Here is an amusing and insightful essay on the French. It’s from 2004, and it starts slowly, but still seems true and maybe even relevant today. The author says this about French philosophy:
Don’t take French philosophy seriously. This bears repeating in slightly different form:
THE FRENCH DON’T TAKE THEIR PHILOSOPHERS AS SERIOUSLY AS WE TAKE THEM!!!!
It can help to ask what the social function of doing philosophy is. In the Anglo world, we tend to think of philosophy as a field of intellectual inquiry rather like science or economics. It’s a pursuit of the Truth that might, with luck, throw off some practical benefits.
Philosophy in France plays a very different role. With a couple of great exceptions (Montaigne, Pascal), French philosophy is, IMHO, best understood as a cross between a hyperrefined entertainment form, and an industry for the supplying of fodder for cafe-and-flirtation chatter. Take French philosophy straight and you’re likely to wind up doing something stupid like destroying a department of English, or maybe even ruining your own life.
It’s really too bad that so many intellectuals in America have in fact taken French philosophy straight, but it has been impossible to get them to stop doing so.
Yes, that's excellent! I enjoyed the whole rambling essay, and it fit closely with how I think about France and the French. Whenever I hear Americans complain about some aspect of the French, my reaction is "yes, but they are French. Complaining about that is like complaining that bears are growly and hairy. Next you'll be complaining that fish swim, I suppose." BTW, General Patton remarked that after the U.S., France was his favorite country.
IMO, the later French philosophers (everyone after Descartes and Pascal) are simply trying to show their cleverness. If they can make an argument that is simultaneously logical and absurd, they are satisfied.
Posted by: Charles N.Steele | 06/27/2019 at 09:06 PM
"simultaneously logical and absurd"
Heh. Nicely put.
Posted by: John Pepple | 06/28/2019 at 05:35 AM