An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought by Geroulanos Stefanos

Author:Geroulanos, Stefanos
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Published: 2011-08-01T04:00:00+00:00

By late 1946, the breakup of the Union Nationale and the Mouvement de Libération Nationale (a breakup that Malraux enthusiastically supported and that framed his return to the question of man’s survival) had left the political arena divided over problems of humanism and violence. With the passing of any possibility for a “third way” (a move toward a radically new democracy and toward a politics not bound to the USA/USSR divide) and with early cracks showing in the legacy and memory of the resistance already in mid-1945, new competition and new languages of political criticism emerged.28 The folding of several influential journals that had emerged from the resistance and had contributed to its philosophical priorities (for example, Fontaine or Confluences) played a part in the deepening of intellectual divisions. The failure of radical social hopes, which by late 1946 had been compounded by questions concerning the experience of violence in World War II and the apparent return of a relatively weak republic often dominated by urgent economic questions as much as by political squabbling between Communists and Gaullists, added to the mistrust of new humanisms. Here, the tenor of the 1930s conflict of exclusivist humanisms reemerged. Intellectuals who in the 1930s had already rejected political alternatives had little reason to expect from them any real improvement in human relations, especially after a second (and far more brutal) European War, the return of a capitalism mixed with impoverishment and destruction, and the decline of France as a European and colonial power.

Here it is fair to say that with the old Right defeated, Communists captured the humanist mantle and sought to direct it against the revelations of Soviet violence.29 In contrast to everyday life in a still-unreconstructed and impoverished France, they proposed a world guided by the concretization of abstract ideals, by social and material equality, by the end to all fascism in the completion of the revolution. Because of their contempt of democratic politics, the Communists’ decimation of competing claims to humanism became even more influential than Communism itself, particularly in the expectation that human rights and liberal notions of equality could sufficiently provide for genuinely human relations. Thus, if Communists successfully wore—at least for a couple of years—the humanist mantle, emphasizing the role of an impersonal history that moves toward genuine human relations and heightening their criticisms of competing movements, this is not to suggest that their practical and domestic politics were as intellectually significant as the critical dimension of Communist humanism. Merleau-Ponty’s rejection of liberalism is exemplary of the breadth and depth of mistrust for political solutions and offers again an exemplary formulation:

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