Echoing the words of Michelet who prefers to be called "Great" the eighteenth century rather than the seventeenth, Onfray says that the seventeenth century deserves this label especially for the place that is given to Catholicism and the monarchy, major place s it is at the expense of the baroque alternative. The author therefore prefers to stick to his personal tastes and follow the movement of his thought that is moving spontaneously towards clearing work libertines, too ignored today by proponents of classical historiography.
Throughout, Michel Onfray puts into perspective the libertine spirit in dealing with the philosophy of the Garden and dietary pleasure: "The baroque libertine, he writes in this regard, treats the body as an accomplice while the end of civilization Judeo-Christian culture practice the Pauline hatred of the body, detestation of desires and pleasures, the disrepute of corporeal matter. "Citing example Gassendi, La Mothe Le Vayer or Cyrano de Bergerac, he added that the body plays in their philosophy the supreme role. "This, he continues, to give the best to the body to make it a partner. For only the body lets you know. A sensual body that smells, tastes, touch, see, hear and informs a brain constructs reality, produces images, and product representations. "
During a very thorough pass he devotes to libertines pantheistic, Onfray is working to a detailed analysis of the work of Cyrano de Bergerac he does not hesitate to consider as a thinker of genius: "In like a Leonardo or a later Jules Verne, he writes, he builds his fantasies with the contours of our reality. "The author of the States and Empires of the Moon - States and Empires of the Sun is described as a visionary and artist of anamorphosis. Cyrano finds in his work indeed another reality, a style from which flows a philosophical theater where agree the life instinct and the material world in the mode of psychophysiological logic. Onfray writes: "Nothing intangible or irrational to the realm of philosophy, just sequences of reasonable and rational causalities: a psycho logic suggesting a foreknowledge of psychosomatic logic. Where a radically materialistic option atomistic. The real is reduced to a combination of elementary particles, the arrangement generates the various appearances of the Same. "
Finally, with regard to Spinoza, Michel Onfray draws from him the laudatory portrait of a practitioner of joy. His ethics is, he said, "a baroque building." The geometrical spirit based work, container and revealing both as a whole forms the divine light. God, as an essential matter, there remains the Treaty on the mode of the proposal and demonstration. "When the Baroque church is receptacle of divine light, Spinoza's Ethics, far from any moral concern moralizing declines a building to collect the famous" natural light "dear to the philosopher. "He concluded:" The book is a philosophical monster. "
