New Philosophers
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The New Philosophers (French nouveaux philosophes) is a new strain of philosophers (including André Glucksmann, Alain Finkielkraut and Bernard Henri-Lévy) that first appeared in the early 1970s in France, as critics of the previously-fashionable "leftist" philosophers, which would include many post-structuralists and Sartre, that they accuse of valuing collectionism and ideology higher than the humanitarian individual. As such they consider their ideas as belonging to the same antihumanistic tradition as Nietzsche and Heidegger. Recently their criticism found a new target in multiculturism and the leftist indifference to the humanitarian needs of their participants for being a western invention.
The mark of the new philosophers was to cast a general doubt on the tendency to argue from 'the left', by attributing too much inherent power-worship in the whole tradition, or at least what it borrowed from Hegel and Marx. They thus challenged the (French) stereotype that an intellectual was necessary a left-wing intellectual, such as illustrated by Jean-Paul Sartre or, in a completely differerent stance, Michel Foucault.
Their soubriquet possibly is a reference to the philosophers of the future that Nietzsche anticipated in his work Beyond Good and Evil[1]. The movement was harshly criticized by Gilles Deleuze, who spoke of a return to the "big concepts" using dualist oppositions, something which his generation had struggled against.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Jenseits von Gut und Böse - Friedrich Nietzsche: Erstes Hauptstück: Von den Vorurtheilen der Philosophen, 2nd paragraph [1]
