20th Century French Philosophy

Author: (American) Gary Gutting / Xin Yan
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-01-01
Features: "We spent a night at the 'Gas Lamp' Hotel on Montparnasse Avenue together. We ordered the specialty drink of the house:. Aron pointed to his glass and said, 'Guys, you see, if you are a phenomenologist, you can talk about philosophy from this cocktail!' At that moment, Sartre turned pale: this was exactly what he had long dreamed of—describing only what he saw and touched, and extracting philosophy from it. Aron convinced him that phenomenology was perfectly suited to his current focus: transcending the opposition between realism and idealism, while establishing the supremacy of reason and the authenticity of the visible world as it appears to the senses. On Saint-Michel Boulevard, Sartre bought a book on Husserl by Levinas, eager to understand its subject so much that he flipped through it while walking, not even bothering to cut the margins." Thanks to this account by de Beauvoir, a memorable episode in the history of philosophy was preserved. Raymond Aron "discovered Germany" before Jean-Paul Sartre entered Germany, but the difference was that while Aron remained faithful to Kant, he never ceased to remind his compatriots of the danger of Nazi Germany. Sartre, on the other hand, not only went east with a smile when his fellow citizens were fleeing Germany but also formed a philosophy study group in a prisoner-of-war camp to study Heidegger's philosophy. Later, in The Fall, Camus, through the character Clamence, mocked him as the "pope of a group of mentally deranged Frenchmen" in the concentration camp. But later, when Sartre became a philosopher, the great skeptic Raymond Aron, ironically, lacked the confidence of Sartre. Like the Chinese, French philosophy students today no longer take Sartre's existentialism too seriously, but in Gary Gutting's French Philosophy in the 20th Century, Sartre's philosophy still receives a dedicated chapter. Gutting chose one of his examination angles as the relationship he established between philosophy and literature: Sartre had an ambitious plan to write biographies of French classic writers, and by the time of his death, Jean Genet, Flaubert, and Baudelaire had successively become subjects of his analysis. Especially Flaubert, the "voracious consumer of words" (as Mr. Guo Hong'an puts it), took up over 2,000 pages. The main thread of Gutting's book is "freedom," and "the focus on individual freedom as a concrete, living reality more than anything else maintained the distinctive character of French philosophy for an entire century." Thus, Sartre naturally occupies the position of a central figure in freedom philosophy. Of course, criticism followed. Raymond Aron, for instance, believed that Sartre's conception of absolute freedom was abstract and meaningless. In Introduction to the Philosophy of History, he said, "There has never been absolute freedom; a person's past limits the scope in which his creativity can operate." Absolute freedom, "the freedom to add new colors in an instant," always left Aron baffled: "This contradicts the experiences of others and my own." After becoming a historian, Aron wrote two more monographs on Sartre, but unfortunately, they were not timely and received little attention.