18 September, 2025
Vincent Descombes looks back, after another 45 years, on his history of French philosophy from 1933 to 1978, published in English as Modern French Philosophy (1980) and in French as Le Même et l’Autre (1979). Translated by E.E. Sheng.
In the late 1960s, when I was teaching in the philosophy department at the University of Montreal, I became friends with two philosophers who regularly taught there as visiting professors, Alan Montefiore (Oxford) and Charles Taylor (McGill). Both had been trained at Oxford in the years when Oxford philosophers set the tone in the analytic world – that is, for some, the only respectable philosophical world. Montefiore and Taylor, however, did not share this prejudice. They thought that one should not simply accept that a division had occurred between a ‘continental philosophy’ and an ‘analytic philosophy’. They decided, therefore, to establish a series named ‘Modern European Philosophy’ with Cambridge University Press, in which would be published books on contemporary philosophy as it was done in various European countries, notably Germany and France. It was thus that I was commissioned to write a book in which I would explain what went on in France in philosophy at that time.
The premise was that I had to write for anglophone readers who were themselves consummate philosophers and had read the same ancient and modern classics as a French philosopher, but who had, in principle, only a vague idea of what had happened in French philosophy since the great philosophical schism that is often said, with good reason, to date from the First World War. So, it was understood that I had to produce a work of philosophy, not a popularized or simplified version of French debates or a textbook.
Thus, I had a contract with Cambridge University Press for Modern French Philosophy, which would be published in 1980. How come my book was first published in France and under a different title? I had worked on my manuscript during 1978 and finished writing in September that year, whereupon I had sent it, as planned, to C.U.P., but also shown it to a few friends for their opinion, notably Jean Piel, who was the editor of the journal Critique and also of the book series named ‘Critique’ published by Minuit. It was thus that my manuscript came fairly quickly into the hands of the director of that publishing house, Jérôme Lindon.
It appeared to me that they both very much liked what I had written. My recollection is that a reason for which Piel and Lindon liked it was that they were struck by the fact that my account took as its starting point the seminar of Alexandre Kojève (beginning in 1933) rather than the publications of Jean-Paul Sartre, as was commonly done in those days. Thus, the journal Critique, founded after the war by a zealous attendee of Kojève’s seminar (Georges Bataille) and with Kojève’s support, got the better of Sartre’s Les Temps modernes.
As a result, Lindon proposed that I sign a contract with him rather than with Cambridge University Press. An advantage for me, he explained, was that it was possible to publish my book quickly in France, since it needed only to be printed, whereas it was yet to be translated into English. Of course, I did not want to go back on my word with C.U.P., but an arrangement was found between C.U.P. and Minuit. This is why in the French version of the book there is a short preface by Alan Montefiore explaining to the French reader the ultimate intention of the work, namely to encourage exchange between two philosophical traditions, the French and the British. Remember that at the time the phenomenon of ‘French theory’ had not yet burst onto the scene and the dialogue of which Montefiore spoke was supposed to develop primarily between the two sides of the Channel, not the two sides of the Atlantic. Montefiore concluded his remarks (signed Oxford, January 1979) as follows:
The reader of the French version of this book, if he remembers that the work is addressed to the anglophone reader – whose education and philosophical assumptions are very often completely different from those of the authors discussed here – will enter into the dialogue that, from multiple sides, is tending to be established between the analytic tradition and continental Europe.
I suppose that one question that must come to mind for a reader reading my book today (in 2025) is how to explain certain absences in the panorama. How is it that some major figures of French philosophy of the second half of the twentieth century were not more seriously discussed? It is clear to me, in retrospect, that it was a mistake not to give an explanation of how I chose which authors and books to cover. In fact, it was for reasons of space that I decided not to go into my methodology in detail. Having already much exceeded the limit fixed by the contract that I had signed with C.U.P., I restricted myself to a general statement cautioning that the books that I was going to discuss were not necessarily the most interesting ones that had been published, but were those that made the news on the French philosophical scene and that I therefore had to discuss.
It is also relevant to remember in what conditions a project like the one that I undertook had to be carried out in the 1970s. The reader of today perhaps does not realize what writing a book or an article involved before the recent emergence of modern informational technologies. There was no Internet, there were no websites where relevant data or texts might be consulted digitally, and there were not even tools for measuring how famous various authors were. The evidential base for a work of this kind was limited, in fact, to two sources: what could be found in bookshops or libraries and what could be picked up from oral traditions.
How was I to proceed in choosing the philosophers to be discussed? One thing was clear in my mind. I must not give in to the temptation of being encyclopaedic and mentioning every writer who published something notable in the period examined, or all the currents of philosophy that had made an appearance in some way or other. Why was this to be avoided? I had consulted a few worked aimed at students that purported to give a picture of post-war French philosophy, and it was clear to me that, in virtue of wanting to cover too much, these works ended up offering only bland and confused accounts that lost sight of the guiding threads of debates. I concluded that selection was inevitable and must be strict.
To figure in my account, someone had to have been the subject of a publication in at least one of the organs that made up the cultural press of the time, such as, for example, L’Arc (a quarterly published in Aix-en-Provence, now defunct), Le Magazine littéraire, Critique, etc. From time to time, these periodicals published special issues devoted to a single contemporary author. It seemed to me that if an author managed to be presented in this way in a publication aimed at a general audience (not just a specialist academic audience), they had a demonstrable presence on the philosophical scene and so I had to devote a few pages to them.
This is why several authors are absent from my account even though they appear today to be major points of reference in twentieth-century French philosophy. At the time, it was not yet the case. It must be remembered that my book was finished in 1978. It was already possible to have an overall view of the œuvre of Sartre or that of Merleau-Ponty. In contrast, Paul Ricœur had not yet published Temps et Récit [Time and Narrative] (1983–1985) orSoi-même comme un autre [Oneself as Another] (1990). As for the next generation, it had only just reached full maturity and was far from having shown all that it could do. In 1978, Deleuze hadn’t yet written his books on cinema and on painting. Derrida was still above all the author of De la Grammatologie [Of Grammatology] and Foucault hadn’t yet published his Histoire de la sexualité [History of Sexuality] or delivered his lectures on the hermeneutics of the subject.
In retrospect, there are two gaping omissions. One is that of Emmanuel Levinas. In fact, it would have been quite easy for me to find a place for him in my overall picture, since Levinas was known at the time as the author of Totalité et Infini [Totality and Infinity], a work that could be read as an account of his critical engagement with the Hegelian system. Thus, I could have compared the philosophical strategies of Levinas and Derrida when confronted with Hegel.
The other major absence is that of Paul Ricœur. At the time, I would have had no difficulty devoting a whole chapter to Ricœur, for I had been his student, had attended his lectures at the Sorbonne for a number of years and had written my thesis for the diplôme d’études supérieures [translator’s note: roughly an equivalent to a master’s degree] under his supervision. Moreover, I knew his articles on Husserl well, as well as his doctoral thesis on the philosophy of the will. The latter, which opened up new paths for phenomenology beyond those found in Merleau-Ponty, was a work whose importance I thought was not fully recognized.
If I had had to write a chapter on Ricœur, how would it have been inserted into the general argument of the book? It would have been necessary to re-arrange the contents of my account. For a section on Ricœur’s work (up to 1978) would not have found its place in either of the two sequences around which I had organized my presentation: the debate with or against Hegel and the episode of structuralism. It would have been necessary to sketch out a third sequence concerning the way in which French philosophers took up or did not take up the legacy of ‘reflexive philosophy’ (what tended to be called the ‘philosophy of the cogito’). It was thought at the time that the so-called structuralists had made a break with the philosophy of the subject; this would have been an opportunity for me to consider more closely how deep that break was. I say ‘structuralists’, for there was not yet talk of post-structuralism. This label would only appear later and was born not in France but in the United States. To use it for authors such as Derrida, Foucault or Lyotard is, indeed, not unjustified. For while one may well say of Lacan or even Althusser that they are (or at least wanted at the time to be) structuralist thinkers, it makes no sense to apply the term ‘structuralist’ to thinkers who never put forward analyses of a structural kind.
A section on Ricœur would have allowed me to call into question the view of philosophy that was commonly held – at least in France – in the 1960s. The authors who were described (rightly or wrongly) as structuralists thought of themselves as critics of the philosophy of the cogito, and claimed the heritage of the thinkers whom Ricœur called the ‘masters of suspicion’ – Marx, Nietzsche and Freud. But had they altogether given up on grounding philosophy in a radical initiative by the philosopher – the self-positing of a subject? Could one not already discern in them signs of the renewed assertion of a subject characterized by ‘care of the self’ that would subsequently be seen particularly in Foucault?
I had occasion to revisit this last point at a conference at Harvard organized by the journal History and Theory for the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of Foucault’s Les Mots et les Choses [The Order of Things]. When that book appeared, it sold enormously well and was fêted as the manifesto of structuralist philosophy. But did people really read it, and if so what did they make of it? For my part, I found the book fairly obscure in its method and aims, and I was not at all enlightened by the explanations offered by reviewers and by the author himself. What did people take from the book? Who, today, makes use of its conceptual framework? I consulted what several eminent experts on Foucault’s thought, starting with Paul Veyne, had written about the book, but found no explanation. I concluded that they had not managed to grasp its real point either.
Having re-read The Order of Things for my contribution to the conference, it appeared to me that, in reality, Foucault was trying to respond to Merleau-Ponty, even if he did not cite the latter. Merleau-Ponty had devoted several courses of lectures at the Sorbonne to the question of the relationship between phenomenology and the human sciences. These lectures had not been published in book form in the author’s lifetime, but a mimeographed version could easily be obtained from the Centre de documentation universitaire (an office in the Place de la Sorbonne in Paris that distributed summaries of lecture courses).
The problem was to know whether an answer could be given to Kant’s fourth question, what is the human being? How do the human sciences and reflexive philosophy answer it? In his lectures, Merleau-Ponty presents and discusses two answers. Firstly, the answers given by the sciences in so far as they are pursued in accordance with the principles of naturalism; by treating all thought, including that of the human sciences themselves, as merely the product of psychological, sociological or historical circumstances, these answers have the cost of leading us into a thorough relativism under the guises variously of psychologism, sociologism or historicism. Secondly, the answer given by Husserl when, against the objectivism of the sciences, he proffers the philosophical procedure of radical reflection (through performing a phenomenological reduction). Merleau-Ponty rejects both options. He believes neither in the possibility that a science that is objectifying by principle may account for itself, nor in the possibility of transmogrifying the philosopher into a pure ego distinct from the empirical roles that it may be called to play. In concluding, Merleau-Ponty invites us to practise radical reflection in a different way, not by suspending all connexion with contingent existences through reduction but by finding in the human sciences themselves the means to resist the total objectification of the mind and to make possible radical reflection.
Foucault never mentions these lectures and does not cite Merleau-Ponty in chapter 10 (titled ‘The human sciences’) of his book, but I have since learned that the manuscript of The Order of Things indeed includes a long discussion of Merleau-Ponty, which Foucault removed in the end. Read as a response to the programme sketched by Merleau-Ponty, chapter 10 begins to make sense. The archaeology of ourselves is the path proposed by Foucault after having criticized the two reflexive paths offered by phenomenology, that of phenomenological reduction as defined by Husserl (already questioned by Merleau-Ponty) and that of a more existential phenomenology advocated by Merleau-Ponty. This archaeology – that is, an intellectual history of our conceptual systems aiming to bring out the discontinuity between successive periods – would be philosophical (or reflexive) in so far as it allows those who undertake it to locate themselves in history through juxtaposing the intellectual system in which we think today with other systems that were prevalent at other times. From this arises the idea that when I think something, rather than me expressing myself it is in fact the system that produces the thoughts that I think I form myself. But what leads Foucault to draw this conclusion? Fundamentally, it is the prejudice that I cannot have thoughts that are my own unless I am also the author of the signifying forms in which I articulate them. In order to be a thinking subject, I should have to express myself in a language that is not shared with and received from others, but my own creation.
Vincent Descombes is a directeur d’études emeritus in philosophy at the École des hautes études en sciences sociales, Paris. His other books translated into English include Objects of All Sorts: A Philosophical Grammar (1986 [1983]), The Barometer of Modern Reason: On the Philosophies of Current Events (1993 [1989]), The Mind’s Provisions: A Critique of Cognitivism (2001 [1995]) and The Institutions of Meaning: A Defense of Anthropological Holism (2014 [1996]). E. E. Sheng is a doctoral student in philosophy at Merton College, Oxford.
