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Jess Harris-Braun

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“The time has returned to speak the words not of Plato, not of Kant, but those of Epicurus: ‘The flesh cries out to be saved from hunger, thirst and the cold.’” (p.4)

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“At all levels of history we will find the traces of a protest in favor of man in his totality, forever stifled, forever aborted because every protest in the name of man in his totality brings with it an accusation of the world as it is. We will find it in Rabelais, in Spinoza, in Diderot. It will flourish in Marx. It will cease to be stifled. Men will want the humanist mythology to become a train of events; they will take back all promises, but they will fulfill them.” (p. 3)

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“In the face of Plato himself, there is the line of Callicles, which goes directly to Nietzsche, the line that the dialog of The Sophist calls “sons of the earth” and in whom we recognize our ancestors, ‘trying to attract to the earth all that holds to the heavens and the invisible, and squeezing rocks and oak trees in their hands.’” (p. 3)

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“It is quite clear that M. Benda has a Platonic idea of the western world and of Hellenism, which brings in its train the affirmation of rigorously intelligible values and notions, purged of all the values and concrete events of human life. It is quite true that this concept triumphed in Greece during a brief period, that it then served as a theoretical justification during entire eras of bourgeois thought. But Platonism is not all of Hellenism. I don’t find this separation in Protagoras, I don’t find it among the Stoics, I don’t find it in Epicurus, and not even among the Alexandrians.” (p. 2)

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“the civilization it is your ambition to construct, is it simply a flowering and prolongation of western values, or is it a break with it? I don’t accept this alternative. Since M. Benda is an Eleatic thinker he wants yes or no answers. Since communists are descendants of Hegel they only give him yes and no answers. And so we answer: this civilization is at one and the same time a prolongation and a break.” (p. 2)

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“Humanism dreamed as well; one of its dreams was the perfection of man, the other his totality. I think we can find these wishes scattered about from Aristotle to Spinoza, from the Renaissance to Goethe.” (p. 1)

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Genealogies of Theory in Paul Nizan's On Humanism

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Genealogies of Theory in Paul Nizan's On Humanism