More French Radicals. Who Knew?

By Emily Ghods-Esfahani | Thursday, May 18, 2006

“I know now what to make of a republic of thirty million atheists.”

-John Adams, on the France after the French Revolution

“…the most melancholy developed country in the world…”

-Michel Beaujour, on France

Dartmouth professor of French and Comparative Literature Lawrence Kritzman has put together an encyclopedia of Twentieth-Century French Thought which, when not swimming in the ostentatious jargon that defined the philosophic chic of the 1970s and 1980s, serves as an insightful introduction to the topics addressed. The professor makes it clear that his encyclopedia is a comprehensive and critical synthesis of the French intellectual movement—and certainly it is, as it touches on topics like The Absurd and the Death of God, Bovarysm and Exoticism, Catholicism, Judaism, Islam, Existentialism, Rationalism, Fashion, Everyday Life, and the expected representative body of French intellectuals.

Twentieth century French thought can be explained in the same way that sixteenth through nineteenth century French thought is: a complex reaction to the traditions that engendered it; in this case, the grim coupling of an antiseptic Modernism with the elbow-grease of the Industrial Revolution, which is incidentally the only “revolution” to take a beating in the erudite pages of Kritzman’s encyclopedia.

Modernism itself was a philosophical tradition that placed reason above all, a system rooted in French philosophy, from Descartes’ cogito ergo sum, to the Enlightenment philosophes’ Rights of Man. The post-modern French thinkers saw the “reason” of Modernism as the source of cruelty and destruction that yielded two world wars, genocide, and totalitarianism; to the French intellectuals, the theory failed, so the theory needed to be fixed, or as was more often the case, discarded altogether.

The French thinkers looked to the Germans (ironically) for philosophical guidance—particularly influential was Kant’s Transcendental Idealism, whose legacy would be to deny man’s epistemic access to an object’s essence, the thing-in-itself. Rationalism was denied the absolute power it was once given. Mix in Nietzsche’s insinuated murder of God with Marx’s determinism, and nihilism moved to the head of the class in the twentieth century French academy. The response to nihilism—either by coping with the absurd, emphasizing human existence above all, waiting for God, embracing the burden of freedom, or a combination of all of the above—is the defining characteristic of French thought and culture following World War Two.

The retaliation against Modern philosophy took two divergent paths, though one certainly became more vocal, dominant, and ultimately victorious over the other. On the one hand, there is the Deconstruction of Jacques Derrida, the skepticism of Albert Camus, and the so-called Humanism of Jean Paul Sartre. On the other hand, and more in the philosophical margins, there is a look to the past and a buttressing of aesthetic value in culture by the likes of Jacques Maritain and Andre Malraux. Though this picture may oversimplify the dynamic between French thinkers, and leave out other currents of French thought, it provides an overarching and binary understanding of the history of French thought in the last century: that is, in terms of the thinkers that destructed the past and thinkers that preserved it.

Perhaps the most influential philosopher of the last century was Jacques Derrida—something of a celebrity amongst the chichi in the humanities—who delivered a brutal, if fanciful, blow to Metaphysics and Ontology, the groundwork of the Western philosophical tradition. Cleverly, he called his method of destruction Deconstruction, which unfortunately is obtusely and incomprehensibly defined in Kritzman’s encyclopedia. Doubters of the suggestion that certain entry authors are eye-deep in impenetrable and obscure jargon, then consider this from the entry on Deconstruction: “ceaselessly translating a language of metaphysical and ontological concepts taken form the philosophical tradition into the unruly rhetorical and extrarhetorical strategies of textual practice, deconstruction is a name for what can always disrupt our understanding of every concept and every name, including those that serve to define and relate…thought to history.” Got it?

Certainly, this is dazzling to all; yet it sheds no light whatsoever on what Deconstruction actually is. Realizing this, the author tries once more by turning to the author (though the idea of authorship be unfashionable) of the concept, Derrida himself, who says, “deconstruction is neither a theory nor a philosophy; it is neither a school nor a method. It is not even a discourse, nor an act, nor a practice. It is what happens, what is happening today.”

Now that may be very deep and thoughtful, but if it is, then it is to the point of absolute inscrutability (if there were “absolutes”). Even if you think that there is some elusive meaning behind the word “happen,” you would do well to think twice. First, according to Deconstruction, there is no way of knowing the ultimate meaning behind anything, so you can stop there. Second, etymologically, the root of “happen” is “hap,” which means luck. It is doubtful that Derrida considers Deconstruction to be “what is lucky, what is lucky today.”

You see, the author of the passage on Deconstruction refuses to define and elucidate, because he is making a philosophical point: nothing can be defined, as a matter of principal and consistency. Unfortunately for the reader, the author will still grant himself the academic luxury of pontificating for seven double-columned, small-font pages on “nothing” he would claim, and as in Deconstruction itself, we get nowhere after reading and systematically decoding what the author writes. Logocentrism? Certainly. One expects that Derrida would be turning in his grave.

The passage on Derrida himself is far more informative as it sketches a brief biography of Derrida, while narrating his philosophical quest (if there were narrators). In effect, Derrida dismantled the skeleton of Western philosophy by maintaining that Deconstruction is a sort of “anti-foundationalism that challenges philosophical systems from within.” Derrida was the bad-boy philosopher of his time—the thinking Frenchman’s Puff Daddy—the rebel who revolted against his family, dreamt of becoming a professional soccer player, and failed his baccalaureate exam—it’s no wonder that his philosophical system was, self-defeatingly, founded on his plea to “transgress borders by refusing exclusive definitions.” Deconstruction relies on there being no Truth, as the author of Derrida’s passage asserts, “note too that relativism can be expressed absolutely.” Quite obviously it cannot be, and this is why Deconstruction, the self-hating philosophy, ultimately nullifies itself. There is a sin in insincerity.

Further, Deconstruction collapses onto itself when it asserts that the metaphysical quest for origins impossibly ends in an epistemic regress because as soon as we try to assert one premise, we need to have an argument scheme that affirms the truth of that premise, and then several argument schemes to affirm the truths of the premises that proved the first premise, and so on ad infinitum. Well, predictably, Deconstruction holds many premises itself—for example, that knowledge is socially constructed, that language is the only derivative source of meaning, and then, contradictorily, that there is no absolute meaning, that metaphysical and ontological understandings of the world are hogwash—so should we apply Derrida’s own criteria to Deconstruction? After all, we have to affirm the truth of the Deconstruction itself before we proceed to deconstruct thousands of years’ worth of wisdom and knowledge; or else we had better, before our best and brightest grind Western Civilization into the ground for no good reason.

Swatting at the nuisance of metaphysics and, in effect, dismantling the history and legacy of Western Philosophy and authority, Derrida left his successors in the Western world with no way of understanding transcendental and yet self-evident realities like Love and Beauty. Derrida himself said, “While I think there is nothing else but ordinary language, I also think that there are miracles…for example, trusting someone, believing someone.”

Historically, society would look to its culture of arts and letters to grasp Derrida’s miracles which otherwise transcend our grasp—miracles, mysteries hidden in the ephemera of the metaphysical world. With art, music, novels, and even philosophy, man could, for a brief moment, elevate himself beyond the constraints of his hum drum life, if dogmatic pointy-heads would allow him to.

But by deconstructing everything, we are left with nothing meaningful; this applies to culture as well. A pragmatic philosophy professor retrieves his students from abstract theory and back to reality at the end of class by asking them if a particular theory is useful and practically employable in everyday life. Deconstruction may be impenetrable and useless to most, but culture has always been indispensable and unavoidable, affecting everyone it touches, for better or for worse depending on its own status, which is generally indicative of the status of civilization as a whole.

By grudgingly accepting the damage that Derrida did to metaphysics, and in turn to culture, the successors to Maritain and Malraux saw their work cut out for them. They sought to save Western Civilization from the existential dread and nihilism of the modernists and postmodernists, elevating civilization up to the spheres of metaphysics, as philosophy and theology had once done.

In a time when Sartre saw tradition as useless and Derrida negated the possibility of Metaphysics and Ontology, the French Catholic philosopher Jacques Maritain was set to reviving St. Thomas Aquinas’ metaphysics, Thomism. The passage on Maritain explains that he perceived Being in all things and then deduced, “I am aware of knowing at least one thing, that what is, is; not: I think.” By assuming an anti-cogito philosophical understanding of the world, he is, like Derrida and other French thinkers, anti-Cartesian. The difference is that Maritain energizes a philosophical system rather than calling the Western tradition a glass house and throwing stones at it.

His fascination with Christian Mysticism disposed him to a neo-Platonic understanding of the world in metaphysical harmony. For instance, Maritain saw morality and art as deeply linked forms of “connatural knowledge,” and was therefore, in some ways, beyond the boundaries of human reason. In this way, he was a healthy subjectivist who still trusted the power of reason to organize empirical knowledge.

Like Maritain, Malraux was deeply concerned with art and ethics. The passage on Malraux is wonderful, and worth the read. The author outlines Malraux’s internal struggles as a youth and grown man, torn as he was between revolutionary (Communist) tendencies that he naively thought would promote freedom and liberty, and his delicate aesthetic tendencies, which had no place in the group of fellow travelers with which he associated. In the end, Malraux came out on the side of aesthetics and understood his decision as the only humane thing to do.

The author explains that to Malraux, “To imagine a humanity beyond the inhumanities of war is to envision individuals necessarily wedded to the artwork by continual exposure which results, finally, in our giving ourselves over to its power.” Malraux saw art as a cultural alternative to religion in understanding the world. Yet, his assessment of art is in fact deeply religious: both Malraux’s aesthetics and religious experience end in submission to an infinitely greater power that’s inexplicable because it transcends the human experience.

Further, aesthetics are defined in the encyclopedia as “the branch of philosophy concerned with the existence and apprehension of beauty in art and nature.” Aesthetics is, therefore, a wholly metaphysical discipline, and Malraux’s desire to restore high art’s influence in culture can be seen as a desire to grant metaphysics a fighting chance against Derrida and his ilk’s repudiation of the highest experiences of humanity, and Sartre’s famous “existence precedes essence”—it surely would for Sartre since the man denied outright the possibility of Essential Truth in The Humanism of Existentialism, which dismissed “all forms of the past,” from religious, to traditional, to biological, by virtue of no more than their being the past.

Considering his pessimism and rejection of the past and even the time during which he lived, it should be no surprise that Sartre was a Communist who became dismayed at the growing “deculturalism” of the working classes, which the intellectual left thought was caused, ironically, when the workers shrugged off communism with ideological indifference. This indictment is offered ambiguously in the entry titled Culture. According to the author, French culture “wished to be a secular substitute for religion…and indeed aspired to revolution.”

This diagnosis of culture fails, however, because revolutions are about overthrowing a set of cultural standards, not about healing them. Further, the Marxism of the Russian Revolution can be understood as annihilating the idea of Culture itself with its dismissal of the multi-verse of thought, which reveals itself in the high craft and art of theatre, sculpture, music, and literature—all of which suffer ideology not at all, by inspiring the critical mind to think for itself.

Yet, the entry authoritatively refers to “cultural ideology,” and “cultural ideologues” without a subtle understanding of the inner-workings and ends of culture. Moreover, by equating culture with communism and ideology, the author, perhaps unwittingly, degrades that which is meant to elevate mankind to the sublime. Communism is egalitarian and meant for the masses. At its best, communism proudly promises and proclaims mediocrity. However, when art is judged as good or bad, it is inherently done so in an aristocratic fashion because it’s understood that all art is not created equal.

Compare Duchamp’s Urinal to El Greco’s Toledo.

And finally, in a moment of triumph, the author brings us back to Malraux, with whom the discussion of art and culture in twentieth-century France closes. Malraux’s culture was “aesthetically conservative in its quest for the sublime.” Unfortunately, to the French, “culture lost its luster, its mission, and its enthusiasm,” when conservatives gained control of political affairs under Charles de Gaulles’ presidency.

Though the French got it right when they revolted against the idea that “culture is a consumer good,” they fumbled when they denounced consumer-capitalism altogether and took refuge in a utopian delusion, in communism—an ideology that damned Alexandre Solzhenitsyn to the gulags.

The strength of Professor Kritzman’s encyclopedia is that it clearly portrays the tensions and movements within twentieth century French intellectual thought. For the most part, the denial of all things Modern condemned, in a particularly late eighteenth French move, all preceding thoughts to the guillotine. Malraux’s attempts to save them were valiant, but ultimately lost in the white waters of skepticism, instability and ideology that defined The New Left.

Instead of addressing the sound arguments that they were so quick to dismantle as they raised their own blank philosophical corpus, the likes of Derrida and Sartre present the Western tradition as, first, no more than a corpse, then second, a dead corpse, and finally, an ironic corpse. But, while Deconstructionist theory and Existentialism have moved in and out of our fashion consciousness, the insight we find in Homer, Virgil, Plato, Dante, Shakespeare, Maritain, Malraux…remains fresh and sympathetic to our quest for the Truth, which plays itself out in this thing that we’ve nearly lost a hold of: Our civilization.

More French Radicals. Who Knew?

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