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Ethics and Aesthetics of Post War France

the hands of an America which they instinctively distrusted, and the loss of their colonies contributed to the desire for radical change among the leading edge of French intellectuals.

One of the first things to fall was the unquestioning rationalism imparted by Descartes as the official school of French philosophical thought. Descartes was a rationalist. He believed that a human being could arrive at the truth and true values by subjecting all of one's beliefs to a strict scepticism, which has become known as Cartesian doubt. Any suggestion of falsehood in a belief should render it unsuitable as a basis for knowledge (Warburton, Philosophy: The Classics, 2001)

This type of scepticism is the basis of science, but Descartes was no scientist. Descartes believed that one could unlock the secrets of nature by pure inductive and deductive reasoning. He thought that in order to understand nature we would have to subject it to the precision of mathematical and geometric analysis. He renounced the senses as a reliable method to understand the true nature of reality, because he felt them to be unreliable witnesses. This rejection of the information of the senses in favor of pure thought as a basis for certain knowledge is an illustration of the famous dualism associated with the philosopher, which is one of the weakest areas of his philosophy. He never manages to explain how the flesh and mind interact, although he once expressed the opinion that they meet in the pineal gland in the brain.

This Cartesian influence, which has prejudiced French intellectuals against the life of the senses (although famously not the French people), as we will see when we examine the post-World War II ethics and aesthetics of France, has led to a characteristic hyper-intellectuality that consistently favors the head over the heart. Certainly this was not the case with the Dadaists and Surrealists, who gave free and playful rein to their most wayward impu...

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Ethics and Aesthetics of Post War France. (1969, December 31). In LotsofEssays.com. Retrieved 03:24, March 29, 2024, from https://www.lotsofessays.com/viewpaper/1703383.html