My introduction to Paul Nizan was via
his indictment of establishment philosophy, The Watchdogs:
Philosophers and the Established Order.
There was one section that caught my attention at the time, which I
then digitized:
Here
two different types of philosophy are addressed: a purely technical
philosophy, as in philosophy of science, which Nizan has no intention
of opposing, and a philosophy that purports in some way to address
the human condition, which Nizan indicts.
Rereading
this now, I paid more attention to the text and context. An American
must read the book through foreign lenses, extracting from what is
dated or situation-specific that which can be learned and
recalibrated to apply to our current reality.
Nizan's
youthful rebellion resonates—as Sartre suggests in his Foreword to
Aden, Arabie—to
contemporary youth rebellions. This was a youth probably more
bourgeois than any we've known, but the rebellion against the
bankruptcy of bourgeois society is familiar enough, and thus Nizan's
story is both relevant and limited on just those grounds.
I have
extracted a few fragments from Sartre's Foreword as well as to
references to Simone de Beauvoir where some combination of Sartre,
Nizan, de Beauvoir, and Leibniz appears:
Returning
to The Watchdogs, note
that Nizan's complaint is specifically French. Nizan rebels against a
specifically French generalized idealist philosophy which purports to
maintain a Platonic detachment from vulgar materiality but which in
fact colludes with and is supported by a grimy bourgeois reality.
Related to this is the French intellectual rebellion against
“humanism”, which would mean something different from what
humanism concerns itself with in the anglophone world were it not for
the importation of postmodernism. The French secular intellectual
religion was a Cartesian hypostatization of “man”, which the left
bourgeois intelligentsia of a later generation was intent to put
down, a concern that ought to be irrelevant to the rest of us.
In
Nizan we also find a familiar yearning to abandon the ivory tower and
live a life of action fighting the bourgeois order. Toward the end of
The Watchdogs we see
Nizan's commitment to the French Communist Party and advocacy of the
USSR, which was later to terminate with the Hitler-Stalin Pact, upon
which the Communists assaulted Nizan's reputation.
In a
fresh extract from this work I aim to highlight the most abstract and
extensive in scope of passages illustrating Nizan's perspective:
I've
made further notes on this book I hope to make publicly presentable.
Turning
to Aden, Arabie, we
find a comparable indictment of bourgeois society, based on
disillusionment experienced in an exotic colonial locale. In addition
to some interesting ruminations, Nizan's writing—in English
translation—is beautiful. Here is an extract containing some
interesting philosophical reflections and illustrative of Nizan's
stylistic excellence:
Additional quotations and comments may be forthcoming. While I have focused on Nizan's more abstract statements, I need to emphasize that Nizan's descriptive powers should not be overlooked.
No comments:
Post a Comment