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Despite a subtitle (“in search of the understanding”) that hints at an analysis of the mind, Alain’s Entretiens au bord de la mer (Conversations by the seaside) does not deal with the faculties of the subject but with the relationship between understanding and existence. The understanding, as a rational faculty, leads us to consider existence as sheer external relations between things that are never things in themselves, defined inherently. This thought, far from asserting itself as a dualism or an idealism, strikingly hinges on a philosophy of being, grounded in a principle of non-duality.