Because I like to plan things in advance (it provides more opportunities for spontaneity), in six months' time I will be presenting at the
Existentialist Society on "The Decline in French Philosophy" (April 4, 2026). There can be no doubt of my long-standing Francophile tendencies when it comes to the fine arts, cuisine, republican politics, and yes, especially French philosophy, at least from the Enlightenment to the Situationists. I admire the gentle spirit of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the grand knowledge and scope of Denis Diderot, and the courage of the entire body of "les philosophes" who took on the absolutism of the monarchy, the dead hand of the church and helped establish the modern public sphere through salon gatherings that, scandously, were hosted by women patrons, "les salonnières"!
Fast-forward to the twentieth century, and again I find myself delving deeply into the mathematics and physics of Henri Poincaré, the perceptual phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty, which would add to the hermeneutics of Paul Ricoeur. I have all the time in the world for the incredible contributions to feminism by Simone de Beauvoir and consider her a better philosopher than her companion, Jean-Paul Sartre. Both, along with Albert Camus' ontological absurdism and the incredible personal standards of Simone Weil, raised and established existentialism a powerful force in the world of philosophy, demanding the primacy of existence over essence, authenticity in behaviour and thought, and recognition to the tension between people as objects and subjects.
These were all great thinkers in hard times. But subsequent to these contributions, things started to go astray. Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze, and Félix Guattari's were all unable to incorporate their necessary criticisms of structuralism into subject disciplines. Jacques Derrida's would engage in intentional obfuscation through words with ambivalent meaning. Bruno Latour's social constructivism would end up becoming impossibly anti-scientific. Jean-François Lyotard retreated to the sublime, and Jean Baudrillard became obsessed with the interrelationship of signs and hypereality. Luce Irigaray asserted that E=mc^2 is a "sexed equation" and fluid mechanics is neglected in engineering because fluids are feminine.
It's not as if it's all bad; Foucault, Deleuze, and Guattari all highlighted abhorrent behaviours in abusive institutions. Derrida's deconstructionism is a useful method to highlight the unity of opposites. Latour does recognise the role of scientific language and practices. Lyotard and Baudrillard both hinted at what could have been a sociology of the information age, and Irigaray really does provide a political economy grounded in sexual difference. But so much of the content produced by post-WWII French philosophers is simply gibberish, ignorant, or both. This, of course, has been explored in the past as "fashionable nonsense", an evocative title by Sokal and Bricmont, who highlight the sort of gibberish that eventually led to the
The Postmodern Essay generator, produced by a Melbourne-based computer scientist.
For what it's worth, I do appreciate the use of metaphors and puns; they're often not just witticisms, they can also provide some linguistic-therapeutic insight. But I do wonder whether the success of ordinary language philosophy on one hand and formal pragmatics on the other has led to a situation where much of French philosophy has become more of an art than something tied to logic, ontology, and epistemology. At least, in this context, Catherine Malabou is returning to reality with work on brain plasticity and François Recanati with conditional pragmatics. These are, at least, positive projects after decades of French philosophy providing content that was highly entertaining but ultimately superficial.
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elainegrey
