20th Century French Philosophy -- Modern Thought Translation Series. Issue 3

Author: (American) Gary Gutting, translated by 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: (Apricot Yellow Cocktail). Aaron 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. Aaron 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 by Levinas on Husserl, eager to understand its subject matter so much that he flipped through it while walking, even forgetting to cut the page margins." Thanks to this anecdote recorded by de Beauvoir, a memorable chapter 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. On the other hand, Sartre not only went east willingly when his fellow citizens were fleeing Germany but also formed a philosophy study group in a POW 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 camp. But later, when Sartre became a philosopher, the great skeptic Raymond Aron, ironically, lacked the confidence that Sartre possessed. 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 selects 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 "a focus on the individual freedom of concrete, living reality more than anything else sustained 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 bewildered: "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.