Alain (pseud. of Émile-Auguste Chartier) (1868-1951). French philosopher, essayist, critic, teacher, and mentor of the Radical party. The brief chapters of Alain's philosophical essays, the 5, 000 lapidary Propos devoted to politics, literature, aesthetics, science, ethics, economics, education, and religion, and his admiration for thinkers as diverse as Plato, Spinoza, Descartes, Hegel, and Comte, might suggest an eclectic and unsystematic approach. None the less, Alain's work was unified by his insistence on the virtues of vigilant doubt, by his lasting concern with the interdependence of per ception, judgement, and action, and by his faith in the will to freedom (Quatre-vingt-un chapitres sur l'esprit et les passions, 1921; Histoire de mes pensées, 1936). His belief that literature was a particularly rich source of ‘real ideas’ was borne out by his commentaries on Valéry's Charmes and La Jeune Parque (1929 and 1936), and by his readings of Balzac and Stendhal: he extolled the vitality and material density of Balzac's world and the autonomy, integrity, and will-power of Stendhal's heroes (Avec Balzac, 1937; Stendhal, 1935).
Alain was a brilliant and unconventional lycée teacher (he refused an appointment at the Sorbonne) whose influence was acknowledged by generations of distinguished disciples, among them Simone Weil, Georges Canguilhem, and Jean Prévost. A man of independent mind, he belonged to no philosophical school. However, his emphasis on the inseparability of consciousness of self and consciousness of the world, and his interest in perception and imagination, anticipated the insights of French existential phenomenology.
[Rhiannon Goldthorpe]
