The tragic life and principled politics of Trần Đức Thảo

It took five ill-fated conversations with Jean-Paul Sartre before the Vietnamese philosopher Trần Đức Thảo finally broke with French philosophy. Between November 1949 and January 1950, Thảo and Sartre recorded and transcribed their conversations on the relation between Marxism and the new philosophy of existentialism, with the intention of publishing them. Sartre hoped to prove that Marxism and existentialism – of which he was the primary representative – were consistent with one another: reconcilable projects. However, the two men’s exchange of views collapsed before completion, under a series of recriminations. Thảo remained bitter about this, later referring to an ‘insidious campaign’ among Sartre’s ‘disciples’ to paint him as responsible for the failure of this planned project. Today, the conversations are still lost.

For Thảo, their disagreement lay in the fact that Sartre did not recognise Marxism’s philosophical seriousness. For Sartre, traditional Marxism offered an attractive social and political programme but lacked a real or serious philosophical account of being and human nature. Sartre developed his ideas about existentialism out of an ambition to provide the foundations for a new Left-wing philosophy for the 20th century.

At the start of the 1940s, Thảo had the same intellectual project. He had arrived in France from a French protectorate in modern-day Vietnam on a governor-general’s scholarship to pursue his studies in Paris. Influenced by those around him, he became convinced that phenomenology, a new paradigm devised by Edmund Husserl, promised fresh answers to fundamental questions about the human condition. At that time, Thảo enjoyed a reputation in French philosophy as the most important interpreter and critic of Husserl’s thought.

By the 1950s, Thảo had changed his mind. After a decade working with Husserl’s phenomenological approach, he came to believe it was ultimately inadequate to the task of understanding human beings since it could not properly account for history and natural development. Thảo was also taken up and transformed by events. By the end of the Second World War, he was a key spokesperson in France for Vietnamese independence. As he became increasingly involved with the Viet Minh, his philosophical outlook changed. Only orthodox Marxism’s materialist understanding of history, he claimed, could provide a full and demystified account of where people’s ideas about themselves and the world come from.

Thảo came to believe that his French philosophical counterparts had chosen their own comfort and role in the Western bourgeois imperialist regime over the morally superior path of supporting revolutionary communism. In 1951, after the publication of his most celebrated book, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, Thảo departed for Vietnam. He would not return to Paris until 1991, two years before his death.

Thảo’s time in Vietnam was hard: although the country honours him today, in his lifetime he was persecuted and kept in poverty by the state. Therefore, Thảo’s most important work was all produced in France during the 1940s. Its interest lies not only in the originality with which he navigates the prevailing currents in French thought, but how he responds to some of the most important conflicts of the 20th century: the Cold War and the worldwide movements for colonial independence. The result is a body of work that raises important questions about how to understand the relation between who we are, and the history and society that shape us. Additionally, Thảo’s refusal to distinguish between the philosophical, the political and the personal led him to become one of the first theorists of the divide between colonised and coloniser.

Trần Đức Thảo was born in a village in what was then the French protectorate of Tonkin, now Vietnam, in 1917. By a confluence of exceptional circumstances, he received a scholarship to study at the Louis-le-Grand and Henri IV lycées in Paris. In 1939, he was admitted to the École Normale Supérieure (ENS) in Rue d’Ulm, the most prestigious university for the humanities in France. Since he was from a French colony, and did not have the legal status of a French citizen, he was assigned a so-called ‘number two’ status at the ENS. He studied there during the Second World War: his instructors included the resistance fighter Jean Cavaillès (killed in 1944), and the philosopher Maurice Merleau-Ponty.

At first a committed Spinozist, Thảo’s encounters with these teachers brought him into contact with the phenomenological system of Edmund Husserl, which proved transformative. Thảo would spend most of the 1940s developing an interpretation and a response to Husserl’s writings: both the published works, and thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts and notebooks smuggled into Belgium during the war under the direction of a Franciscan priest named Herman Van Breda.

Husserl (1859-1938) had begun his career as a philosopher of mathematics, which he theorised as a system of abstract representations corresponding to how reality appears to us in certain situations. A mathematical theorem is not, strictly speaking, true: rather it is a statement of the truth, a kind of roadmap we can follow to reach an objective perception of what it describes. Thảo elaborates on this idea in Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism (1951) where he explains how ‘a theorem of geometry can be the object only of a confused intuition or of a blind or symbolic representation’ (his italics). In the first case, we may only dimly remember or partly understand what the theorem is getting at. In the second, where we understand it perfectly, ‘the only sensible thing to do is to subject it to careful analysis, in which the theorem is presented in the fullness of itself by the performance of the operations which demonstrate its truth.’ The premise of a divide between concrete reality, which can only be experienced, and our representations of it, which inevitably condense or repackage the truth, is the basic insight on which Husserl built his system.

The sky is seldom actually blue, and the meaning of ‘father’ is different whether we are three or 53 years old

Phenomenology has less mainstream purchase than, say, psychoanalysis; but there are many parallels between the two schools of thought. Both phenomenology and psychoanalysis were devised near the turn of the 20th century by intellectuals – Husserl and Sigmund Freud – who had grown up in assimilated Jewish families of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Freud the medical clinician and Husserl the Kantian logician were each devoted to the methods of rational enquiry. But both phenomenology and psychoanalysis fundamentally challenge the Enlightenment notion that human beings (at their best) and the world (as we can understand it) are rational. They each in different ways dispute the very coherence of rationality as an intellectual principle.

For example, take an ordinary statement that professes to be rationally grounded: ‘The sky is blue,’ ‘I am your father,’ ‘Two lines that are parallel do not meet,’ and so on. Instead of treating such observations at face value, both Husserl and Freud consider them to be surface effects. What makes such statements appear rational, in other words, is the false impression they give of being somehow apart from our ordinary human drives and experiences. For Freud, this all has to do with the past: in all parts of life, unknowingly, we repeat the dramas of our early years. Whatever justifications or explanations we invent, however little we may realise, when we act, we follow baby logic. Meanwhile, for Husserl, the essential thing is the present moment, the experience. At first, his point may seem merely to consist in the trite observation that we all see the world through our own eyes. But the profundity lies in his attempt to describe individual experience in systematic terms and offer a critique of everyday understanding. The sky is seldom actually blue, and the meaning of the term ‘father’ is different whether we are three or 53 years old.

What, in more-careless moments, we might call objective descriptions of these things are, for the phenomenologist, really a shorthand we use to develop a shared consistent picture of the world. This is more apparent when speaking about something like emotions, which are often difficult to put into words. Yet phenomenology is based on the idea that whatever we might be speaking about, we cannot fully capture it. Even a chair or a table, the more you look at them, start to exhibit new properties: to catch the light in unexpected ways, to betray their origins as wood formed by a certain hand, and so on. Phenomenology argues that what we normally mean by subjectivity and objectivity puts these terms the wrong way around. Usually, we treat personal things as subjective, and imagine that common systematic accounts of things are objective. This is not actually the case. Objectivity is what we find in our personal experience, when we encounter the object; subjectivity is the abstraction of terms and associations that we impose on our experience in order to understand it.

It was this system that Thảo spent the 1940s trying to interpret. In 1942, he submitted his thesis on Husserl at the ENS in Paris. In 1944, he travelled to Louvain in Belgium to collect some of Husserl’s unpublished manuscripts and smuggle them back to Paris. Thảo then kept them in his home for several years as he reworked his thesis into a book on Husserl’s philosophy.

Over the 1940s, Thảo grew more deeply involved in politics. From the mid-19th century, the French had been colonial rulers of the region then known as Indochina, encompassing modern-day Vietnam, Cambodia and Laos. During the Second World War, the Japanese invaded and occupied the region. When they left in 1945, the Viet Minh, a communist revolutionary force led by Ho Chi Minh, seized the opportunity to declare independence as the Democratic Republic of Vietnam. Thus began a chain of events leading to an eight-year war between France and the Viet Minh. By the end of the Second World War, Thảo was a leading spokesperson for the anticolonial Vietnamese independence movement in France. As the French state reacted to the movement, he became a target.

Towards the end of 1945, at the same time as French forces under General Leclerc landed in Saigon, Thảo was arrested and imprisoned in Paris. The arrest divided his compatriots at the ENS, and an effort to support him against the French state did not completely crystallise. From prison, Thảo wrote the first and most important of several articles on the conflict that were published in Les Temps modernes, the intellectual magazine founded by Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and Simone de Beauvoir. Thảo would later describe the article, titled ‘On Indochina’, as ‘existentialist’, and it would prove a key influence on Frantz Fanon. Thảo’s ‘On Indochina’ anticipated one of Fanon’s most important ideas: that universal ideals as we usually understand them are improper in discussions between coloniser and colonised, because to be colonised is precisely to be relegated outside the Western reach of the universal.

Thảo gives examples of how a word can mean virtually opposite things to colonised and coloniser

‘On Indochina’ (1946) is of more than just historical interest – Thảo does not merely argue for colonial independence, but tries to explain how the gap between the perspectives of coloniser and colonised makes it impossible to have debates on shared terms or to appreciate the other’s point of view. He refers to ‘a radical misunderstanding, which no explanation would be able to dissipate, since all expressions are understood in a sense opposed to the one in which they are pronounced.’

For the French, the so-called Annamites (as the Vietnamese in Indochina were known, and as Thảo calls them in ‘On Indochina’) were not truly French. But nor, since the community to which they had belonged was premodern and precolonial, did they fully count as a people in their own right. They were, for the average French person of good faith, in need of modernisation and proper integration into the international community. The Annamites, of course, saw the situation completely differently: they considered themselves part of a people who had been occupied and put to the service of a foreign power. ‘When one [side] says “liberty” or “progress”,’ writes Thảo, ‘the other hears “liberty-” or “progress-inside-the-French-system”, such that in order for Vietnam to be free, it must first remain inside this system, by force if necessary.’ The notions of liberty and progress presuppose that Vietnam should be a Western-style society with its accordant economic and social structures. To the extent it lacks this, it may be classed as a less developed society in need of Western help – which may amount to Western control. Thảo is arguably the first theorist of how the language and culture of Western imperialism is based on an erasure of the peoples colonised by Europe.

Another of Thảo’s examples of how a word can mean virtually opposite things to colonised and coloniser centres on the word ‘treason’ (trahison) and describes a situation similar to his own experience. From the perspective of the colonising French, an intellectual, he says, who is suddenly lifted out of the oppressed class to receive all the benefits and privileges of the powerful ‘is now a member [of the elite], and to purport to pass back to the side of the exploited class, is to commit treason.’ Yet the coloniser’s view is based on overlooking the fact that such a person is, and already considers themselves, a citizen of their own country: in this case, Vietnam. Thảo argues that what certain Vietnamese intellectuals such as himself experienced, from their own point of view, was their colonisers bestowing an array of privileges along with a subsequent demand for loyalty. In other words, a dishonourable bribe. Resistance and opposition by the privileged colonised, he says, is not only inevitable: for them it is the only honourable course, since ‘to abandon one’s own for a personal advantage is the very definition of the concept of treason.’ Thảo was claiming that the French were cultivating a class of native informants or loyalists.

Over the course of the 1940s, the tensions of Thảo’s position as a Vietnamese philosopher at the top of the French system seem to have weighed more and more on him. The burden began to colour his relationships with French intellectuals. He became disillusioned with the Parisian philosophical milieu, and his activism led him to a more radicalised Marxist point of view. In 1948, he wrote ‘The Phenomenology of Spirit in its Real Content’, a critical review for Les Temps modernes of Alexandre Kojève’s (still) influential presentation of G W F Hegel.

Kojève’s lectures on Hegel were a sensation in Parisian intellectual circles at the time, and Thảo himself considered this critique his break with the French philosophical scene. Essentially, Thảo’s criticism was that Kojève mystified the relation between Hegel’s concepts of Nature and Spirit, or the world as a whole and the human consciousness that emerges within it, in a way that left the door open for theological interpretations. For Thảo, Hegel’s dialectic, as reinterpreted by Marx, was a powerful means of showing how the mind is a product of the way living beings interact with their environment. Thảo defended the Marxist notion of human history as essentially the history of production, by framing it in terms of a broader biological theory, claiming that consciousness and mind developed from mediation between the organism and its surrounding environment. Thảo depicts an upward trajectory of evolutionary development from the smallest biomes to human beings, with more complex levels of awareness resulting from biological features such as the capacity to move oneself or to wield instruments.

In 1950, two years after his essay on Kojève, Thảo’s dispute with Sartre arose. As had been the case with Kojève, Thảo believed the disagreement with Sartre was both political and philosophical. From the 1940s to the ’80s, French philosophy attempted to chart a third way between the US and the Soviet Union, between capitalism and Marxism. What happened, instead, was the slow de-Marxification of the French intellectual elite, as it gradually became a mouthpiece for US capitalist ideology. Thảo seems to have grasped all this at an early stage, in part because he never believed in the possibility of a third way.

What had begun as an account of Husserl’s system became an attempt to highlight and transcend its weaknesses

Looking back on the postwar period from the vantage point of the 1980s, Thảo would later describe how ‘the surprise offensive of the Marshall Plan with the purging of Communist ministers from the governments of Western Europe’ left him and others with a choice between two alternatives: ‘Faced with the rise of colonialist imperialism, I could only choose Marxism.’ To say so implies, of course, that his counterparts tacitly chose capitalism. Thảo fought his battle with Sartre on philosophical grounds: idealism or materialism? The individual or the collective? The disputes between the two and their ideas came together in Thảo’s major work, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, a much-revised version of his 1942 thesis, which appeared in 1951.

Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism is regarded as Thảo’s most important work, and the most significant introduction to Husserl’s system for a generation of French students and thinkers, including Jacques Derrida, Jean-François Lyotard and Paul Ricoeur. What makes Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism philosophically important is Thảo’s argument that the phenomenological system ultimately undermines itself (see below). Thảo argues that to move beyond this paradox intellectually requires us to abandon phenomenology for an orthodox Marxist position, and claims that, instead of experience, natural and social development are the best philosophical foundations for an understanding of the world and human nature. In this sense, the book is also a record of its author’s own political and intellectual transformation during the 1940s. What had begun as an account of Husserl’s system became an attempt to highlight and transcend its weaknesses using a Marxist dialectical materialist framing; it reads like two books in one.

In Thảo’s account, Husserl’s phenomenological system is essentially flawed because, in seeking to avoid intellectual abstractions, it counsels a return to ‘experience’ – which is itself an abstraction. For Thảo: ‘The lived is just an abstract aspect of actual real life’ which consists in ‘the real movement by which nature becomes conscious of itself through biological evolution and human history.’ In other words, experience is not just a random flux from which we make our own ideas; it is a product of the biological and historical conditions in which we live. Husserl demonstrates how people’s concepts about the world come from their experiences, but these too come from somewhere. Human psychology, if taken to mean the study of how individuals come to their ideas about themselves and the world, is a subdiscipline of human evolution and social history. For Thảo, Husserl took to its limit the Cartesian mode of philosophising from the point of view of an individual consciousness. But his mistake was to regard pure formless experience as the ultimate zone of philosophical enquiry and to claim everything else was built on top of it. For Thảo, this meant that, despite himself, Husserl could not avoid falling into a solipsism by which one’s personal perspective becomes virtually the centre of the universe.

In the second part of Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, Thảo aims to offer a way beyond what he has shown to be Husserl’s solipsism. So Thảo offers a foundation for a full materialist account of the human condition: the development of the species, the trajectory of history and civilisation, the formation of the individual human being, and the relation between these epistemic layers. This account delves deeply into human evolution and child psychology. Throughout his work, Thảo accepts and represents the Western-centric, human-centric, teleological view of history he inherits from 19th-century Europe: somehow, things move from the earliest farmers to ancient Greece, then to the Middle Ages, and finally into capitalism. At its best, Thảo’s Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism is an effort to engage seriously with Marxism’s philosophical depth: it is not just a sociopolitical agenda, but an ambitious account of being and human nature.

The second part of Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism is less successful. It sometimes falls into the same naive materialism that Thảo elsewhere warned so forcefully against, viewing the world purely in a mechanistic manner, absent the wonder and nature of consciousness.

His life afterwards was less a trajectory than a series of aborted moves and battles against the odds

After completing Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism, Thảo left France for Vietnam. The rest of his life would prove tumultuous and tragic. In 1956, a few years after his return to Vietnam, the communist regime became tolerant of dissenting voices in the wake of the Soviet Union’s leader Nikita Khrushchev’s secret speech in Moscow. Gradually, there developed a culture of satire and criticism of the regime by intellectuals, most infamously in two journals respectively called Nhân Văn and Giai Phẩm (Thảo wrote for the second). What is known today as the Nhân Văn-Giai Phẩm affair resulted in the state banning the journals and punishing those who’d been involved with them. In 1958, Thảo was forced to make a public self-criticism, and got sent for re-education to a farm at the foot of mount Ba Vì, near Hanoi.

Thảo’s intellectual life afterwards was less a trajectory than a series of aborted moves and battles against the odds. When he finally returned to France in 1991, he was like a ghost: ‘The more we spoke,’ says one account from someone who met him during that period, ‘the less I knew what distinguished our conversation from a dream, or a nightmare.’ Thảo died in Paris in 1993, aged 75, leaving behind thousands of pages of unpublished manuscripts.

Thảo is a tragic figure, both in philosophy and in life. His work on phenomenology remains one of the clearest assessments of the scope and limits of Husserl’s system. But his intellectual legacy is much greater than this. Despite the education and privilege France had bestowed on him, Thảo refused to commit anything like ‘treason’ against the Vietnamese to whom he felt he belonged. Instead, he devoted himself to their cause, including on the plane of ideas, where his postcolonial critiques of liberal universalist language and his analysis of the perspective of the colonised influenced generations to come. Thảo’s greatest strength is how he strove to bring together the philosophical, the political and the personal, and to organise these all with some consistency. But this was also his weakness and, at his worst, it made him dogmatic. It was also the reason why he returned to Vietnam where he met his ruin. The life and work of Trần Đức Thảo bring us face to face with some of the hardest subjects: what kind of creatures are we? What is this world in which we find ourselves? How should we live? These questions are just as pressing today, and the answers no easier to find.