Raymond Aron (March 14, 1905 - October 17, 1983)
Raymond Aron's death has moved international opinion; it has saddened French opinion, and even more deeply affected the Collège, since he wished to complete and crown his academic career in our house. The image of Raymond Aron perceived by the general public probably differs from the one we ourselves formed of him, reading his books and listening to his speeches. But I doubt that we should separate the journalist from the philosopher and theorist to such an extent. He confessed that he never spent more than three half-hours writing an article. And if, throughout his academic life, he was able to complete so many great books, it was partly because the typing of his lectures - for which he used only a few notes - lent itself almost without retouching to printed publication. Above all, it is striking that, as he explains in his Memoirs, he spent most of his lessons - and I quote - "confronting his judgments, contemporary with events, with the overall view" that he took of them from a distance after ten or twenty years, "purifying and stylizing" comments written as the news unfolded. His passionate attention to facts, observed from the most concrete angle, was inseparable from his theoretical reflection. Nothing illustrates this alliance better than the names of the two authors - Kant and Proust - whose reading, he says, transported him during his student years. It was this duality, or rather the complementary nature of the two aspects of his character, which, it seems to me, drew him to Clausewitz. Like him, Clausewitz had combined thought and action; better still, he had turned his action into the subject of reflection. No wonder, then, that this remarkable case, in which he undoubtedly recognized himself, took center stage in his lectures at the Collège. For three years, he devoted his time to the lectures that became part of Penser la guerre.
Shared with Clausewitz, this singular ability to be at once "engaged" and "spectator" - two words chosen by Aron for the title of a book reproducing radio interviews - thus manifested, at the level of his personal life, philosophical convictions from which, since his first works appeared in 1938, he has never detached himself. In his view, collective history can no more be judged from the angle of pure theory than individual freedom can be defined as a constantly renewed creation in the moment. Societies are what history has made them; and the individual himself lives under the dependence of slowly internalized models, customs and beliefs. So when Aron meditated on his previous positions in his lectures, he was merely putting into practice the fundamental principle of his philosophy. The thinker's job is not to decree reality, but to reflect on it. It is in history - the history of his society, his environment, his own history (the ethnologist would add: in the immense range of experiences lived by human societies), that the philosopher seeks and finds the raw material for his speculations. Raymond Aron has often been described as a cold, impassive thinker. What I've just said about his lectures, in which the problems linked to his personality merged with those raised for him by people and their history, shows that this apparent coldness was merely a means by which he forced himself to contain a very real sensitivity. But in his dealings with individuals and the world at large, he witnessed the ravages of systemic thinking and the evils of ideologies, and throughout his life he imposed a kind of asceticism on himself to think against himself and submit everything to the control of reason. He was a late entrant to the Collège, already adorned with legendary prestige. An intimate of Sartre's at the École Normale, an observer in Germany of the rise of Nazism, close to de Gaulle in London, a contributor to Combat alongside Albert Camus, a friend of Malraux, a familiar face to the great and the good of the world, he was one of the key players in this dazzling period of French intellectual life in the aftermath of the Second World War. Apart from the serious health accident that convinced him, from 1977 onwards, that he had only been given a reprieve, he kept - and I quote - "a memory of intense activity and moral peace" from his years at the Collège. election to the Collège," he says, "rejuvenated me and gave me a new zeal. Our house can be proud of this. We ourselves will cherish the memory of his radiant intelligence and moral integrity. By giving eight years of his life to the Collège, he allowed us to rub shoulders with a wise man.
Claude Lévi-Strauss, 1984.
Reference
Printed
Lévi-Strauss C., "Hommage à Raymond Aron (14 mars 1905 – 17 octobre 1983)", L’annuaire du Collège de France, Paris, Collège de France, n° 84, 1984, p. 73-74.
