Marcel Paquet

Marcel Paquet (21 February 1947 – 22 November 2014) was a Belgian philosopher. The most important influences on his thought were Spinoza, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche, Heidegger and Michel Foucault.

Paquet rejected all forms of Idealism in favor of the sensory world. Insofar as he considered human beings to be no more than fragments of nature, thought was considered by him to be the result of cerebral processes which operate largely beneath the level of consciousness. He insisted on the pre-eminence of the body and the fact that, for this reasons, consciousness observes the results of thought, but does not bring them into being.

Inspired by Nietzsche's notion of Eternal Recurrence - which Paquet treated not as a doctrine but an operational principle, that is as a means of disentangling ourselves from secondary aspects of our identity (determined by cultural, religious and moral factors) in order to recover our primary nature - he considered a return to the body as the sole ethical value.

He developed this Spinozan theme in a number of different directions: ontology (L'enjeu de la philosophie, Platon: l’éternel retour de la liberté), political philosophy (Nous autres Européens, Le Fascisme Blanc) and esthetics, the latter in particular in relation to painting which he defined as the art of rendering the sensory visible. He is the author of a large number of essays consecrated to visual artists whom he knew personally: Jean Dubuffet, Alexander Calder, André Masson, René Magritte, Paul Delvaux, Fernando Botero, Sophia Vari, Corneille (one of the six founders of the Cobra movement), Bram Bogart, Anna Wilczynska-Wilska, Amann.

He is also the author of several philosophical novels, namely Renaissance sécondaire, Merde à Jésus, L’affaire Socrate and Marie et les Jean.

He died in Poznań, Poland, on 22 November 2014.