Julien Benda
Julien Benda [ bɛda ] ( born December 26, 1867 in Paris, † June 7, 1956 in Fontenay -aux -Roses near Paris ) was a French philosopher and writer
Life and work
Julien Benda comes from an assimilated Jewish family of merchants and studied mathematics and history.
As a representative of a resolute realism he turned against irrational positions in the philosophy and art at the beginning of the 20th century and condemned in his work Belphégor (1918 ) emotion and intuition. He fell mainly in the years 1912-1914 in an intensive examination of Henri Bergson and his philosophy of life.
In particular, in the novel The ordination (1910/1912) and the famous essay The betrayal of the intellectuals (1927, in the original: La trahison of Clerks ), he lamented a trend of the intelligentsia, which they were entitled at position of universalism, its key value of justice and to betray their organizational form of democracy and increasingly add " political passions " as the class struggle, nationalism or racism. His idea of intellectuals ( in the original: Clerks ) describes a class "whose activities are already not aligned by nature practical objectives; People that their satisfaction in art, science or metaphysical speculation - in short, looking, in the possession of intangible goods ". As an intellectual role models to him Plato, Descartes and Kant were
In the study of the European nation (1933 ), he joined an early one for a rational unified Europe and called for a supranational reason. Not the Zollverein, but thinkers such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte had created the German nation. "Europe will be seriously or not to be." Accordingly, he critically turned in his essay The ordeal of Democracies (1942 ) against the Popular Front and the National Socialism.
Effect
With new editions of his most important work on the treason of the intellectuals in the 1950s and 1970s, he released after his death in the French scholarly circles as well as in the public again and again from debates about the role of intellectuals and its relationship to social power positions. In Germany, his work was very much less attention, although it also deals extensively with the German intellectuals. In the 1980s, Edward Said followed up on it and developed from a controversial reading of Benda's Treason his idea of " secular intellectuals ".
Bibliography
- Les sentiments de Critias - 1917
- Belphégor: essai sur l' esthétique de la société française présente - 1919
- Les amorandes - 1922
- La croix de roses; Precede d'un dialogue avec l' auteur d' Eleuthère - 1923
- Lettres à Mélisande - 1926
- L' ordination - 1926
- La trahison of Clerks - 1927
- Cléanthis ou du Beau et de l' actuel - 1928
- Properce, ou Les amants de Tibur - 1928
- Apposition - 1930
- Outline of a histoire des Français dans leur volonté d'être une nation - 1932
- Discours à la nation européenne - 1933
- La jeunesse d'un clerc - 1936
- Précision (1930-1937) - 1937
- Un régulier dans le siècle - 1937
- La grande épreuve of démocraties. Essai sur les principes démocratiques: leur nature, leur histoire, leur valeur Philosophique. - 1942
- Exercice d'un enterré vif, juin 1940 -August 1944-1945
- La France byzantine, ou Le triomphe de la littérature pure: Mallarmé, Gide, Proust, Valéry, Alain Giraudoux, Suarès, les Surrealistes: essai d'une psychologie du original littérateur - 1945
- You poétique. Selon l' Humanité, non selon les poètes - 1946
- Non possumus. À propos d'une certaine poésie moderne - 1946
- Le rapport d' Uriel - 1946
- Tradition de l' existentialisme, ou, Les philosophies de la vie - 1947
- Trois idoles romantiques: le dynamisme, l' existentialisme, la dialectique matérialiste - 1948
- You style d' idées: Reflexions sur la pensée, sa nature, ses réalisations, sa valeur morale - 1948
- Les cahiers d'un clerc, 1936-1949 - 1949
- La crise du rationalisme - 1949
German
- The betrayal of the intellectuals (Fr. La trahison of clerks, 1927, 1948) 1978, 1983, Fischer TB, Frankfurt 1988 ( out of print); Publisher Andre Thiele, Mainz 2013 ISBN 978-3-940884-71-8