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.

Paul Nizan on humanism & other matters

Paul Nizan (7 February 1905 – 23 May 1940) was an eminent French writer, an erstwhile Communist, who left the party as a reaction to the Soviet-Nazi pact and died fighting the Germans.

I first became aware of Nizan via his philosophical work The Watchdogs: Philosophers and the Established Order, translated by Paul Fittingoff (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1972; original publication, 1960).  Here is a relevant excerpt:

The Philosopher's Mission by Paul Nizan / Misio de la Filozofo (my Esperanto translation)

Here Nizan distinguishes between two types of philosophy, which he judges differently. He accepts strictly technical philosophers, particularly in philosophy of science, as they are, making no ideological demands upon them. But those who make broader assertions about human existence have proven themselves philosophically bankrupt, and those bourgeois philosophers are roundly condemned.

Nizan was also a prize-winning novelist. His last novel The Conspiracy, translated by Quintin Hoare, with an Afterword by Jean-Paul Sartre, and Appendix by Walter Benjamin (translated into English for the first time) has just been published in English by Verso.

Translations of some of Nizan's essays can be found at the Marxists Internet Archive.

Now I want to call your attention to Nizan's 1935 essay "On Humanism". The term "humanism" applies to several historical periods and schools of thought, and in even in English one must be attentive to the vagaries of the term. But "humanism" has a special meaning and basis of contention in French intellectual culture, known to Americans only through the unfortunate importation of postmodernism. If one were to think solely of the American humanist movement, Nizan's reference to "humanism" would be meaningless. The French reference to "humanism" reflects a traditionalist bourgeois culture that came under attack from multiple directions in the 20th century. Its attackers and defenders came from both right and left.

To get more of an idea of this background, follow the links on my web page:

Badiou and the Bankruptcy of Fashionable French Philosophy

. . . and on my "Studies in a Dying Culture" blog:

Bergson, apostle of reactionary irrationalism