Paris_ City Guide (Lonely Planet, 7th Edition) - Lonely Planet [26]
Left Bank philosophers Bernard-Henri Levy, Jean-François Revel, André Glucksmann and the late Marc Sautet, who founded the Café des Phares and died in 1998 at the age of 51, have achieved a level of celebrity normally reserved for film stars. Even politicians are expected to show a philosophical bent. In 2003 then Foreign (and later Prime) Minister Dominique de Villepin quietly published Éloge des Voleurs de Feu (translated as ‘On Poetry’), an 824-page critique and homage to such ‘Promethean rebels’ as Villon and Rimbaud in French poetry.
René Descartes, who lived in the first half of the 17th century, was the founder of modern philosophy and one of the greatest thinkers since Aristotle. After making important contributions to analytical geometry and algebra, Descartes sought to establish certainty from a position of absolute doubt. Descartes’ famed aphorism ‘Cogito, ergo sum’ (I think, therefore I am) is the basis of modern philosophical thought. His method and systems of thought came to be known as Cartesianism. In positing that there is an external reality that can be grasped through reason, Descartes rendered possible the development of modern science.
Blaise Pascal, a contemporary of Descartes, was also a mathematician, but addressed the absurdity of the human predicament in a manner that foreshadowed the existentialists of the 20th century. Pascal’s central concern was in reconciling his religious devotion – he was a convert to Jansenism, an almost Calvinist branch of Roman Catholicism – with his scientific background. Thus, in Pensées (Thoughts) he put forth ‘Pascal’s Razor’, which stated that the most logical approach is to believe in God. If God does not exist, one has lost nothing; if God does exist one has assured oneself of a favourable afterlife. The difficulty in this argument is that it makes it possible to argue that one should believe in all religions.
As one of the major thinkers of the 18th century, the so-called Age of Enlightenment, Jean-Jacques Rousseau addressed the relationship of the individual to society. His 1762 work Le Contrat Social (The Social Contract) laid the foundations for modern democracy by arguing that sovereignty resides with the people who express their will through majority vote. Liberty is an inalienable ‘natural’ right that cannot be exchanged for civil peace.
In the late 19th century the philosopher Henri Bergson abandoned reason as a tool towards discovering the truth, arguing that direct intuition is deeper than intellect. He developed the concept of élan vital (creative impulse), a spirit of energy and life that moves all living things, as the heart of evolution – not Darwin’s theory of natural selection. His thoughts about the subjective experience of time greatly influenced his brother-in-law, Marcel Proust, and the writer’s À la Recherche du Temps Perdu (Remembrance of Things Past;).
The 20th century’s most famous French thinker was Jean-Paul Sartre, the quintessential Parisian intellectual who was born in the capital in 1905 and died there in 1980. For most people he embodied an obscure idea known as existentialism. It’s one of the great ‘isms’ of popular culture, but even philosophers have trouble explaining what existentialism really means. The word derives from Sartre’s statement, ‘Existence precedes (or, more accurately in English, takes priority over) essence’, meaning that man must create himself because there