oh noble simplicity!—by his practice,13 he was of course thinking of Pascal. And yet, few philosophers in history, since Socrates and Diogenes, can be said to have given such an existential value to their philosophical production. Paulhan, in the letter presented at the beginning of this book, nevertheless acknowledged Lequier’s interest on a biographical level, but it was precisely Lequier’s philosophical postulate that made this life admirable. That he was not recognized as a great mind by the editorial committee would no doubt have confirmed the idea that what counts is life itself, and that the work and its theoretical propositions only make sense in their relation to the

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author’s destiny. A tragic one, from which success and shared love14 were lacking more than anything else, and which seems to have already been decided by the time he wrote the following to Gal la Salle, in a long and important letter dated Tuesday December 24, 1839: Yes we will go, Daniel, but we will flay our knees on the stones, we will cling to the brambles, we will pale more than once before the abyss. Remember the words of old Lamennais. We won’t get far in a coach. The place I’m talking about can only be reached on foot, and only after trudging for a long time through the mud and breathing the corrupted air. (OC 497) Grenier15 recalled that if greatness in Pascal’s work meant spanning the whole, vast gulf between science and faith, the spirit of geometry and the spirit of finesse, between abysses and glory, then no one better than Lequier had embodied this thought. A thought dedicated to the construction of a system, in order to demonstrate that it is impossible to build one, a thought of the dilemma into which Lequier fell, but in which his greatness was not to consent to escape from this paradox. And we should add, by way of conclusion to this study, to what extent his work symbolises, even in the depths of French thought, this “spirit of exception”16 which is indeed its most remarkable attribute. A CERTAIN “SPIRIT OF EXCEPTION” Christianity intends to make every Christian an exception. This is a concept that comes essentially from the Kierkegaardian tradition. Hélène Politis reminds us in Le discours philosophique selon Kierkegaard that “if this category is so important, it is especially because it appears to him to be at the heart of the strategic device that he opposed to the System.”17 To take an example, Kierkegaard considered Pascal to be a remarkable, exceptional Christian, the embodiment of a “temporal singularity.”18 There is not, in Pascal, as a philosopher, a person or a Christian, any part of his life that is at odds with his own principles. Refusing to compromise means not giving in to the law of numbers.19 It means being den enkelte, the Unique, the Exceptional, the Singular, a term that can be translated in many ways, but which retains the meaning attributed to the one who, posed as a subject, exists alone before God, as opposed to the “material power of public things.”20 Den enkelte is a unit that can only be added to units of the same type, so as to form the theoretical but concretely active Christian community, which brings together knights of faith in a sense that transcends all forms of constituted church. Thus for Kierkegaard, Pascal’s “exceptional” character

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is derived from the sincerity of the antiphilosopher’s Christianity, and the authentically Christian nature of his antiphilosophy, but certainly not from his genius. What interpretation could Kierkegaard have offered of his quasi-contemporary Lequier? I believe it is possible to put forward a few ideas based on this passage from the Papers: Exceptions begin in reverse, from childhood dialectically, that is to say, without immediacy, they begin with dialectic, with reflection, thus living year after year (about as much as others live in pure immediacy) and then, at a more mature age, the possibility of faith appears to them. For faith is immediacy after reflection.21

There is no doubt that he was an exception here: no philosopher sought to describe the free act, in its very immediacy, as much as Lequier, whose long philosophical quest ended only with his death. Not to mention that the faith of Lequier, this exemplary reflexive philosopher, appeared when he was already a grown man, following an experience reminiscent of Pascal’s Night of Fire,22 described earlier. Finally, is not the expression “beginning backwards, dialectically from childhood” an apt summary of the whole Lequierian method, which he, from the very beginning of the work, entrusts to a child? Thus, it is not so much “the enigma of the exception” that matters to Lequier.23 He must be presented (as well as Kierkegaard and Pascal) as the individual he undoubtedly was, the very example of one who offers himself for the accomplishment of the universal. These three authors are indeed universal in the sense that they do not belong to any traditional category. It is therefore appropriate to attempt to perceive Lequier’s “exceptionality” through his use—albeit unconscious—of a category so difficult to render in French or in English, den Enkelte, a point on which, paradoxically, he chimes with Kierkegaard as well as Pascal. The reversal of the relationship between the law and the exception, between the rule and that which is exempt from it, supplants the chain of causes and effects, the mechanics of everyday life, the determinism of our actions and gestures. The free act has turned everything upside down. Tristan Garcia, in a recent article already quoted herein, identifies Lequierian thought as giving its character of “exceptionality” to French thought. This “exception to universal determinism”24 seems to him to have been the major differentiating factor of French philosophy in relation to German systematics and Anglo-American analytical philosophy. He also traces the ramifications of Lequier’s “beginning” as far as the philosophy of Alain Badiou, where the figure of the exception is understood in relation to the event:

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The Badiousian event thus renews, through Sartre, Lequier’s freedom, which was accessible to us in the terms of universal causality while at the same time escaping this determinism. We have come full circle, which has led the history of French philosophy to adopt the ways of an exceptional universalism, of a systematic search for that which escapes the system.25

And so it is Lequier, not content to have inverted the order of precedence, to the benefit of the latter, between the universal and the exceptional, in order to accomplish his project, has continued to work in this direction over two centuries and more, from Renouvier to Badiou, passing through Lachelier, Lagneau, Bergson, Sartre, and among others. By pointing the way to a theorization of the singular, an “ontologization” of the exceptional, he has served as a point of reference, or an unconscious model, for all of the countless philosophical projects which have sought to consign the strictures of systematics to the realm of fantasy (Garcia cites the concepts of différance in Derrida and the multiple in Deleuze), or who have sought another universal escaping the (idealistic) reference of the great German philosophy (Garcia mentions “the freedom of the spiritualists, the will, the ‘for oneself,’ but also the woman, the queer, the ‘wild thought’ the potlatch, the difference, the singularity, the Other, the event, the Grace of Simone Weil”26). One would be tempted to say that for an author who published nothing during his lifetime and who died alone, whom the philosophical institution hardly recognized, who remains little-known (or entirely unknown) beyond the select circle of Lequierian studies, this is not such a bad result. Revisiting Garcia’s thesis in this conclusion is also a manner of re(tracing) the road traveled during this search and returning to my starting point. It is a way of completing the loop and thus beginning. To begin like a child, picking up a hornbeam leaf. Or like an author, as he writes the last sentence of the book open on his desk, and turns the page with his heart pounding, who unknowingly creates a way of being, and whose readers must surely hope that he has much more unlearning to do. But those readers would do well to bear in mind that, with regard to these great questions of free will and Providence (OC 13), the reasoning of the learned has, alas, never been able to do anything for him.

NOTES 1. Badiou, A. Lacan—l’antiphilosophie 3, 2013, 221. 2. Worms, F. CJL No. 6: 131. 3. Tilliette, X. Jules Lequier ou le tourment de la liberté, 47/48. 4. 2002 film by Franco-Argentinean director Gaspard Noé.

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5. Tilliette, X. Jules Lequier ou le tourment de la liberté, 47/48. 6. See, for example, Illouz, E. (dir). Emotional commodities. Authenticity in the time of capitalism. First parallels, 2019. 7. Stiegler, B., ed. Bifurquer, Les Liens qui Libèrent, 2020. 8. “The Word, defiled by the sight of evil, is incarnated to suffer, to pay the debt which man has contracted and which is beyond his strength; God will be satisfied with a small satisfaction on the part of man; those who have died and who provided this small satisfaction before the suffering of the Word, do not yet enjoy the sight of God. This must be: for before the coming of Jesus Christ the offence done to God by men could not be sufficiently atoned for, God comes, becomes flesh and dies, the satisfaction is complete, and men who have died since the beginning of the world and shed a tear of repentance enter heaven after Jesus Christ” (OC 438). 9. For example: “O my God, O suffering God, O dying God, O crucified God, whose body twisted like a worm and whose limbs stiffened in the torment of this sovereign agony. . . . / I recognised God” (OC 450–51). 10. Clair, A. La recherche d’une première vérité—introduction, p. IX/X. The height of irony lies more precisely in the last part of the dialogue in which the reprobate seems to accept his fate to the point of blessing God himself. “What still strikes me in this dialogue is the artist it reveals,” notes Jacob in a letter of September 7, 1890, addressed to Charles Renouvier and Louis Prat, “under the thought that develops one feels an ever-present emotion that brings the dialectic to life and which bursts out at every moment with words and phrases of sober and piercing irony.” Fonds Jules Lequier, Lettres de Jacob à Charles Renouvier et Louis Prat, number 7, Kérity, September 7, 1890. 11. Badiou, A. L’être et l’événement, p. 208. By the way Badiou is not exempt, far from it, from any antiphilosophical influence. Cf. for instance Phelps, H. Alain Badiou: Between Theology and Anti-Philosophy (Routledge, 2013) or Deslandes, G. Antiphilosophy of Christianity (Springer, 2021). 12. “Justice is the balance of rights” (250, f° 23). 13. OC XVIII, Judge for yourselves, 170–171. 14. Lequier’s grandeur endures in the face of his doomed quest for glory, as recounted here in a letter to Miss Deszille, the object of his thwarted love: “They were noble projects. Indeed, what would a courageous soul not do for the love of glory? To the most vulgar souls, the love of riches, to all at last that which bears the name of love? Nothing has any value, neither peril nor labour nor pain, and these are the wonders of which man is capable. Well! Yes! I wanted to reach you by glory; to me, you were the reward for glory—I have often dreamed, happy dream! that I brought to your feet, born of the purest blood of my heart, blossoming at the burning fires of sorrow, and watered with those tears all the more fertile as they are more bitter, a flower of unequalled beauty which would entrance you with its perfume” (OC 514). 15. Lequier, like others, does not disregard so-called objective certainty. Faced with this tension, more acute than it is for those who simply choose to jettison one of the terms of the antinomy, we must say with Pascal: “One does not show one’s

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greatness by being at one end, but by touching both at the same time and filling the whole in-between.” Grenier, J. Jules Lequier, philosopher and freedom theologian, p. 8. 16. Garcia, T. Ce qui commence et ce qui finit, 305. 17. Cf. Hélène Politis’ thesis defended in 1993, Le discours philosophique selon Kierkegaard, p. 722. 18. Jean Guitton underlines: “If, in Goethe, even the historical accident, the inner event are exhausted of their temporal singularity, transmuted into ideas and forms, on the contrary, in Pascal even existence in its eternal form, even mathematical truth is clothed in historicity, in singularity, of presence, as if this truth were embodied, crossed on the path, met one evening, stared at, analogous to the person—and therefore capable of being known as one knows the event, the person, through a convergence of signs and perspectives, through witness.” Guitton, J. Génie de Pascal, ed. Aubier, 1962, 171. 19. “Casuists . . . / People who are accustomed to speaking and thinking badly / Their great number far from marking their perfection marks the opposite / The humility of one makes the pride of many.” Laf. 729, Br. 931. 20. OC XIX, L’instant No.6: 205. 21. VIII A 649, 1846/1849, Volume 2, Nrf Gallimard, 225/226. 22. The night of 23rd to 24th February 1654, during which Pascal wrote his Mémorial. 23. So described by Tilliette, because of “his Breton origins, his sickly constitution, his madness, the failures of his life to the bitter end.” Tilliette adds: “One cannot treat the ‘lone pine’ as a tree in the row, and that is why it (Lequier) was preferably erected near the Kierkegaard enclosure, so little its elder, despite the restrictions that must be placed on the astonishing similarities of their fates.” Tilliette, X. Jules Lequier ou le tourment de la liberté, Liminaire, 12. 24. Garcia, T. Ce qui commence et ce qui finit, 302–303. 25. Id., 304. 26. Ibid., 294.

Acknowledgments

I would like to take this opportunity to thank Kévin Le Louargant and Lura Patrick for their wise rereading of the first versions of this work. I express my gratitude to Goulven Le Brech for authorizing me to reproduce and translate the interview that he conducted and published in the Cahiers Jules Lequier. I would also like to thank the two editors of the series to which this book now belongs (Continental Philosophy and the History of Thought): Professors Christian Lotz and Antonio Calcagno, as well as Professor Donald Viney for the part he had in the development of this translated version of the book and for the central role he has continued to play in the recognition of Lequieranism, these last decades, in the development of contemporary French philosophy.

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CAHIER JULES LEQUIER, NO. 8 This interview with Ghislain Deslandes (GD) by Goulven Le Brech (GLB) in Cahiers Jules Lequier, no. 8 (February 2021: 59–77) appeared on the occasion of the publication of this book. GLB:  Your work is divided into three parts or moments, named after verbs which correspond to instances of Lequier’s philosophy: “seeking,” “making” and “beginning.” In the first part, you retrace the course of Lequier’s thought from its first interpreters to the present day, and, more generally, in the history of French philosophy. To do so, you draw on the work of the great Lequier specialists; Jean Grenier, Jean Wahl, Xavier Tilliette, and André Clair. You also make many references to the Cahiers Jules Lequier. So I would like to hear your opinion on this collective undertaking; how did you use it in the preparation of your book? And can you explain to us its genesis? GD:  The genesis goes back to the 1990s, when I was writing my PhD thesis, under the supervision of Bernard Bourgeois. In the list of those you mention, the major figure is the one whose central role in twentieth-century French philosophy was recognized by Deleuze, whom he greatly influenced. I mean, of course, Jean Wahl, and in particular this long “footnote” in the Etudes Kierkegaardiennes (p. 430). In the introduction, he refers to the “curious analogies between Kierkegaard and Lequier” which “could be explained in part by the double influence of Pascal and Fichte,” and the same way in which they understand Christian concepts, the test, the elect, pardon etc . . . This was a starting point. Then Jules Lequier’s Philosophy of Jean Grenier and Metaphysics and Existence of André Clair took over. This last essay was published in February 2000, the month in which I submitted my thesis, and it was a kind of invitation to continue my dialogue with Lequier after the defense, nourished by Les 105

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Cahiers which never ceased to feed my curiosity: the correspondence between Baptiste Jacob and Charles Renouvier in Issue 1, between Lequier himself and Renouvier in 5, in particular this letter dated 12 April 1848 when he was thinking of a political career, in which he recommends to his friend to “talk about it if you find it to M. Lamennais,” are precious documents. Other examples come to mind: the short letter that Jean Grenier addresses to Louis Guilloux in No. 2, André Clair’s text in No.7 where he insistently evokes “the pathos of existence,” finally No.6 which has a status apart, resulting from the exchanges of the international conference organized at the ENS (École Normale Supérieure) on the bicentenary of his birth, a convincing sign of the topicality and vitality of Lequierian research. A conference which highlighted, as Paul Ricœur wrote in one of his first books, that “no one more than Lequier trembled before this power to begin, to be able to begin.” Trembling that I myself felt at the moment of committing myself, in the period of the first lockdown, to writing an essay that I imagined only centered on freedom. Less out of irony, alas, than out of an instinct for survival. This project which also became a meditation on the idea of beginning, an idea which gives its title to this book. GLB:  Your reading of Lequier’s recent reception, “one of the least well-guarded secrets in the recent history of French philosophy” (p. 11) particularly caught our attention. Tristan Garcia’s text, which you quote several times and which positions Lequier as the great thinker of the central concept of the “concrete universal,”1 a concept defining the primary quality of French philosophy, is quite striking. After decades of obscurity, Lequier would emerge from the shadow of Renouvier and Sartre to finally appear in full light in the French philosophical field. We would thus be able to see the prophetic character of the philosopher’s following thought: “Introduction of an original element through banal elements. History of men of genius. When this element itself acts strongly on all the others so as to make it new, man is unknown for a time” (Cahier C, folio 72 recto). Can you give us your opinion on this late highlighting of Lequier and its effects? GD:  The article by Tristan Garcia that you cite as a reference, which looks at the central concept of the “concrete universe”—which is reminiscent of an important text by Jean Wahl2—is indeed well worth reading. Initially published in Les Temps Modernes in 2015, I discovered this text by chance in a collection published last year, in which it is the final chapter. I became interested in Tristan Garcia after reading his short text on intense life, which, incidentally, may also remind us of Lequier, his life and his work: there are not many texts for us to draw upon, but those we have are of an almost unprecedented philosophical intensity—that it was really emerged from Garcia’s article, which I think represents the very forefront of Lequierian studies. In it he defends a position that consists of illustrating the pioneering, and almost premonitory role (as Grenier already noted in his time) that Lequier has played in the development of French philosophy over the last two centuries, up until Badiou. He sees Lequier as the

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one who bequeathed to French philosophy its most recognizable characteristic of all, a “spirit of exception,” found in many guises in postmodernity: difference, queerness, the event etc. That is to say, basically, the absolute accident, a “non-nothing from a non-cause,” which was and could not have been, and thus contest claims of German idealism in general and Hegelian universal determinism in particular. Lequier would thus be the systematic precursor of the exception, the minority, and the marginal. The precedence of the minority over the universal system, of a philosophy of the “fragment” over a philosophy of the “monument,” also seems to me characteristic of a certain direction of thought of which Lequier is one of the main representatives, and perhaps after Pascal, the first among them. How do you build a system which demonstrates the impossibility of building a system? How do you reverse the order of precedence between the system, which is supposed to be always first, and what stands in its way? How to consent to this paradox in favor of the work of thought? This is what is at stake in the “exceptional universalism” that Garcia evokes, and which Lequier first championed. In this respect, The Hornbeam Leaf, to which André Breton paid tribute in the second revised edition of Nadja in 1963, is not just a text of poetry, it establishes for French philosophical posterity another way of philosophizing. A way in which the “pathos of existence” that I just mentioned has its place, and from which the many authors of the great French tradition, from which figures such as Jules Lachelier, Maurice Blondel, or Henri Bergson emerge, will continue to draw inspiration. GLB:  Lequier left several texts devoted to his reading and criticism of the great philosophers, to which he refers in order to situate himself in the history of philosophy. You mention, for example, his deference for Aristotle, to whom he is grateful for having fought to maintain the two great principles of non-contradiction and contingency of the future. You place him in the chessboard of the history of philosophy on the side of antiphilosophy. This concept was forged by Alain Badiou and taken up by Quentin Meillassoux and Tristan Garcia. Can you define it and explain to us why the link with Lequier? GD:  Where Tristan Garcia sees Lequier as a philosopher in the Badiousian vein, I for my part consider him an antiphilosopher. The inquiry I am proposing on Lequier is indeed linked to the Badiousian conceptual framework, but on an aspect that is not the one Tristan Garcia takes. In substance, as in style, it relates, in my opinion, to those whom Badiou calls the antiphilosophers, and more precisely to those of a somewhat particular genre that can be called the antiphilosophers of Christianity. As opposed to the anti-Christian antiphilosophers of which Nietzsche is the model.3 Badiou’s antiphilosophy is the subject of numerous occurrences, notably in his seminar at the Collège International de Philosophie, but always comes down to describing a process in which we find, firstly, a disgrace addressed to the great philosophical systems, secondly, the repeated demand for an affirmative and productive act, and thirdly, the demand for a new beginning as an end. Now this triptych is indeed that of the

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Lequierian antiphilosophy in the sense that it allows us to introduce, in the right order, its three categories: the search, the doing, and the beginning. Lequier’s critical research leads to the proclamation of an always possible doing that gives full measure to the demand for the beginning as an end, which nevertheless appears, especially in the eyes of the ‘philosophers’ at any rate, as “supraphilosophical, even a-philosophical.”4 Disregard for philosophers, with a few exceptions, followed by an affirmative gesture of freedom, this first truth resulting from the research itself, and finally the accumulation of new existential (anti)philosophical categories that undermine philosophical discourse, these are the articulations of Lequier’s thought, which explain the general matrix, and the plan, proposed in this essay. Finally, two remarks: there is in Lequier a character of individual and subjective appropriation of the truth that somehow overhangs the Badiousian schema. “The thought of the self and the self are united in a way that we would call existential today,” explained Jean Wahl. What is important, “it is the living me, it is I who must act.”5 For all that, it seems reasonable to me to place Lequier in the lineage of Pascal and his contemporary Kierkegaard,6 with whom he shares a “stellar friendship,” to which I devote a few pages in the last section. The fact that there is an antiphilosophical and Christian “style” in Lequier, from research to the beginning one might say, is basically what this work tries to highlight. GLB:  The first part of your book deals with the Lequierian style, its literary and poetic qualities, as well as its reflexive and logical ones, the diversity of its philosophical and theological approaches, through narrative, dialogue, poetic prose, meditation. You note the theatricality of Lequier’s writings, especially at work in the Dialogue of the Predestined and the Reprobate and in the biblical narrative Abel and Abel, whose origin is undoubtedly to be found in his interest in theater and opera, as we can see in the fragments of Cahier C. From the point of view of style and thought, you compare Lequier, in the continuity of a thesis you devoted to these philosophers, to Kierkegaard and Pascal. Can you tell us more about the “stellar friendship” of these three great philosophers, and what was the path that guided you towards these three thinkers, who were also great tormented Christians? GD:  Your question reminds me of a remark in a recent text by Alain Badiou, in which he states that “for these great tormented antiphilosophers, happiness is not made for joyful antiphilosophers, a certain amount of despair is the condition for real happiness.”7 However, one might easily retort that it would be wrong to suggest that the polemicist of the Provinciales or the author of the fictional characters in the Kierkegaardian corpus does not have laughter on their side. In Lequier’s use of his name, for example, which differs according to place, space or his interlocutors (Lequyer, Le Quier, Le Kair, Le Keyr, Lesquaire, etc.), one also perceives an irony towards himself that deserves to be noted. But what kind of humor is involved here? Well, it is a humor directed against pedants, the “knowers” in general, and philosophers who take

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themselves seriously in particular. To philosophize authentically is to make fun of philosophers, as Pascal wrote in a well-known formulation. I am not far from the view that the borderline between philosophy and antiphilosophy lies somewhere in the question of what is to be taken seriously and what is best to laugh about. Basically, it is not the use of reason that separates the “fragmentary” antiphilosophers from the “monumental” philosophers, of whom Hegel is the paragon, but rather between the comic and the serious. In fact, the term “fragmentary” is just as useful in defining Lequier’s antiphilosophical style, in the way he extracts himself, discovering himself to be the exception of a universal, mechanical and pantheistic determinism dominant in his time (“my situation is so strange, it is such an exception in the course of my ordinary thoughts”8). Last point: to the word “torment” you use in your question, where Badiou speaks of “despair,” I would opt instead for the word “suffering.” Lequier’s torment is called despair by Kierkegaard, which in fact presupposes freedom. In such a way that the possibility of guilt is a proof of our freedom. For Lequier as for Kierkegaard we are after all nothing more than a synthesis of necessities and possibilities. But suffering must be seen on another level, as a properly Christian category: suffering in the Christian sense is not an attempt to fight the external causes that cause it, as in ancient stoicism, for example, in Epictetus in particular. On the contrary, this is what is worth being identified and lived as such. Suffering is then what summoned ipseity and can lead to joy, a feeling that Kierkegaard and Lequier, despite their misfortunes, I would be tempted to say, often describe in themselves. GLB:  The second part of your book is entitled “Making.” Making is indeed central to Lequier, who contrasts it with becoming in his famous Formula of Science: “TO MAKE, not to become, but to make, and, in making, TO MAKE ONESELF.” You explain very well his conception of freedom as the power to create a modality of existence that breaks the deterministic causal chain. In this connection I quote a fragment from Book C: “[man] can introduce a new free element, outside the necessary course of things—for example, to develop a force that would not have developed in the purely concrete phenomena of nature, such as affection, generosity, etc.” (Fol. 49, recto). Can you explain to us what interests you in this ontological conception of human freedom and its consequences for human existence, especially in its relation to mysticism? GD:  The search for a first truth leads us to an affirmative and productive act that Lequier simply calls “making.” Moreover, in this act itself, the junction point of Lequier’s trajectory, he takes care to evoke it by specifying that “this science is not complete, as long as it does not submit to Reason, as long as it is not enlivened by the total adhesion of practical Reason, thus accomplishing a circle. / And this science is not true as long as it does not really lead to the ACT.”9 I think it is important to note that, as those who have been able to consult his manuscripts in the university library of Rennes—which will probably have to be digitized one day given the conditions in which they are

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found—have been able to realize, the term MAKE, as here the ACT, appears in capital letters. The postulate of freedom is in a way guaranteed by freedom itself; Lequier wants to conquer with great struggle an awareness of freedom through “spontaneous” knowledge, an imperceptible superabundance resulting from an act. From the act, this path that leads from intention to operation, springs the freedom that appears beyond all justification, beyond all demonstration. As for “making,” which expresses a primacy of action and practice, it is a hole in the causal chain, a break with a universe whose fundamental binder was causality alone. But then the question arises as to how to hear what he curiously calls the formula of science, “TO MAKE, not to become, but to make, and, in making, TO MAKE ONESELF,” which sounds more like a metaphysical formulation. “Making,” as opposed to becoming, is a sign of an ethical relationship with oneself, of an effort towards oneself that would break the circle of ‘natural’ evolution. “To make oneself” then amounts to confronting a dilemma, to experiencing within oneself a mysterious power that he calls “the enigma of making.”10 This is dependent on the individual, but connected to the “making,” which in Lequier’s mind is God Himself. This relationship to God is clearly expressed in this fragment by Lequier: “Not to use one’s own freedom,—not to do what God does not help to do. But to do, understood as invocation; call to his help the one who is called to do. To refuse the ring is to refuse the power to do wrong that God offers not to do.”11 Here we have a relationship with ourselves, posited by another, which is singularly reminiscent of the definition of the spirit enunciated by Anti-Climacus in The Sickness of Death. It is as if, by relating to ourselves through “making,” our acts have an incalculable impact on the power that established them. GLB:  You evoke his borrowings from the introspective method of the Descartes of Meditations on First Philosophy and his critique of the cogito and the deism of the philosopher. In your work on philosophy of management, as in your book on Lequier, you mention not only Kierkegaard but also the philosopher Michel Henry (1922-2002), who was a student of Jean Grenier at the Sorbonne. You bring him closer to Lequier because of the importance he gave to affectivity in his philosophy and you evoke the concept of the affective cogito. Can you tell us more about this philosopher and the sense of self that we find in Lequier’s germ? GD: The reference to Descartes and his Meditations is doubly important, methodologically and conceptually. We find in Lequier the will to take up the problems of philosophy from their origin, which is the meaning of a research devoted to a very first truth, but there is also a reading of Descartes which leaves a place for a cogito where thought is as if preceded by a “feeling.” This affective cogito can in fact be seen as the anticipated announcement of the subjective Henryian body, an affective cogito which obviously lacks the contributions of Husserl’s phenomenology, but in which we can

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recognize a self-affection, a feeling of self that Lequier himself calls ipseity (libertas ipsa). Moreover, Lequier asserts that even “science begins with the self.”12 But before developing a Henryian interpretation of Lequier, or before highlighting the Lequierian resonances in the project of a material phenomenology,13 the reference you make to Grenier is very striking for two reasons: firstly because it confirms—as it is generally recognized by many observers—the pioneering influence of Lequier on existentialism, the philosophies of process, neo-Kantism and pragmatism. It confirms his role as a precursor, which he willingly attributed to himself and so, finally, also for phenomenology, which I insist would have made him less a prisoner of the philosophies of his time. Secondly, because Grenier is an obvious link between Lequier and Henry: to the former he devoted his own doctoral work. As for the latter, he was the director of his first thesis devoted to Spinoza (Jean Wahl having been, it should be recalled here, co-director of his main thesis with Jean Hyppolite). In short, he devoted the first years of his philosophical career to one, while in the other he recognized a singular talent, since together with Maurice de Gandillac they had wanted to propose the manuscript of the young Henry to Gallimard,14 a project interrupted by the war, at which point Henry joined the maquis, using Kant as his resistance code name. We therefore have every reason to suspect that Grenier was a precursor in his turn, and we can even assume that the Lequierian works of Grenier were very well known to Michel Henry. This “genealogical” parenthesis brings us to two other considerations: note that we are here in an interpretation that departs as far as possible from the Badiousian destination of the Lequierian trajectory, from this “system” of the exceptional that Tristan Garcia evokes in his study. Note also that if Lequier escapes “stupidity,” to use Henry’s word for the various modern critiques of the Cogito, it is at the price of recognizing a fundamental, affective and pathetic phenomenality that links us to what he calls the “mystical body,” and which presupposes an abandonment of all forms of pantheism. I am given to myself, in this singular Self which is mine, by another which has the power to “make things happen,” what Henry calls Absolute Life. Finally, I think the potential overlap between Lequier’s “make” Henry’s “act” undoubtedly deserves to be explored further, both from the point of view of contemporary phenomenology and from the point of view of Lequierian hermeneutics. It obviously constitutes a possible agenda, but one that remains to be constructed, for contemporary philosophical research. GLB:  In Lequier’s work, human freedom is always set against divine freedom: your work addresses this central subject of Lequierian research on freedom in the face of predestination and divine prescience. Without giving a definitive answer, you pose some reading hypotheses. In particular, you explain one of Lequier’s hypotheses, probably his boldest, according to which time as duration is the same for man and God. You write that Lequier “sees this as the necessary condition and foundation for a relationship between the temporal and

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the eternal” (p. 147). In so doing, does Lequier, who anticipates the theology of the process,15 not step out of dogma to create his own theology? Is he not then a heterodox, even heretical, philosopher who questions the divine omnipotence? GD:  I don’t think that contemporary theology makes “divine omnipotence” a prerequisite for research work. And a critique of Thomism such as Lequier envisages it should not be conceived as an “exit from dogma” but rather as a critical relationship to theology, fairly typical of the antiphilosophy of Christianity. It also seems to me that, from postmodern theology to radical theology, many debates clearly show Lequier’s modernity when he reveals a possible, and all relative, “ignorance” of God, a divine prescience that is at least partially limited. Admittedly, most of these theologies come from a Protestant source, as it is notoriously the case with the “weak” Derridian John Caputo, who emphasizes the persistent “insistence” of God. But authors such as Gianni Vattimo, closer to Pascal and Catholicism, or Jean-Luc Marion, who is closer to Descartes and Henry whom he published (as well as La recherche d’une première vérité et autres textes at the PUF in 1993), also participate in their own way in this renewal. From a certain point of view, Lequier’s mystical impulses have perhaps never seemed so topical. That God should divest himself of part of his omniscience in order to give the world the salt it needs, i.e., the ambiguity that reigns over the future, may paradoxically engender, in an effort of selflimitation of the omnipotence with regard to itself, an even more striking sign of power. By evoking an enigmatic power to “make things happen,” that at the same time recognizes the possibility of an independent capacity to “make,” Lequier is in some ways similar to those whom Caputo calls the “apostles of the impossible.”16 In the sense that freedom, which is of a theological nature in Lequier’s work, is impossible, and yet it takes place. GLB:  In his youth, Lequier was torn apart, as were Renan and Nietzsche, brought up like him in a form of devotion to the Christian faith, between a desire to know and a duty to believe. In Lequier’s Cahier C, we find the following aphorism: “Perhaps FAITH is even more BEAUTIFUL than TRUTH. Impiety! Impiety!” (fol. 12 verso). How do you see Lequier’s contribution in this register? GD:  If freedom is of a theological nature, then faith is for Lequier the act of freedom par excellence, and no doubt also a gamble. It is always at stake in his examination of predestination and future contingents. The question he asks about predestination is present in the 2nd statement of the third part: how to search, how to find a first limitation to the prescience of God knowing that man is free to choose between two indeterminate? Lequier would answer that question by evoking God’s knowledge of the simultaneous series of possible coexistences, while maintaining what we might call the “subjective possibles.” The treatment of the theme of grace also deserves our attention, just as he collected Grenier’s, which reserves an entire chapter for it among the published elements of his thesis. But let us reserve for Lequier the privilege of evoking this very grace: “calm has returned to the bottom of my heart” he wrote. “In this deep

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night I will be guided by a light. This last ray of your grace will remain with me from now on to illuminate those fateful nights where your divine providence, in its mysterious advice, sometimes likes to leave us.”17 GLB:  In the third section, you extract from the Lequierian corpus five quotations taken from fragments, which you analyze one after the other as a way of taking Lequier’s Christian thought seriously, even in its mystical impulses and interpretations of Christian dogmas such as that of the Trinity. Do you think that Lequier, after having suffered from a biased reading, can nowadays receive new attention, both anthropologically and theologically, through an interpretation of the entirety of his fragments? GD:  From the very beginning of the book, I highlight the recent revival of Lequier’s thought thanks to a few philosophers, in addition to those already mentioned in our interview, such as Vincent Citot, Frédéric Worms, Claire Marin, Michele Sciotti, Marie-Claude Blais, or even Robert Misrahi, to make a generational leap, whose interest I discovered when I read Cahier No.5. In literature, and to varying degrees, André Breton, Christian Prigent, or Jean-Marie Turpin have taken an interest in Lequier. This consideration shows clearly that, although he published nothing during his lifetime except his declaration of candidacy for an election, which was another failure, Lequier has not been completely forgotten by the community of philosophers and writers. To answer your question, however: didn’t his “mystical impulses” affect the “institutional” receptivity of the work? I would answer that it is quite possible that this is the case, but it doesn’t matter. Christian antiphilosophers do not constitute any school of thought, in fact this is one of their specific characteristics. Kierkegaard didn’t have a school, Pascal didn’t either, and neither of them ever wanted to have any disciples. And this is unlikely to change, especially among philosophers, who will always suspect them of holding a supra-philosophical, or even a-philosophical discourse, as Badiou pointed out. Everything indicates that they wanted it that way. On the other hand, there is nothing to indicate that they ever suspended the impulse of philosophical questioning. But they did it in their own way, by maintaining a preoccupation outside philosophy. No doubt we have to admit that some elements of Lequier’s thought are beyond the confines of philosophy, just as he escaped in a sense from the world itself. In this respect, we could perhaps advance what Michel Henry describes in a passage from his last book, published in 2002, namely that “the purpose of Christ’s teaching is never in doubt: to elevate the spirit of men by detaching them from worldly affairs, marked by the sign of the ephemeral and vanity, to open it to what alone matters.”18 Not to accept the world, to refuse its rules etc., is this what perhaps frightened off Miss Deszille’s parents, who twice refused to marry their daughter to Lequier? GLB:  In the Afterword to your book you refer to the current “prestige of necessity” which is manifested by the power of digital technology in our daily lives, governed by algorithms: “The rise in power of predictive tools, such as those

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based on so-called artificial intelligence, particularly in the political and economic fields, has resulted in the co-production of remote-controlled affects that are no longer entirely ours” (p. 175). Nowadays, when necessity is called “data,” do you think that Lequier’s philosophy could have a role, especially an educational one, in the younger generations? GD:  Anyone who is interested to some extent in the evolution of the economic world and the importance of data in it will quickly realize that “data” is understood primarily in terms of numbers, in terms of quantitative evaluation. A few years ago, I ironically titled one of my books Essay on the Philosophical Data of Management,19 precisely to challenge the idea that we can think that only statistical data exists in organizations, which the doxa could lead us to believe, if we are not careful. However, data in a human organization are multiple: they are political, ethical, logistical, discursive, interpretative, scientific, etc... in short, philosophical. The problem with such a restrictive definition of “data” is first of all that it contributes to the disqualification of human judgment. If the Waze application on our mobiles phones, as long as it works, guides our steps, what’s the point of knowing how to use a map anymore? More worryingly, the algorithms tend to have a filtering effect, depending on the user’s profile for example, which already induces multiple choices made by the program in our place. Everything is programmed, in short, everything is determined in advance. The very idea of “branching off,” to use a Stieglerian term, that is, making an unexpected choice, becomes out of reach. This is how the regime of generalized necessity, which could be described as computational and mechanical, is established. In relation to these questions, a Lequierian “pedagogy” would have to offer a denial and a proposal. By the fertility of the possible beginnings, to do so in Lequier is always first and radical. What we know of his work shows, after all, that something new is possible in philosophy, that it must even be possible to invent new things in other fields where the principle according to which “everything must be relearned and begun again, but in a different truth”20 seems to apply. Hence the importance of constantly rediscovering the field of Humanities, the memory of the past and philosophical ideas, that is to say, free research. In this respect, fields such as management, industry or marketing, practices that seem to be far removed from thought, are for this very reason those that need it the most. Lequier was, moreover, Professor of Humanities to the children of Egyptian civil servants, during a period on which, alas, we have too little “data…” GLB:  Do you yourself use Lequier in your research and teaching on contemporary management? GD:  I wouldn’t go that far. And then I am not sure, as you can tell, that “Lequierism” exists in the sense that it could constitute a system, or even a school of thought. “Pascalism” and “Kierkegaardism” are also two words, you will notice, which are, not without good reason, just as unpronounceable. On the other hand, I try to remain faithful to one of Pascal’s Pensées (Sel. 457, Laf.

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533)21 which has inspired my research work and my teaching practice since I chose this profession, which consists in particular in teaching ethics and aesthetics to students who are presented as future “leaders” of economic life. What finally makes me think that our books are never anything more than a footnote, is that we come back to them, and to the works that preceded them. Which surely means that there is always something new to be found in them! As long as the idea of freedom, libertas ipsa, is still there to be exercised.

NOTES 1. Garcia, Tristan. “Une exception, exception,” Les Temps Modernes 1, no. 682 (2015): 5–19, reprinted in Ce qui commence et ce qui finit. Kaléidoscope II (Léo Sheer, 2020). 2. Wahl, Jean. Vers le concret, Études d’histoire de la philosophie contemporaine (William James, Whitehead, Gabriel Marcel, Vrin, 2004). 3. Deslandes, Ghislain. Antiphilosophie du christianisme (Ovadia, 2018). 4. L’antiphilosophie de Wittgenstein (Nous, 2009), 16. 5. Wahl, Jean. Jules Lequier—Les classiques de la liberté, 54–55. 6. Deslandes, Ghislain. “Kierkegaard, Pascal, Lequier : L’amitié stellaire de trois chrétiens philosophes,” Etudes, 397, no. 7–8: 53–62. 7. Badiou, Alain. Métaphysique du bonheur réel (PUF, 2015), 39. 8. Quoted by Tristan Garcia, 295. 9. Œuvres complètes, Edition de la Baconnière, 393–94. 10. Ibid., 395. 11. Ibid., 398. 12. La recherche d’une première vérité (PUF, 1993), 31–32. 13. Name given by Michel Henry to qualify his own philosophical project. 14. Le bonheur de Spinoza (PUF, 2004). 15. See Viney’s work on Lequier and Charles Hartshorne. 16. Caputo, John. “Apôtres de l’impossible : sur Dieu et le Don chez Derrida et Marion,” Philosophie (2003): 33–51. 17. Œuvres complètes (Editions de la Baconnière, 1952), p. 346. 18. Paroles du Christ (Seuil, 2002), p. 117. 19. PUF, 2013. 20. Letter from Louis Guilloux to Henri Petit, 25 September 1945. 21. “We can only think of Plato and Aristotle in grand academic robes. They were honest men, like others, laughing with their friends, and when they diverted themselves with writing their Laws and the Politics, they did it as an amusement. . . . If they wrote on politics, it was as if laying down rules for a lunatic asylum; and if they presented the appearance of speaking of a great matter, it was because they knew that the madmen, to whom they spoke, thought they were kings and emperors.”

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Name Index

Aanes, Asbjorn, 2 Anselm of Canterbury, 85 Antisthenes, 29 Aquinas, Thomas, xiii, xiv Aristotle, 18, 19, 107, 115 Augustine of Hippo, xiv, 90n78 Badiou, Alain, xvi, 5, 8, 9, 30, 31, 39n82, 50, 51, 65, 69, 93, 98–99, 100n11, 107–9, 113 Barbey d’Aurevilly, Jules, 1 Bergane, Torbjohn, 2 Bergson, Henri, xi, xii, xiv, xv, 4, 10n13, 11, 42, 99, 107 Blais, Marie-Claude, 1, 113 Blanquis, Louis, 49 Blondel, Maurice, 107 Boethius, xiv Bossuet, Jacques-Bénigne, 72, 80 Bourgeois, Bernard, 105 Bréhier, Émile, xix, 52, 60n21 Breton, André, 5, 107, 113 Brimmer, Harvey H., ix, xvi, 2 Brimmer, Jacqueline Delobel, ix Byron, Lord, 26 Callot, Émile, 31 Calvin, John, 90n78, 71 Campanella, Tommaso, 71

Camus, Albert, viii, 3 Caputo, John D., 51, 112 Castre, Victor, 40n100 Chateaubriand, François-René de, xix, 37 Citot, Vincent, 1, 4, 8, 14, 55, 59n8, 59n9, 61n44, 69, 113 Clair, André, 4, 8, 14, 18, 23, 24, 28, 29, 31, 33, 35, 36n24, 39n68, 40n98, 41, 54–57, 59n3, 60n27, 61n32, 65, 71, 80, 90n85, 95, 105 Colette, Jacques, 61n37 Cousin, Victor, 18, 21, 37n30 De la Noue, A., vii Delecroix, V., 24 Deleuze, Gilles, 25, 99, 105 Derrida, Jacques, 16, 99 Descartes, René, 5, 8, 14, 19, 22, 33, 66, 85, 87, 88n22, 110, 112 Deszille, Anne “Nanine,” xix, 16, 18, 23, 86, 100n14, 113 Dewey, John, x Diogenes, 96 Dugas, Ludovic, viii, 3, 10n3, 16, 32, 33, 37n44, 38n48, 61n33 Enxing, Julia, xiv Evard, Jean-Luc, 15 121

122

Name Index

Fichte, Johann Gottlieb, 18, 22, 46, 52, 105 Foucher, Louis, 24 de Gandillac, Maurice, 111 Garcia, Tristan, 5, 6, 98, 99, 106, 107, 111 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 101n18 Grenier, Jean, viii, ix, xx, 2–6, 13, 17, 18, 21, 24, 28, 33, 37n43, 43, 58, 61n41, 71, 79, 83, 85, 87n18, 88n37, 90, 93, 105, 106, 110, 111 Guilloux, Louis, xix, 106 Guitton, Jean, 101n18 Guyau, Jean-Marie, 49 Hacking, Ian, x Hartshorne, Charles, ix–xvii, xx, 2, 5 Hegel, G. W. F., xvi, 20, 33, 61n37, 109 Hello, Ernest, 1, 10, 36 Hémon, Prosper, 37n44, 38n49 Henry, Michel, 19–20, 110–13 Husserl, Edmund, 64, 110 Hyppolite, Jean, 111 Jacob, Baptiste, 3, 106 James, William, vii, ix–xii, xv, xvi, xx, 2–4 Jankélévitch, Vladimir, 63 Jesus Christ. See Christianity Kant, Immanuel, xvi, 76, 86, 88n22, 111 Kierkegaard, Søren, xvi, 8, 20, 23–25, 27–29, 35, 40n100, 42, 48, 54, 55, 57, 60n15, 60n27, 61n42, 67, 76, 80–82, 87, 88n41, 90n86, 93–98, 101n23, 105, 108–10, 113 Lacan, Jacques, 8, 9, 30 Lachelier, Jules, 107 Lagneau, Jules, 99 Lamennais, Félicité Robert de, xix, 16, 36n21, 89n63, 97, 106 Le Brech, Goulven, viii, 1, 13, 16, 26, 39n68, 103, 105

Le Gal La Salle, Mathurin, xvi, 13, 15, 24, 26, 88n28 Leibniz, Gottfried, 10n4, 38n44 Lequier, Jules (biography); anxiety about determinism, 49; candidacy for archival position, xxn2; candidacy to Parliament, xxn2; and Catholicism, xii, 32, 33, 37n43, 71, 93, 112; as Christian philosopher, xii, 3, 8, 9, 13, 29, 39n74; confidence in the importance of his work, 15; death of, vii, xix, 2, 4, 15; Dinan asylum, 31; at the École Polytechnique with Renouvier, xix, 3, 33; failed engagement to Deszille, xix, 100n14; his belief in freedom, 43; his eloquence, 16; his romanticism, 18, 23, 24, 30, 57; images of himself in his work, 93; incompleteness of his work, vii, 6, 17; instructor at École Egyptienne, 10n3; mystical experience, 82, 89n74; as perpetual beginner, 64; political views, 96; spelling of his name, vii, 23, 37–38n44, 108 Levinas, Emanuel, 10n4 L’Isle-Adam, Auguste de Villier de, xix Luther, Martin, 90n78 Maine de Biran, Pierre, 2, 4, 19, 37n34, 86 Marin, Claire, 1, 113 Marion, Jean-Luc, 51, 112 Marquet, Jean-François, 48, 60n14 Marryat, Frederick, 49 Meillassoux, Quentin, 107 Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 32 Milton, John, 26 Misrahi, Robert, 1, 68, 113 Molina, Luis de, 71 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xvi, 39n82, 49, 107, 112 Pascal, Blaise, xvi, 6–8, 14, 18, 19, 24, 25, 27, 29, 31, 33–35, 38n54, 39n82, 43, 50, 54, 59n12, 66, 68, 71, 72, 81,

Name Index

82–85, 90–91n83, 93–98, 100n15, 101n18, 105, 107–9, 112, 113 Paulhan, Jean, 3, 4, 96 Peirce, C. S., x, xi, xii, xv Pelagius, 71 Perier, Étienne, 31 Petit, Henri, 115n20 Pillon, François, viii Plato, xii, 115 Politis, Hélène, 97 Prat, Louis, 16, 36n20, 100n10 Prigent, Christian, 113 Pyguillem, Gérard, 13, 86 Ravaisson, Félix, 2, 18, 37n33 Renan, Ernest, xix, 112 Renouvier, Charles, viii, ix, x, xx, 2–4, 10n13, 11n25, 13, 16, 19, 23, 25, 27, 31, 32, 36n20, 37n44, 64, 72, 83, 85, 87n28, 88n46, 99, 100n10, 106 Rice, Richard, xv Ricoeur, Paul, 2, 71, 86, 106 Sainte-Beuve, Charles, 38n54 Sand, George, 26, 33 Sander, John, xiv Sartre, Jean-Paul, x, 4, 5, 58, 59n4, 99, 106 Sciotti, Michele, 1, 113

123

Séailles, Gabriel, viii Senancour, Étienne Pivert de, 26 Socrates, 18, 32, 96 Spinoza, Baruch, 111 Tailhardat, Vincent, 59n5 Tilliette, Xavier, ix, 28, 56, 67, 79, 82, 89n74, 101n23, 105 Tracy, David, xv Turpin, Jean-Marie, 113 Valensi, Michel, xx Vasquez, Gabriel, 71 Vattimo, Gianni, 112 Vieira, Antonio, 37n33, 85, 59n1 Viney, Donald, 2, 10n12, 23 Wahl, Jean, ix, xx, 17, 18, 21, 24, 28, 35, 43, 49, 53, 64, 68, 74, 80, 81, 88n32, 93, 105, 108, 111 Ward, Thomas, x Weil, Simone, 99 Whitehead, Alfred North, xi, xii, xv, xvi, xvii Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xvi, 31 Worms, Frédéric, 1, 2, 17, 93 Zizek, Slavoj, 51

Subject Index

Abraham and Isaac, 82, 83, 89n76 Adam, 70–77 Adamic fall. See truths of the first and second orders antiphilosophy, xvii, 8–9, 29–32, 39n82, 50, 69, 98, 109, 112; anti-Christian antiphilosophy, xvi, 31, 107 Beginning. See freedom, as creativity/ making Cahiers Jules Lequier, viii, ix, 1–2, 105, 106 caritas. See love Christianity, xii, xvi, 7, 22, 27, 29–33, 61n42, 66–69, 82, 97, 98, 107, 112; and free will, 64, 82; Jesus Christ, 31, 71, 73, 90, 100 Cogito ergo sum: affective, 110; of Descartes, 19, 111 concrete universal, 5, 106 contradiction. See non-contradiction, principle of determinism, x, 4–6, 11, 22, 23, 42, 49, 56–59, 98, 99, 107, 109; burden of proof on the determinist, 55; and science, 49–50, 52; as undermining the search for truth, 50. See also freedom

the enigma, 28, 42, 98, 110 den enkelte, 97–99 Existence/Essence/Actuality (Hartshorne), xiv–xv existential character of Lequier’s thought, 17–18, 42, 87n22, 93 faith, 13, 28, 29, 31, 32, 43, 48, 57, 58, 64–66, 69, 71, 81–84, 97–98, 112 fertility and influence of Lequierism, x, 4–10 freedom: as ability to choose/not choose between alternatives, 46, 85; as absolute accident, 51; and arbitrariness, 46, 56; aseity of, 68–69; as condition of error, repentance, and guilt, 57; as creativity/making, x–xi, 42, 67; “dependent independence” (Lequier), xi, 67–68; and determinism (necessity), 4–6, 14, 43, 44; faith in one’s freedom, 44; God as creator of freedom, 54, 58, 66; and Jansenism, 72, 90n83; moral duties required by, 56; as non-nothing from non-cause, 51–53, 107; not provable by experience/ reason, 44, 46, 51; as postulate required for the search for truth,

125

126

Subject Index

43–47; and quadruple dilemma, 44; and responsibility, 56–59; as stumbling block, 83; as taking side with motives, 56; and temporality, 47, 54, 76; value in the use of freedom, 54. See also the enigma and making future contingents, xii–xiii, xv, 18, 19, 29, 51, 60n25, 64, 73–76, 79, 88n51, 107, 112 God: as almighty/all-doing, 73; and contradictions, 37n35, 61n41; as creator, xii; as creator of freedom, 54, 58, 66; and double prescience, 73–75; evil impossible for God, 78– 80; knowledge of God by revelation/ by self-knowledge, 77; “listening to God” (Pascal), 64; as love, xii, 80–81; no proof of, 91n90; question of omniscience of, xiii–xv, 22, 71, 72, 76, 111–13; and real and rational relations, xiii; responsibility to God, 66; as self-limiting, 72, 74, 75, 77, 112; and time, 76; as Trinity, xii, 3, 29, 41, 77, 80, 82, 89n56, 113; truth for God and for man different, 89n46; on turning to God, 77–81 habit, xii, 15, 63 Jansenism, 43, 72, 84, 85, 90n83 Judas’ betrayal, xv, 73 Lequier, Jules (writings): Abel and Abel, xvi, 14, 17, 23, 36, 54, 108; Cahier H, 13; Corlay, 14, 26; Declaration of Candidacy, 43; The Dialogue of the Predestinate and the Reprobate, xiii, 13, 25, 49, 73, 75, 85, 90n83, 95, 100n10, 108; The Hornbeam Leaf, x, 14, 15, 18, 23, 42, 45, 49, 56, 95, 99, 107; How to Find, How to Search for a First Truth, xvi; “The Last Page” (the lonely pine), 28, 39n67,

93, 101n23; Nouvelles Provinciales (written with Renouvier), 32, 96; The Pitchfork and the Distaff, 14; refusals to publish work by and about him, viii, 3, 4; Renouvier’s edition of Search for a First Truth, viii, xx, 3; Search for a First Truth, vii, 3 Lequier, Jules, influence on subsequent thought, x, 106–7, 111 lonely pine. See Lequier (writings), “The Last Page” love, xii, 55, 80–81, 100n14 making, 41–43, 48; and Being, 42; formula of science, x, 41, 53, 109, 110; freedom to make/not to make, 10, 42, 53, 72; and the idea of a person, 58; to make a first choice, 48; to make good use of freedom, 70, 73; making things happen, 58, 68, 111, 112; self-making, 43, 48, 53–58, 86, 110; and “the wisdom of the heart,” 86 non-contradiction, principle of, 19–22, 27–29, 42–44, 50, 52, 107; and the future, 74; God and, 37n35, 61n41 open theism, vii, xv original sin, 70. See also Adam pantheism, 21–22, 27, 109, 111 Pelagianism, 74, 85 Peter’s denial, xv, 73 philosophy and religion, relation of, 33– 34; philosophy as a mere theoretical exercise, 30, 95. See also Hegel, G. W. F.; truths of the first and second orders polyrealism, 13 possibilities, fictitious and real, 74. See also future contingents predestination, 71, 72, 74, 75, 89n41, 111, 112

Subject Index

quale and quantum in God and humans, 78–79 ridicule, fear of, 94 Romanticism, 37n43 science, x, 7, 17, 18, 26, 34, 38n63, 50–52, 74, 87, 91n93, 97, 109, 111; and determinism, 49–50; Lequier’s formula of, x, 41, 109, 110; not selfsufficient, 34–35

127

search for a first truth, 19, 30, 44, 109 skepticism, 22, 37n40 suffering as a test/trial, 95 time, nature of, xi, 11n13, 47, 49, 74; and eternity, 28, 54–56, 64, 65, 76; and God, xiii–xiv, 76, 111; modal structure of time, xi truths of the first and second orders, 29, 30, 88n32

About the Author

Ghislain Deslandes is professor at ESCP Business School in the Law, Economics, and Humanities Department, and a former program director at the Collège International de Philosophie. He is the author of several books, such as: Essai sur les données philosophiques du management (PUF, 2013), Critique de la condition managériale (PUF, 2016), and Antiphilosophy of Christianity (Springer, 2021). He has also published numerous papers in philosophy journals including Cercles, Diotime, Etudes, Le Portique, and Rue Descartes.

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