Ethics and Aesthetics Intellectual Movement in France

The cut emerged from World contend II as a shadow of their former self. The colonies were declaring their license from France superstar by one, or fighting successful wars of matter liberation against the European colonizer, uniform Vietnam and Algeria. The humiliating defeat by the Nazis, the liberation at the hands of an America which they instinctively distrusted, and the issue of their colonies contributed to the desire for radical change among the leading edge of French intellectuals.

One of the first things to fall was the unquestioning rationalism imparted by Descartes as the official school of French philosophical judgment. Descartes was a rationalist. He believed that a hu homo being could arrive at the truth and true values by subjecting all of one's beliefs to a strict scepticism, which has become known as Cartesian doubt. every suggestion of falsehood in a belief should frame it unsuitable as a basis for knowledge (Warburton, school of thought: The Classics, 2001)

This type of scepticism is the basis of science, but Descartes was no scientist. Descartes believed that one could unlock the secrets of temperament by pure inductive and deductive reasoning. He thought that in order to understand nature we would have to subject it to the precision of mathematical and geometric analysis. He renounced the senses as a reliable method to u

nderstand the true nature of reality, because he felt them to be unreliable witnesses. This rejection of the information of the senses in favor of pure thought as a basis for certain knowledge is an good example of the famous dualism associated with the philosopher, which is one of the weakest areas of his philosophy. He never manages to explain how the number and mind interact, although he once expressed the opinion that they determine in the pineal gland in the brain.

"It is the characteristic of the example imperative that it does not determine an end, and the actions are not g all overned by an end, but flows from the free leave and has no regard for an end. Our immunity and refraining has an inner goodness, irrespective of its end.

Thus moral goodness endows man with an immediate, inner, absolute moral worth".

This Cartesian influence, which has prejudiced French intellectuals against the life of the senses (although famously not the French people), as we will see when we examine the post-World War II ethics and aesthetics of France, has led to a characteristic hyper-intellectuality that consistently favors the head over the heart. Certainly this was not the case with the Dadaists and Surrealists, who gave free and playful draw rein to their most wayward impulses, 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 bare in the intellectually challenging but emotionally sterilized work of Alain Robbe-Grillet and Jean-Luc Godard.

Goddard was an expert in the conventional use of montage, which twain Hollywood and the European film makers had mastered. But with the encouragement of fellow filmmaker Francois Truffaut, who wrote the script, he dispensed with them, introducing a freshly improvised
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