Paul Nizan watching the watchdogs

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:

"The Philosopher's Mission"

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:

John-Paul Sartre on Paul Nizan

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:

The Watchdogs: Bourgeois Philosophy in Action (Excerpts)

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:

Philosophy in Aden

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.

Howard L. Parsons: East meets West (2): Naturalizing the religious impulse

I have uploaded three excerpts from this book I started to review in a previous post:

Parsons, Howard L. Man East and West: Essays in East-West Philosophy. Amsterdam: B. R. Grüner, 1975. xi, 211 pp. (Philosophical Currents; v. 8)

Howard L. Parsons on the Role of the Philosopher

This is Parsons' general prescription for the philosopher's task and not specifically tied to the theme of the book.

Howard L. Parsons on Naturalist vs. Supernationalist Perspectives on Value

Parsons is skeptical both of Barth's neo-orthodoxy and Tillich's liberal theological palaver about 'being'. We should seek the natural basis of human dependencies instead of railing against modern man and hyping his dependence on a transcendental source. Progress means that theology tends to become anthropology. Parsons seeks to preserve some of the traditional concerns, but with an updated, naturalistic world view. This is an example of how he typically expresses himself:

Yet a full anthropology, which sees man in society, history, and nature, in the full stretch of space and time, might bring modern humanism to affirm, in a new and qualified way, some of the assertions of ancient religion.

While I've seen much worse in my time, I find this sort of formulation conceptually muddled. Parsons also evinces an excessively deferential attitude toward sacred figures and what others call the great spiritual teachers. On the plus side, Parsons sees the human symbolizing capacity as having from the beginning taken a wrong turn into superstition. Parsons also criticizes Sartre's mournful nostalgia for the outmoded supernaturalist position.

Howard L. Parsons on Naturalism & Religion: Conclusion

Parsons sums up his position in the final pages of the book. Parsons is mostly on track, but I object to his characteristic formulations, e.g.:

Is it possible to combine the best of the religious perspective with the power of scientific knowledge and control now in our hands? It is not only possible; it is necessary, if we are to be saved from a science determined by men who do not understand or appreciate the evolutionary role of man in nature and his responsibility toward it, and from religions that do not understand and even repudiate science. The first would give us man divorced from nature and from values grounded in nature; the second, values divorced from man and nature. In both cases, values become arbitrary and, in the event of conflict, subject to settlement by capricious preference and arbitrary power.

 In his essay "Theories of Knowledge: A Dialectical, Historical Critique" Parsons evinces an awareness of the interplay between positivist and irrationalist tendencies in the ideological life of bourgeois society. However, he tries too hard to have it both ways, affirming modernity and criticizing tradition while fudging his analysis of the allegedly admirable facets and impulses of pre-modernity. There is both sophistication and epistemological repression going on here, which I suspect is related to his brand of Marxism with its lack of recognition of the ineluctable impossibility of socialism in rapidly modernizing peasant societies.