lses, and for once and for all showed the absurdity of European intellectual pretensions. We see this influence in the more light-hearted mid-century artists like Jacques Tinguely. But it is certainly the case with French super-intellectuals from Jean-Paul Sartre to Jacques Derrida to Roland Barthes to Claude Levi-Strauss. And it is clearly evident in the intellectually challenging but emotionally sterile work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean-Luc Godard.
"In one of his essays Sartre remarks that for three centuries Frenchmen have been living by 'Cartesian freedom', with, that is to say, a Cartesian intellectualist idea of the nature of freedom. However this may be, it is hardly an exaggeration to say that the shadow of Descartes lies across French philosophy, not of course in the sense that all French philosophers are Cartesians but in the sense that in many cases personal philosophizing begins through a process of reflection in which positions are adopted for or against the ideas of the foremost French philosopher" (Coppleston 1977, p. 342-343).
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