Volume 17, Number 10 · December 16, 1971
French Toast
By Stephen Toulmin
Chance and Necessity
by Jacques Monod, translated by Austryn Wainhouse
Knopf, 199 pp., $6.95
The rhetorical, disputatious, ideological cultural life in France (as Mary McCarthy recently reminded us) obeys different rules from those in les pays anglophones. To Jean-François Revel, exaggeration can even become 'an artistic form' in itself; yet this fact is concealed by the belief that French is the supremely logical language. So, however ideological their aims, intellectual debates in France always affect a strict Cartesian form, according to the demands of the esprit géométrique. The Priest and the Schoolmaster who symbolize French intellectual life still assault each other with syllogisms. As a result, Parisian best-sellers are particularly likely to be misunderstood by Anglo-Saxons, who read their debating points as assertions, their exaggerations as dogmas, and their oratory as rigorous proof.
Review, 4851 words
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