Le bonheur de Spinoza, a Masters dissertation of young Michel Henry, is of more than a curiosity. It is of great interest in that it betrays its relation so close and yet so far to Baruch de Spinoza’s ontological ethics. In this paper I will discuss how young Michel Henry felt himself akin to Spinoza in respect of the quest for bliss in union with Nature-God, and how he was disappointed with its outcome. Henry sees in Spinoza a contradiction between desire for beatitude and geometrical demonstrations the Ethics deploys to achieve it. He believes this rationalistic vein would rule out any possibility of a sentiment of union by replacing it simply with its pale intellectual concept. I will show the contrary is true. Spinoza’s bliss is essentially linked with the geometrical manner. The eyes of the mind are demonstrations themselves, he says, which alone can make us “feel and experience” our own eternity by means of an eternal vision that leads us to the truth of being as a body in union with Nature-God. In this respect it is Spinoza that is so close to and yet so far from Henry. Finally I will propose to look at the paradoxical figure of Spinoza in the context of contemporary French thought, i.e., in the tension between phenomenology and anti-phenomenology tenets since the late 1930s, where certain Spinozist ideas seem to be present in both camps, such as the pantheistic immanentism we see in Henry on the one side and Jean Cavaillès’ conviction of Spinozan necessitarianism on the other.
