Name Julien Benda | Nominations Prix Goncourt | |
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Books The treason of the intellectuals, Immanuel Kant | ||
Faut-il ressusciter Julien Benda ? -- Partie VII : Débat et conclusion
Julien Benda (26 December 1867 – 7 June 1956) was a French philosopher and novelist. He remains famous for his short book, La Trahison des Clercs (The Treason of the Intellectuals or The Betrayal of the Intellectuals). He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in Literature four times.
Contents
- Faut il ressusciter Julien Benda Partie VII Dbat et conclusion
- Faut il ressusciter Julien Benda Partie II Pascal Engel
- Life
- References
Faut-il ressusciter Julien Benda ? -- Partie II : Pascal Engel
Life
Born into a Jewish family in Paris, Benda became a master of French belles-lettres. Yet he believed that science was superior to literature as a method of inquiry. He disagreed with Henri Bergson, the leading light of French philosophy of his day.
Benda is now best remembered for his short 1927 book La Trahison des Clercs, a work of considerable influence. It was translated into English in 1928 by Richard Aldington; the U.S. edition had the title The Treason of the Intellectuals, while the British edition had the title The Great Betrayal. It was republished in 2006 as The Treason of the Intellectuals with a new introduction by Roger Kimball. This polemical essay argued that European intellectuals in the 19th and 20th century had often lost the ability to reason dispassionately about political and military matters, instead becoming apologists for crass nationalism, warmongering and racism. Benda reserved his harshest criticisms for his fellow Frenchmen Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès. Benda defended the measured and dispassionate outlook of classical civilization, and the internationalism of traditional Christianity.
Closing this work, Benda darkly predicts that the augmentation of the "realistic" impulse to domination of the material world justified by intellectuals into an "integral realism" risked producing an all-encompassing species-civilization which completely ceased "to situate the good outside the real world". Human aspirations, specifically after power, would become the sole end of society. In closing, bitterly, he concludes: "And History will smile to think that this is the species for which Socrates and Jesus Christ died."
Other works by Benda include Belphégor (1918), Uriel's Report (1926), and Exercises of a Man Buried Alive (1947), an attack on the contemporary French celebrities of his time. Most of the titles in the bibliography below were published during the last three decades of Benda's long life; he is emphatically a 20th-century author. Moreover, Benda survived the German occupation of France, 1940–1944, and the Vichy regime despite being a Jew and having called the Germans "one of the plagues of the world".
He died in Fontenay-aux-Roses.