PARAIN (Brice). - Lot 235

PARAIN (Brice). Born in Courcelles-sous-Jouarre. 1897–1970. Philosopher, essayist. Close friend of Albert Camus. Autograph letter signed with his initials “BP” to “Dear Merleau-Ponty.” No place, May 15, 1945. 3 pp. 1/2 in-8. NRF letterhead. A FASCINATING LETTER FROM BRICE PARAIN TO THE PHENOMENOLOGICAL PHILOSOPHER MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY ...I read your foreword last night and this morning. So the best thing is for me to write to you right away. It confirmed what I told you yesterday, somewhat bluntly. (Somewhat bluntly because—as I realize more and more—my entire mission would be to save France from phenomenology, and my joy in achieving that, but time is against me; events must unfold in order; when we haven’t even reached Hegel yet, we can’t jump straight into the 20th century. As for you, you’re on the brink; all it will take is a little Marxism. See p. XI: “The world is what we perceive.” No. We are not that literary being—or rather, we are not only that— and writers only make sense when they are a very small minority, when they are immediately absorbed, when they form a social body—just as the revolution only makes sense when it leads to a true utterance, that is, to a decision. The rest belongs to the realm of silence. Phenomenology seeks to transform silence into speech. That is the impossible task. There is, in fact, a problem of intuition. Bergson had his rightful place in history. And perhaps one must speak at length about intuition—as the Germans did in the 19th century and the Russians did—to come to understand that it is merely a means of speech, and that speech is a sacrifice; just as one must steep oneself for a long time in aestheticism, probably to come to understand that the aesthetic feeling is indeed, at its origin (what you say about it on pp. XII and XIII is quite accurate), but in the service of logic... In short, here are my reflections, one after another. Your foreword is excellent, clear, accurate, and powerful. It reaches the brink of salvation. But, if it is true that “philosophy is about (re)learning to see the world,” it only begins to be philosophy once it has seen the world anew, once the draft has been discarded and the result has been written down. Such is our condition (...). Otherwise (p. X), you exude the dream of a golden age (“before any thematization”), you remain stuck in description, you forget dialectics, dialogue, and the historical role of humanity, and your return to history is purely aesthetic; it is heroic—it is the return of a victim who sacrifices herself so as not to sacrifice anything, which is contradictory. We are paying the price for the Western interpretation of Christianity, in which there is no longer any resurrection... I’m moving too fast. It’s just that I have to catch my train shortly. We’ll talk about this again. And perhaps my essay on language and existence, followed by my novel, will better explain to you what I no longer wish to repeat now. What you need to understand clearly right now is that the body is a necessity and not a remedy (...) that, likewise, communion is a necessity (external, imposed) and not a remedy, that the remedy will only be effective once the body once again possesses what is necessary to be a thinking body (...). Make one more effort, and you will see clearly (as you almost say, incidentally, on p. XII) that everything is connected in German idealism and Husserl’s Critique of Judgment, Heidegger, and contemporary literature—that our Western joy has not emerged from this problem of the axiomatization of thought, but that an axiom has meaning only when applied to a discovery, that its truth lies precisely in not being formulated, as in Archimedes’ axiom of the infinite, whereas it is emptied of meaning when formulated, and that this formulation means it must make way for another. Our Western joy must, in one way or another, break free from its current Aristotelianism. We will surely force it to do so...