Oct 9, 2015 06:29 PM
http://aeon.co/magazine/philosophy/how-d...in-crisis/
EXCERPT: There are many things we have come to regard as quintessentially French [...] distinctive is the French mode and style of thinking, which the Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke described in 1790 as ‘the conquering empire of light and reason’. He meant this as a criticism of the French Revolution, but this expression would undoubtedly have been worn as a badge of honour by most French thinkers from the Enlightenment onwards.
Indeed, the notion that rationality is the defining quality of humankind was first celebrated by the 17th-century thinker René Descartes, the father of modern French philosophy. [...] This French rationalism was also expressed in a fondness for abstract notions and a preference for deductive reasoning, which starts with a general claim or thesis and eventually works its way towards a specific conclusion – thus the consistent French penchant for grand theories. [...]
[...] Typically French, too, is a questioning and adversarial tendency, also arising from Descartes’ skeptical method. The historian Jules Michelet summed up this French trait in the following way: ‘We gossip, we quarrel, we expend our energy in words; we use strong language, and fly into great rages over the smallest of subjects.’ A British Army manual issued before the Normandy landings in 1944 sounded this warning about the cultural habits of the natives: ‘By and large, Frenchmen enjoy intellectual argument more than we do. You will often think that two Frenchmen are having a violent quarrel when they are simply arguing about some abstract point.’
Yet even this disputatiousness comes in a very tidy form: the habit of dividing issues into two. It is not fortuitous that the division of political space between Left and Right is a French invention, nor that the distinction between presence and absence lies at the heart of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. French public debate has been framed around enduring oppositions such as good and evil, opening and closure, unity and diversity, civilisation and barbarity, progress and decadence, and secularism and religion.
Underlying this passion for ideas is a belief in the singularity of France’s mission. This is a feature of all exceptionalist nations, but it is rendered here in a particular trope: that France has a duty to think not just for herself, but for the whole world. [...]
This specification of a distinct French way of thinking is [...] not a genetic inheritance, but rather the product of specific social and political factors. The Enlightenment [...] in France, from the mid-18th century [...] produced a particular type of philosophical radicalism, which was articulated by a remarkable group of thinkers [...] Thanks to the influence of the likes of Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, the French version of rationalism took on a particularly anti-clerical, egalitarian and transformative quality. These subversive precepts also circulated through another French cultural innovation, the salon: this private cultural gathering flourished in high society, contributing to the dissemination of philosophical and artistic ideas among French elites, and the empowerment of women.
This intellectual effervescence challenged the established order [...] It also gave a particularly radical edge to the French Revolution, compared, notably, with its American counterpart. Thus, 1789 was not only a landmark in French thought, but the culmination of the Enlightenment’s philosophical radicalism [...] It also crystallised an entirely original way of thinking about the public sphere, centred around general principles such as the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’, the civic conception of the nation (resting on shared values as opposed to blood ties), the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, and the notions of the general interest and popular sovereignty.
[...] since the Enlightenment, France has granted a privileged role to thinkers, recognising them as moral and spiritual guides to society – a phenomenon reflected in the very notion of the ‘intellectual’, which is a late-19th-century (French) invention. Public intellectuals exist elsewhere, of course, but in France they enjoy an unparalleled degree of visibility and social legitimacy.
[...] This French style of thinking has had its critics, both from within France and outside. The liberal thinker Alexis de Tocqueville noted in 1856 the ‘extraordinary and terrible’ influence of literary figures in France, lamenting their disposition to ‘indulge unreservedly in ethereal and general theories’ [...] Making the same point in philosophical terms in 1901, the essayist Hippolyte Taine criticised Descartes and Rousseau, France’s tutelary thinkers, for shying away from experience [...]
[...] Foucault criticised the French philosophical obsession with Reason for its sweeping character, and for effectively clearing the way for new, and more perverse, forms of social and political oppression. Indeed, Foucault believed that the imperatives of control and domination lay at the heart of the Enlightenment’s conception of rationalism: it was thus less concerned with liberating the mind than with imposing a bourgeois order of ‘pure morality and ethical uniformity’. It was a similar intuition that led Frantz Fanon to urge his comrades struggling for freedom from colonial rule during the post-Second World War-era to reject the false universalism of ‘the European model’, which was nothing but ‘the negation of humanity’.
In less apocalyptic terms, French philosophical rationalism has also been charged with creating a nation of individualists, with a crippling fetish for skepticism, and for challenging authority in all its forms. This trait has been deemed to have negative consequences of both a practical and theoretical nature. In the latter case, it has fostered a tradition of theoretical extremism (most vividly reflected in the vibrant radical movements in France both on the right and the left). It has hindered the emergence of a gradualist epistemological tradition of acquiring knowledge through a process of accumulation. And in practical matters, this French individualism has encouraged a cult of singularity and a resistance to state power [...]
[...] Since the late 20th century, the rich tradition of French thought has come under increasing strain. The symptoms of this crisis are numerous, beginning with a widespread belief in the decline of French artistic and intellectual creativity. In 2007, Time magazine’s cover article even announced ‘The Death of French Culture’, cruelly concluding: ‘All of these mighty oaks being felled in France’s cultural forest make barely a sound in the wider world.’ Even philosophical ideas about resisting tyranny and promoting revolutionary change, which were the hallmark of French thought since the Enlightenment, lost their universal resonance. It is instructive that neither the fall of Soviet-style communism in eastern Europe or the Arab spring took any direct intellectual inspiration from French thinking. [...]
Mirroring this retrenchment is a pervasive mood of pessimism that has spread across the French nation. [...] French thinking has become increasingly inward-looking – a crisis that manifests itself in the rise of the xenophobic Front National, which has become one of the most dynamic political forces in contemporary France
[...] The present Gallic intellectual crisis is in part an anguished collective reaction against France’s shrinking place in a world increasingly dominated by Anglo-American culture. [...] The global retreat of French cultural institutions is also apparent in the low ranking of the nation’s elite universities in the Shanghai league table [...]
In intellectual terms, the Gallic malaise also highlights the erosion of the classical strengths of French thinking (universalism, dynamism and inventiveness), and the preponderance of its less salubrious features: an over-reliance on abstraction, and a fetish for semantics [...]
All of these negative elements are fused in the current mainstream discussion of French identity, which stems from the refusal of the nation’s elites to adapt their rhetoric to the reality of a multicultural and postcolonial French society. [...]
Yet there are silver linings to this bleak vision. The humanism and intellectual creativity of the republican tradition is still alive, and indeed is increasingly pushing back against the pessimism of the declinists. [...] The French are still exceptionally devoted to their culture [...] Laurent Binet’s La septième fonction du langage [is] an entertaining murder-mystery yarn framed around the death of the philosopher Roland Barthes in 1980. Its subtle lampooning of the vanities of late-20th-century Parisian high culture should be read as a satire of the structuralists’ interpretative delirium, but also as a belief in the possibility of a return to the universalising rationalism of the French intellectual tradition. Regeneration, after all, is one of the most potent ideals of modern French culture....
EXCERPT: There are many things we have come to regard as quintessentially French [...] distinctive is the French mode and style of thinking, which the Irish political philosopher Edmund Burke described in 1790 as ‘the conquering empire of light and reason’. He meant this as a criticism of the French Revolution, but this expression would undoubtedly have been worn as a badge of honour by most French thinkers from the Enlightenment onwards.
Indeed, the notion that rationality is the defining quality of humankind was first celebrated by the 17th-century thinker René Descartes, the father of modern French philosophy. [...] This French rationalism was also expressed in a fondness for abstract notions and a preference for deductive reasoning, which starts with a general claim or thesis and eventually works its way towards a specific conclusion – thus the consistent French penchant for grand theories. [...]
[...] Typically French, too, is a questioning and adversarial tendency, also arising from Descartes’ skeptical method. The historian Jules Michelet summed up this French trait in the following way: ‘We gossip, we quarrel, we expend our energy in words; we use strong language, and fly into great rages over the smallest of subjects.’ A British Army manual issued before the Normandy landings in 1944 sounded this warning about the cultural habits of the natives: ‘By and large, Frenchmen enjoy intellectual argument more than we do. You will often think that two Frenchmen are having a violent quarrel when they are simply arguing about some abstract point.’
Yet even this disputatiousness comes in a very tidy form: the habit of dividing issues into two. It is not fortuitous that the division of political space between Left and Right is a French invention, nor that the distinction between presence and absence lies at the heart of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy of deconstruction. French public debate has been framed around enduring oppositions such as good and evil, opening and closure, unity and diversity, civilisation and barbarity, progress and decadence, and secularism and religion.
Underlying this passion for ideas is a belief in the singularity of France’s mission. This is a feature of all exceptionalist nations, but it is rendered here in a particular trope: that France has a duty to think not just for herself, but for the whole world. [...]
This specification of a distinct French way of thinking is [...] not a genetic inheritance, but rather the product of specific social and political factors. The Enlightenment [...] in France, from the mid-18th century [...] produced a particular type of philosophical radicalism, which was articulated by a remarkable group of thinkers [...] Thanks to the influence of the likes of Voltaire, Diderot and Rousseau, the French version of rationalism took on a particularly anti-clerical, egalitarian and transformative quality. These subversive precepts also circulated through another French cultural innovation, the salon: this private cultural gathering flourished in high society, contributing to the dissemination of philosophical and artistic ideas among French elites, and the empowerment of women.
This intellectual effervescence challenged the established order [...] It also gave a particularly radical edge to the French Revolution, compared, notably, with its American counterpart. Thus, 1789 was not only a landmark in French thought, but the culmination of the Enlightenment’s philosophical radicalism [...] It also crystallised an entirely original way of thinking about the public sphere, centred around general principles such as the ‘Declaration of the Rights of Man’, the civic conception of the nation (resting on shared values as opposed to blood ties), the ideals of liberty, equality and fraternity, and the notions of the general interest and popular sovereignty.
[...] since the Enlightenment, France has granted a privileged role to thinkers, recognising them as moral and spiritual guides to society – a phenomenon reflected in the very notion of the ‘intellectual’, which is a late-19th-century (French) invention. Public intellectuals exist elsewhere, of course, but in France they enjoy an unparalleled degree of visibility and social legitimacy.
[...] This French style of thinking has had its critics, both from within France and outside. The liberal thinker Alexis de Tocqueville noted in 1856 the ‘extraordinary and terrible’ influence of literary figures in France, lamenting their disposition to ‘indulge unreservedly in ethereal and general theories’ [...] Making the same point in philosophical terms in 1901, the essayist Hippolyte Taine criticised Descartes and Rousseau, France’s tutelary thinkers, for shying away from experience [...]
[...] Foucault criticised the French philosophical obsession with Reason for its sweeping character, and for effectively clearing the way for new, and more perverse, forms of social and political oppression. Indeed, Foucault believed that the imperatives of control and domination lay at the heart of the Enlightenment’s conception of rationalism: it was thus less concerned with liberating the mind than with imposing a bourgeois order of ‘pure morality and ethical uniformity’. It was a similar intuition that led Frantz Fanon to urge his comrades struggling for freedom from colonial rule during the post-Second World War-era to reject the false universalism of ‘the European model’, which was nothing but ‘the negation of humanity’.
In less apocalyptic terms, French philosophical rationalism has also been charged with creating a nation of individualists, with a crippling fetish for skepticism, and for challenging authority in all its forms. This trait has been deemed to have negative consequences of both a practical and theoretical nature. In the latter case, it has fostered a tradition of theoretical extremism (most vividly reflected in the vibrant radical movements in France both on the right and the left). It has hindered the emergence of a gradualist epistemological tradition of acquiring knowledge through a process of accumulation. And in practical matters, this French individualism has encouraged a cult of singularity and a resistance to state power [...]
[...] Since the late 20th century, the rich tradition of French thought has come under increasing strain. The symptoms of this crisis are numerous, beginning with a widespread belief in the decline of French artistic and intellectual creativity. In 2007, Time magazine’s cover article even announced ‘The Death of French Culture’, cruelly concluding: ‘All of these mighty oaks being felled in France’s cultural forest make barely a sound in the wider world.’ Even philosophical ideas about resisting tyranny and promoting revolutionary change, which were the hallmark of French thought since the Enlightenment, lost their universal resonance. It is instructive that neither the fall of Soviet-style communism in eastern Europe or the Arab spring took any direct intellectual inspiration from French thinking. [...]
Mirroring this retrenchment is a pervasive mood of pessimism that has spread across the French nation. [...] French thinking has become increasingly inward-looking – a crisis that manifests itself in the rise of the xenophobic Front National, which has become one of the most dynamic political forces in contemporary France
[...] The present Gallic intellectual crisis is in part an anguished collective reaction against France’s shrinking place in a world increasingly dominated by Anglo-American culture. [...] The global retreat of French cultural institutions is also apparent in the low ranking of the nation’s elite universities in the Shanghai league table [...]
In intellectual terms, the Gallic malaise also highlights the erosion of the classical strengths of French thinking (universalism, dynamism and inventiveness), and the preponderance of its less salubrious features: an over-reliance on abstraction, and a fetish for semantics [...]
All of these negative elements are fused in the current mainstream discussion of French identity, which stems from the refusal of the nation’s elites to adapt their rhetoric to the reality of a multicultural and postcolonial French society. [...]
Yet there are silver linings to this bleak vision. The humanism and intellectual creativity of the republican tradition is still alive, and indeed is increasingly pushing back against the pessimism of the declinists. [...] The French are still exceptionally devoted to their culture [...] Laurent Binet’s La septième fonction du langage [is] an entertaining murder-mystery yarn framed around the death of the philosopher Roland Barthes in 1980. Its subtle lampooning of the vanities of late-20th-century Parisian high culture should be read as a satire of the structuralists’ interpretative delirium, but also as a belief in the possibility of a return to the universalising rationalism of the French intellectual tradition. Regeneration, after all, is one of the most potent ideals of modern French culture....
