How the French think -- or the closing of the French mind?

[C C]

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/6067/full

EXCERPT: How the British Think would make a strange title for a book — at least that is what my friends in Britain tell me. But [...] an exploration of French thought is more justified. Thinking, it seems, is part of France’s history and one of the characteristics the French are famous for.

In his latest book, How the French Think, Sudhir Hazareesingh [...] shares his deep knowledge of the French passion for the intellectual quest. [...] The book is rich in information and anecdotes and easy to read, and it shows a love of France [...]

The French are rationalists, and like abstraction; they divide the world into right and wrong, and of course between Left and Right; they are fond of utopianism and believe — or believed — in progress and science.

[...] But today, according to Hazareesingh, because of the end of Communism, which was deeply rooted among French intellectuals, the fading of structuralism, and anxiety about France’s identity in a globalised world, the French have come to doubt themselves and their intellectual destiny. This can be seen in the decline of France’s intellectual life and in its fading intellectual influence in the world.

I think that the situation is even more depressing than that. [...] It is true that there are still great French writers and thinkers, and that newer disciplines like economics offer new kinds of talents. But as a cultural phenomenon, I don’t think that French thought has survived.

France was never such a thing as an entire nation of thinkers [...] But there was a deep respect among ordinary people for the cultivated elite [...] Now a large part of this elite pays no attention to culture any more, as is shown by the poverty of their language. One cannot help comparing the eloquence of, say, Charles de Gaulle, and the spiritual vacuum that someone like François Hollande represents. [...] Or open any recent fiction or non-fiction publication in French: the vocabulary range is shrinking, the sentences are three words long and the form is always fashionably deconstructed — but not à la Derrida.

If the present is embarrassing, is the past as glorious as one might suppose? Hazareesingh, describing the French intellectual pantheon, includes all the main strands of French thought — Descartes, positivism, Gaullism, Marxism, structuralism, liberalism — all inevitably placed on the same level. [...] Why all the praise for Sartre and Marxism? Or for the structuralists? French Marxism, a rather rigid kind of Leninism followed by a Latin Quarter Maoism, was either intellectual nonsense or an insult to real people struggling in the USSR and elsewhere. As for structuralism, apart from the great Lévi-Strauss and the sometimes interesting but strange Foucault, it is difficult to see much sense in, for example, Lacan’s one-minute sessions where he shouted at patients for a large fee.

I am left to wonder: did all countries have such strange intellectual moods? Were the French mad? Were they really thinking? It all depends on what you call thinking. I may be very un-French, but because something is grandiose or unintelligible doesn’t make it worthy of being called thinking. Support for revolution and destruction — of institutions or of the bourgeoisie, for example — doesn’t necessarily justify the description of thinking. I suspect that Hazareesingh would disagree with me....

[Yazata]

This is interesting. Thanks for posting it.

http://standpointmag.co.uk/node/6067/full
EXCERPT: How the British Think would make a strange title for a book — at least that is what my friends in Britain tell me.

From the American perspective, it wouldn't be so strange. There is, and has long been, a very subtle... Britishness... to British intellectual life.

But [...] an exploration of French thought is more justified. Thinking, it seems, is part of France’s history and one of the characteristics the French are famous for.

I think that intellectuals in most countries participate in what amounts to a global conversation. That's particularly obvious in the sciences. The problems they address and the concepts and methods with which they are addressed, don't bear particular nationalities. We see Americans, Australians, Indians, Finns and Japanese writing (often in English) in ways in which their national origins aren't readily apparent.

The French have always held themselves a little aloof from that conversation when it comes to humanities subjects. They talk about different things, in French, among themselves.

That isn't universal. French philosophy of science is often conducted in the 'analytic' mode even when it's written in French and addresses largely the same issues and problems that Anglophone philosophy is interested in.

The more uniquely French thing is typically "cafe-philosophy", the kind of 'public-intellectual' thinking pioneered by Sartre (though it needn't be existentialist and usually isn't). It's social and political philosophy and philosophy of the arts and literary humanities. France kept its sense of uniqueness in those areas because French intellectual life was a bit of a world-apart and because would-be French intellectuals took it so seriously and thought that it was so important.

The French are rationalists, and like abstraction

That's a myth that derives from the French fascination with Descartes. French intellectual life arose in a world of French nationalism, in which it was important to identify a distinctly French current in intellectual life and to argue that it was the world's most important current. So we have French rationalism and the idea of Descartes as the founder of modern philosophy. The same tendencies are also visible in German intellectual history, where Kant became the icon, raised up as the greatest German philosopher (and hence the greatest philosopher in world history). And we have German idealism. In Britain that tendency was never quite as strong (a nation of shopkeepers) but we do see it in the iconic status of Locke and Hume, and in the legacy of British empiricism.

But in real life I'm not convinced that the French are rationalists. Sometimes it seems the very reverse, as French intellectuals like the post-Structuralists attack the very idea of meaning, in favor of anything-goes passion and "play". (There's something aggressively adolescent about contemporary French intellectual life that repels me.)

they divide the world into right and wrong, and of course between Left and Right

One of the fatal defects of French intellectual life is the way that French intellectuals identify the first dichotomy with the second. But it isn't just the French.

they are fond of utopianism and believe — or believed — in progress and science.

That's partly the result of the importance that the French Revolution is given in French history teaching. It just has to be the most significant and transformative event in world history. So there's a peculiar French nexus of utopianism and faith in progress, combined with a disinterest in practicalities. Even the contemporary currents that attack 'enlightenment' thinking still imagine what they are doing as some sort of "progressive" move.

[...] But today, according to Hazareesingh, because of the end of Communism, which was deeply rooted among French intellectuals, the fading of structuralism, and anxiety about France’s identity in a globalised world, the French have come to doubt themselves and their intellectual destiny. This can be seen in the decline of France’s intellectual life and in its fading intellectual influence in the world.

France was never as important as it imagined it was. And since World War II, Europe as a whole is tremendously diminished and no longer forms the heart and center of Western civilization. Paris isn't (and really never was) the metropolis from which all advanced and progressive thinking in any subject flows. For a while, it seemed like the United States had taken that leadership role, and the French hated us for it. But now the US is fading too and the world doesn't really have an intellectual center any more. It's that global conversation thing.

I think that the situation is even more depressing than that. [...] It is true that there are still great French writers and thinkers, and that newer disciplines like economics offer new kinds of talents. But as a cultural phenomenon, I don’t think that French thought has survived.

Of course it's survived. It just isn't maintaining its cherished uniqueness. It's like physics, French scientists are major players at CERN (part of which is in France), but there isn't really any distinctly French physics.

I am left to wonder: did all countries have such strange intellectual moods? Were the French mad? Were they really thinking? It all depends on what you call thinking. I may be very un-French, but because something is grandiose or unintelligible doesn’t make it worthy of being called thinking.

It's the Germans who are most guilty of that. (Just think Kant, Hegel and Heidegger. Or in his own intentionally antithetical way, Nietzsche.) Obscurity isn't synonymous with profundity.

Support for revolution and destruction — of institutions or of the bourgeoisie, for example — doesn’t necessarily justify the description of thinking.

I emphatically agree. That current of French thought is its fatal flaw, in my opinion, and it's why French thinking in the humanities generally repels me.