It is some­times noted–typically with admiration–that France is a place where a philoso­pher can still be a celebri­ty. It sounds laud­able. But celebri­ty cul­ture can be cor­ro­sive, both to the cul­ture at large and to the celebri­ties them­selves. So it’s worth ask­ing:  What price have French phi­los­o­phy and its devo­tees (on the Euro­pean con­ti­nent and else­where) paid for the glam­our?

Per­haps one casu­al­ty is clar­i­ty. The writ­ings of the French post­mod­ernist philoso­phers (and those inspired by them) are noto­ri­ous­ly abstruse. In a scathing cri­tique of the­o­rist Judith But­ler, an Amer­i­can who writes in the French post­struc­tural­ist style, philoso­pher Martha Nuss­baum of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Chica­go sug­gests that the abstruse­ness is cal­cu­lat­ed to inspire admi­ra­tion:

Some precincts of the con­ti­nen­tal philo­soph­i­cal tra­di­tion, though sure­ly not all of them, have an unfor­tu­nate ten­den­cy to regard the philoso­pher as a star who fas­ci­nates, and fre­quent­ly by obscu­ri­ty, rather than as an arguer among equals. When ideas are stat­ed clear­ly, after all, they may be detached from their author: one can take them away and pur­sue them on one’s own. When they remain mys­te­ri­ous (indeed, when they are not quite assert­ed), one remains depen­dent on the orig­i­nat­ing author­i­ty. The thinker is heed­ed only for his or her turgid charis­ma.

On Fri­day we post­ed an excerpt from an inter­view in which lin­guist Noam Chom­sky (some­thing of a polit­i­cal celebri­ty him­self) exco­ri­ates Jacques Der­ri­da and Jacques Lacan, along with Lacan’s super­star dis­ci­ple, Sloven­ian the­o­rist Slavoj Žižek, for using inten­tion­al­ly obscure and inflat­ed lan­guage to pull the wool over their admir­ers’ eyes and make triv­ial “the­o­ries” seem pro­found. He calls Lacan a “total char­la­tan.”

Lacan had a pen­chant for using trendy math­e­mat­i­cal terms in curi­ous ways. In a pas­sage on cas­tra­tion anx­i­ety, for exam­ple, he equates the phal­lus with the square root of minus one:

The erec­tile organ can be equat­ed with the √-1, the sym­bol of the sig­ni­fi­ca­tion pro­duced above, of the jouis­sance [ecsta­sy] it restores–by the coef­fi­cient of its statement–to the func­tion of a miss­ing sig­ni­fi­er: (-1).

Chom­sky’s crit­i­cism of Lacan and the oth­ers pro­voked a wide range of com­ments from our read­ers. Today we thought we would keep the con­ver­sa­tion going with a fas­ci­nat­ing audio clip (above) of philoso­pher John Sear­le of the Uni­ver­si­ty of Cal­i­for­nia, Berke­ley, describ­ing how Michel Fou­cault and Pierre Bour­dieu–two emi­nent French thinkers whose abil­i­ties Sear­le obvi­ous­ly respected–told him that if they wrote clear­ly they would­n’t be tak­en seri­ous­ly in France.

Sear­le begins by recit­ing Paul Grice’s four Max­ims of Man­ner: be clear, be brief, be order­ly, and avoid obscu­ri­ty of expres­sion. These are sys­tem­at­i­cal­ly vio­lat­ed in France, Sear­le says, part­ly due to the influ­ence of Ger­man phi­los­o­phy. Sear­le trans­lates Fou­cault’s admis­sion to him this way: “In France, you got­ta have ten per­cent incom­pre­hen­si­ble, oth­er­wise peo­ple won’t think it’s deep–they won’t think you’re a pro­found thinker.”

Sear­le has been care­ful to sep­a­rate Fou­cault from Der­ri­da, with whom Sear­le had an unfriend­ly debate in the 1970s over Speech Act the­o­ry. “Fou­cault was often lumped with Der­ri­da,” Sear­le says in a 2000 inter­view with Rea­son mag­a­zine. “That’s very unfair to Fou­cault. He was a dif­fer­ent cal­iber of thinker alto­geth­er.” Else­where in the inter­view, Sear­le says:

With Der­ri­da, you can hard­ly mis­read him, because he’s so obscure. Every time you say, “He says so and so,” he always says, “You mis­un­der­stood me.” But if you try to fig­ure out the cor­rect inter­pre­ta­tion, then that’s not so easy. I once said this to Michel Fou­cault, who was more hos­tile to Der­ri­da even than I am, and Fou­cault said that Der­ri­da prac­ticed the method of obscu­ran­tisme ter­ror­iste (ter­ror­ism of obscu­ran­tism). We were speak­ing in French. And I said, “What the hell do you mean by that?” And he said, “He writes so obscure­ly you can’t tell what he’s say­ing. That’s the obscu­ran­tism part. And then when you crit­i­cize him, he can always say, ‘You did­n’t under­stand me; you’re an idiot.’ That’s the ter­ror­ism part.” And I like that. So I wrote an arti­cle about Der­ri­da. I asked Michel if it was OK if I quot­ed that pas­sage, and he said yes.

NOTE: For more on John Sear­le, includ­ing links to his full Berke­ley lec­tures on the phi­los­o­phy of mind, lan­guage and soci­ety, see our post, “Phi­los­o­phy with John Sear­le: Three Free Cours­es.”

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Michel Fou­cault: Free Lec­tures on Truth, Dis­course & The Self

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky & Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature & Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

90 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

Philoso­pher Slavoj Zizek Inter­prets Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go in The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma (2006)

Noam Chom­sky’s well-known polit­i­cal views have tend­ed to over­shad­ow his ground­break­ing work as a lin­guist and ana­lyt­ic philoso­pher. As a result, peo­ple some­times assume that because Chom­sky is a left­ist, he would find com­mon intel­lec­tu­al ground with the post­mod­ernist philoso­phers of the Euro­pean Left.

Big mis­take.

In this brief excerpt from a Decem­ber, 2012 inter­view with Vet­er­ans Unplugged, Chom­sky is asked about the ideas of Slavoj Žižek, Jacques Lacan and Jacques Der­ri­da. The M.I.T. schol­ar, who else­where has described some of those fig­ures and their fol­low­ers as “cults,” does­n’t mince words:

What you’re refer­ring to is what’s called “the­o­ry.” And when I said I’m not inter­est­ed in the­o­ry, what I meant is, I’m not inter­est­ed in posturing–using fan­cy terms like poly­syl­la­bles and pre­tend­ing you have a the­o­ry when you have no the­o­ry what­so­ev­er. So there’s no the­o­ry in any of this stuff, not in the sense of the­o­ry that any­one is famil­iar with in the sci­ences or any oth­er seri­ous field. Try to find in all of the work you men­tioned some prin­ci­ples from which you can deduce con­clu­sions, empir­i­cal­ly testable propo­si­tions where it all goes beyond the lev­el of some­thing you can explain in five min­utes to a twelve-year-old. See if you can find that when the fan­cy words are decod­ed. I can’t. So I’m not inter­est­ed in that kind of pos­tur­ing. Žižek is an extreme exam­ple of it. I don’t see any­thing to what he’s say­ing. Jacques Lacan I actu­al­ly knew. I kind of liked him. We had meet­ings every once in awhile. But quite frankly I thought he was a total char­la­tan. He was just pos­tur­ing for the tele­vi­sion cam­eras in the way many Paris intel­lec­tu­als do. Why this is influ­en­tial, I haven’t the slight­est idea. I don’t see any­thing there that should be influ­en­tial.

via Leit­er Reports

Relat­ed con­tent:

John Sear­le on Fou­cault and the Obscu­ran­tism in French Phi­los­o­phy

Clash of the Titans: Noam Chom­sky and Michel Fou­cault Debate Human Nature and Pow­er on Dutch TV, 1971

Jacques Lacan Talks About Psy­cho­analy­sis with Panache (1973)

Philoso­pher Slavoj Zizek Inter­prets Hitchcock’s Ver­ti­go in The Pervert’s Guide to Cin­e­ma (2006)

Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es

What do most philoso­phers believe? The ques­tion may only inter­est oth­er philosophers—and when it comes to such eso­teric con­cerns as the “ana­lyt­ic syn­thet­ic dis­tinc­tion,” this is prob­a­bly true. But when it comes to the big issues that have giv­en every thought­ful per­son at least one sleep­less night, or the ques­tions reg­u­lar­ly explored by spec­u­la­tive fic­tions like Star Trek or zom­bie movies, the rest of us might sit up and take notice.

Two con­tem­po­rary philoso­phers, David Chalmers and David Bour­get, decid­ed to find out where their col­leagues stood on 30 dif­fer­ent philo­soph­i­cal issues by con­struct­ing a rig­or­ous sur­vey that end­ed up account­ing for the views of over 3,000 pro­fes­sors, grad­u­ate stu­dents, and inde­pen­dent thinkers. Most of the respon­dents were affil­i­at­ed with pres­ti­gious phi­los­o­phy depart­ments in the Eng­lish-speak­ing world, though sev­er­al con­ti­nen­tal Euro­pean depart­ments are also rep­re­sent­ed.

Some semi-famous names come up in a perusal of the list of pub­lic respon­dents, like A.C. Grayling and Mas­si­mo Pigli­uc­ci. For the most part, how­ev­er, the sur­vey group rep­re­sents the rank-and-file, toil­ing away as teach­ers, thinkers, writ­ers, and researchers at col­leges across the West­ern world. You sur­vey geeks out there can dig deeply into Chalmers and Bourget’s detailed account­ing of their method­ol­o­gy here. But for a quick and dirty sum­ma­ry, let’s take a cou­ple of gen­er­al cat­e­gories and look at the results.

Meta­physics:

The issues that fall under this head­ing broad­ly involve ques­tions about what exists, and why and how it does. Here’s a break­down of some of the big­gies:

• God: athe­ism 72.8%; the­ism 14.6%; oth­er 12.6%

Grant­ed, this is an over­sim­pli­fi­ca­tion. Pop­u­lar notions of these cat­e­gories don’t nec­es­sar­i­ly cor­re­spond to more sub­tle dis­tinc­tions among philoso­phers, who may be strong or weak athe­ists (or the­ists), or hold some ver­sion of deism, agnos­ti­cism, or none of the above.

•  Free will: com­pat­i­bil­ism 59.1%; lib­er­tar­i­an­ism 13.7%; no free will 12.2%; oth­er 14.9%

Com­pat­i­bil­ism, the major­i­ty view here, is the the­o­ry that we can choose our actions to some degree, and to some degree they are deter­mined by pri­or events. Lib­er­tar­i­an­ism (relat­ed to, but not syn­ony­mous with, the polit­i­cal phi­los­o­phy) claims that all of our actions are freely cho­sen.

• Metaphi­los­o­phy: nat­u­ral­ism 49.8%; non-nat­u­ral­ism 25.9%; oth­er 24.3%

Nat­u­ral­ism, accord­ing to the Oxford Eng­lish Dic­tio­nary, is “the idea or belief that only nat­ur­al (as opposed to super­nat­ur­al or spir­i­tu­al) laws and forces oper­ate in the world,” or “the belief that noth­ing exists beyond the nat­ur­al world.” Note that meta­phys­i­cal nat­u­ral­ism needs to be dis­tin­guished from method­olog­i­cal nat­u­ral­ism, which near­ly all schol­ars and sci­en­tists embrace.

• Abstract objects: Pla­ton­ism 39.3%; nom­i­nal­ism 37.7%; oth­er 23.0%

This dis­tinc­tion gets at whether abstrac­tions like geom­e­try or the laws of log­ic exist in some immutable form “out there” in the uni­verse (as Pla­ton­ic ideas) or whether they are “nom­i­nal,” no more than con­ve­nient for­mu­las we cre­ate and apply to our obser­va­tions. It’s a debate at least as old as the ancient Greeks.

Per­son­al Iden­ti­ty:

In this gen­er­al cat­e­go­ry, we deal with ques­tions about what it means to be a per­son and how we can exist as seem­ing­ly coher­ent indi­vid­u­als over time in a world in con­stant flux. Let’s take two fun exam­ples that deal with these quan­daries, shall we?

• Tele­trans­porter: sur­vival 36.2%; death 31.1%; oth­er 32.7%

Here, we’re deal­ing with a thought exper­i­ment pro­posed by Derek Parfit (one of the par­tic­i­pants in the sur­vey) that pret­ty much takes the Star Trek trans­porter tech­nol­o­gy (or the hor­ror ver­sion in The Fly) and asks whether the trans­port­ed individual—completely dis­in­te­grat­ed and recon­sti­tut­ed some­where else—is the same per­son as the orig­i­nal. In oth­er words, can a “per­son” sur­vive this process or does the indi­vid­ual die and a new one take its place? The ques­tion hinges on ideas about a “soul” or “spir­it” that exists apart from the mate­r­i­al body and asks whether or not we are noth­ing more than very spe­cif­ic arrange­ments of mat­ter and ener­gy.

• Zom­bies: con­ceiv­able but not meta­phys­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble 35.6%; meta­phys­i­cal­ly pos­si­ble 23.3%; incon­ceiv­able 16.0%; oth­er 25.1%

Zom­bies are every­where. Try to escape them! You can’t. Their preva­lence in pop­u­lar cul­ture is mir­rored in the phi­los­o­phy world, where zom­bies have long served as metaphors for the pos­si­bil­i­ty of a pure (and rav­en­ous) bod­i­ly exis­tence, devoid of con­scious self-aware­ness. The prospect may be as fright­en­ing as the zom­bies of the Walk­ing Dead, but is it a real pos­si­bil­i­ty? A sig­nif­i­cant num­ber of philoso­phers seem to think so.

As I said, these are just a few of the issues Chalmers and Bourget’s sur­vey queries. Physi­cist Sean Car­roll has a quick sum­ma­ry of all of the results on his blog, and Chalmers and Bour­get have made all of their data and analy­sis very trans­par­ent and freely avail­able at their Philpa­pers site. David Chalmers, who spe­cial­izes in phi­los­o­phy of mind and looks like one of Spinal Tap’s doomed drum­mers, spills the beans on his ideas of con­scious­ness in the video at the top.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Do Physi­cists Believe in God?

50 Famous Aca­d­e­mics & Sci­en­tists Talk About God

Daniel Den­nett and Cor­nel West Decode the Phi­los­o­phy of The Matrix in 2004 Film

Down­load 90 Free Phi­los­o­phy Cours­es and Start Liv­ing the Exam­ined Life

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness

Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beau­voir were twen­ti­eth-cen­tu­ry philosophy’s pow­er cou­ple, in a time and place when pub­lic intel­lec­tu­als were true celebri­ties. In the mid-six­ties, they were not only fas­ci­nat­ing writ­ers in their own right, but also activists engaged in inter­na­tion­al strug­gle against what they defined as the glob­al­ly inju­ri­ous forces of cap­i­tal­ist impe­ri­al­ism and patri­ar­chal oppres­sion. In 1967, Sartre, along with Bertrand Rus­sell and a hand­ful of oth­er influ­en­tial thinkers, con­vened what became known as the “Rus­sell Tri­bunal,” a pri­vate body inves­ti­gat­ing war crimes in Viet­nam. De Beau­voir mean­while had pub­lished a suite of mem­oirs and prize-win­ning nov­els, and her ground­break­ing fem­i­nist study The Sec­ond Sex had been in pub­li­ca­tion a full twen­ty years.

In the inter­views above with Sartre and de Beau­voir, the “free and inti­mate cou­ple,” a mod­el of exis­ten­tial­ist free love, receives rev­er­en­tial treat­ment from the CBC. The jour­nal­ists describe Sartre as “the most famous and con­tro­ver­sial writer of his time…. An ally of stu­dents and inter­na­tion­al rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies [and] a very pub­lic fig­ure.” Sartre’s Paris apart­ment, an “aus­tere room,” rep­re­sents “a kind of uni­ver­sal con­science.” There are long, lin­ger­ing shots of the writer at work, pre­sum­ably on his Flaubert study, ten years in the mak­ing at this point. Sartre becomes pas­sion­ate when the inter­view­ers ask him about the dan­gers of the Viet­nam War. He responds:

There is noth­ing glo­ri­ous about a super­pow­er attack­ing a small nation which can­not fight on even terms, and yet resists fierce­ly, refus­ing to yield…. My per­spec­tive is sociopo­lit­i­cal as well as moral. The Viet­nam war is the very sym­bol of impe­ri­al­ism, the fruit of today’s monop­o­lis­tic cap­i­tal­ism.

For Sartre, phi­los­o­phy and pol­i­tics are insep­a­ra­ble. “The war in Viet­nam,” he says, ”dis­putes my work, and my work dis­putes the war.”

When the scene shifts to the sep­a­rate home of de Beau­voir, nick­named “Cas­tor” (the beaver), the cam­era lingers over her col­lec­tion of knick-knacks. Her home is “like a muse­um of her own life… filled with rem­i­nis­cences of Cuba, Africa, Japan, Spain, Chi­na, Mex­i­co.” She dis­cuss­es her time spent with Fidel Cas­tro at his coun­try home (“He fish­es with his gun, shoot­ing at trout”), and talks about her mem­oirs. “I am attached to my past,” she says, “but I don’t shun the present and future. Arti­facts and sou­venirs are meant to pre­serve the present. To buy a sou­venir is there­fore an invest­ment in the future.”

Sartre and de Beauvoir’s rela­tion­ship is sto­ried and com­plex. In his lengthy 2005 expose for The New York­er, Louis Menand describes it thus:

Their liai­son was part of the mys­tique of exis­ten­tial­ism, and it was exten­sive­ly doc­u­ment­ed and cool­ly defend­ed in Beauvoir’s four vol­umes of mem­oirs, all of them extreme­ly pop­u­lar in France…. Beau­voir and Sartre had no inter­est in var­nish­ing the facts out of respect for bour­geois notions of decen­cy. Dis­re­spect for bour­geois notions of decen­cy was pre­cise­ly the point.

Their sex­u­al rebel­lion seems nov­el for the times, but the way they con­strued their open rela­tion­ship also relied on Roman­tic clichés and the medieval for­mu­la of court­ly love. As Sartre would say of their roman­tic “pact”: “What we have is an essen­tial love; but it is a good idea for us also to expe­ri­ence con­tin­gent love affairs.” His Aris­totelian argu­ment, Menand writes, “worked as well on her as a dia­mond ring.” The couple’s egal­i­tar­i­an sex­u­al pol­i­tics often seem at odds with their prac­tice, in Menard’s esti­ma­tion, in which Sartre seemed to gain the upper hand and both wield­ed pow­er over their con­quests.

While spec­u­la­tions on their arrange­ment may seem pruri­ent, the two doc­u­ment­ed their own dal­liances obses­sive­ly in their work—both fic­tion­al and non—referring to their entourage of admir­ers and lovers as “the fam­i­ly.” They adopt­ed young women, fre­quent­ly stu­dents, as pro­tégées, and seduced both women and men in what their for­mer lover Bian­ca Bienen­feld, in her mem­oir A Dis­grace­ful Affair, would call “act­ing out a com­mon­place ver­sion of ‘Dan­ger­ous Liaisons.’”

Author Hazel Row­ley, who also wrote on Franklin and Eleanor Roo­sevelt, doc­u­ment­ed their 51-year part­ner­ship in her book Tete-a-Tete, a biog­ra­phy writ­ten in coop­er­a­tion with de Beauvoir’s adopt­ed daugh­ter (and pos­si­ble lover) Sylvie Le Bon de Beau­voir and con­test­ed by Sartre’s adoptee, Arlette Elka­im-Sartre. Like all rad­i­cal fig­ures, Sartre and de Beau­voir need to be accept­ed as warts-and-all human beings. Their influ­en­tial work is not negat­ed by their con­tra­dic­to­ry lives, but the per­son­al and polit­i­cal do make for a strange blend in the case of these intel­lec­tu­al rev­o­lu­tion­ar­ies.

Relat­ed Con­tent:

Simone de Beau­voir Explains “Why I’m a Fem­i­nist” in a Rare TV Inter­view (1975)

Jean-Paul Sartre Breaks Down the Bad Faith of Intel­lec­tu­als

Lovers and Philoso­phers — Jean-Paul Sartre & Simone de Beau­voir Togeth­er in 1967

Josh Jones is a writer and musi­cian based in Wash­ing­ton, DC. Fol­low him at @jdmagness