excerption of a book - 2

The Makingof an Anthropologist

I was studying philosophy with a view to sitting the agregation  competitive examination, but this was the result less of a genuine vocation than of a dislike for the other subjects I had sampled up till then. When I reached the top or "philosophy" class in the lycee, I was vaguely in favour of a kind of rationalistic monism, which I was prepared to justify and support; I therefore made great efforts to get into the section taught by Gustave Rodrigues, who had the reputation of being "advanced". He was, it is true, a militant member of the SFIO, but on the philosophical level all he had to offer was a mixture of Bergsonism and Neo-Kantism which I found extremely disappointing. He expounded his dry dogmatic views with great fervour and gesticulated passionately throughout his lessons. I have never known so much naive conviction allied to greater intellectual poverty. He committed suicide in 1940 when the Germans entered Paris.

It was in that class that I first began to learn that every problem, whether serious or trifling, may be solved by the application of an always idential method, which consists in contrasting two traditional views of the question; the first is introduced by means of a justification on common-sense grounds, then the justification is distroyed with the help of the second view; finally, both are dismissed as being equally inadiquate, thanks to the third view which reveal the incomplete character of the first two; these are now reduced by verbal artifice to complementary aspects of one and the same reality: form and subject matter, container and content, being and appearance, continuity and discontinuity, essence and existene, etc. Such an exercise soon became purly verbal, depending, as it does, on a certain skill in punning, which replaces thought: assonance, similarity in sound and ambiguity gradually come to form the basis of those brilliantly ingenious intellectural shifts which are thought to be the sign of sound philosophizing.