Ernest Renan

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Ernest Renan
Signature of Ernest Renan.svg

Ernest Renan (born February 28, 1823 in Tréguier , Département Côtes-d'Armor , † October 2, 1892 in Paris ) was a French writer , historian , archaeologist , religious scholar and orientalist . He was a member of the Académie française .

Life

Renan's birthplace in Tréguier , now turned into a museum as Maison Ernest Renan

Initially a student of Catholic theology , Renan was at the seminary Saint-Nicolas-du-Chardonnet in Paris from 1838 , moved to the seminary of Issy in 1841 and in 1843 to the Grand Séminaire de Saint-Sulpice . He received the minor orders in 1844 , but left the seminary in 1845 because he had serious doubts about the historical truth of the Holy Scriptures . He rejected a view of history based on Christian dogmas and was enthusiastic about German idealism and the critical "German exegesis" of the Bible ( Tübingen School ). His debut work L'Avenir de la Science reflects a positivist and culturally optimistic philosophy of history. It was published in 1890 with the subtitle Pensées de 1848 .

In 1855 Renan published a historical-systematic concordance of the Semitic languages . In 1859 he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Royal Prussian Academy of Sciences . The Bavarian Academy of Sciences elected him as a foreign member in 1860.

Renan conducted research in the Middle East in 1860/61 on an official basis and then published the results in La Mission de Phénice (2 volumes, 1864–1874). The first volume of his eight-volume main work Histoire des origines du Christianisme appeared in 1863 under the title Vie de Jésus . In this work Renan took up the results of the life of Jesus research in a novel-like form and tried to explain the life, the form and the way of Jesus from the ancient conditions of his time and to represent the figure of Jesus as that of a person who after was proclaimed "God" by his community after his death. On paradigm of evolutionism oriented, Renan saw the religious history as progress towards ever greater moral perfection. The book was a great success and at the same time - because of the continued influence of the Catholic Church - a scandal. Sixty thousand copies were sold in France alone within half a year. One edition followed the other, while Renan's opponents immediately responded with their own writings.

His appointment to a chair for oriental languages ​​at the Collège de France in 1862 was suspended due to the sharp criticism of the episcopate and the public of his historicizing view of the person of Jesus. In 1870 Renan, who did not see himself as anti-religious, was rehabilitated and in 1879 was elected a member of the Académie française . From 1883 until his death he was the manager of the Collège de France.

The democracy

In his work Dialogues et fragments philosophiques in 1876 he wrote:

“Reason and science are the products of mankind, but to attribute reason directly to the people and to realize it in the midst of this people - that is a chimera . It is not part of the nature of reason that it be understood by all the world. If such an initiation were to take hold, it would in any case not be possible through a form of lower democracy which seems to lead to the obliteration of every finer culture and every higher order. The principle that society exists solely for the welfare and freedom of the individuals who make it up is also inconsistent with nature's proposition that species alone are considered and the individual sacrificed. It is very much to be feared that the ultimate result of democracy understood in this way would represent a social condition in which a depraved mass has no other concerns than indulging in the enjoyment and pleasure of the ignoble average person. "

- Ernest Renan

What is a nation

Renan is also known for his speech on March 11, 1882 in the Sorbonne : Qu'est-ce qu'une nation? ("What is a nation?"), In which he gives the following definition:

“The nation is a great community of solidarity that is formed by a feeling for the sacrifices that have been made and that are still ready to be made. It presupposes a past and can still be summed up in the present by a tangible fact: satisfaction and the clearly expressed will to continue living together. The existence of a nation is (forgive me this metaphor) a daily plebiscite, just as the existence of the individual is a constant affirmation of life. "

- Ernest Renan

In this speech, which is often shortened to the phrase “The nation is a daily plebiscite ”, he also anticipated the idea of ​​the European Community as early as 1882 :

“The nations are not eternal. Once they have started, they will end. The European confederation will probably replace them. "

- Ernest Renan

Some authors criticize the ambiguity of the "daily plebiscite". They argue that Renan's inconsistent with his thinking. Its definition was influenced by the fall of Alsace in the Franco-Prussian War .

Islam and Science

On March 29, 1883, Ernest Renan gave a lecture at the Sorbonne on the relationship between Islam and modernity. Renan claimed that Islam was at odds with modernity.

"Just as it is initiated into its religion, around the age of ten to twelve, the Muslim child, who until then was still quite aroused at times, suddenly becomes fanatical, saturated with that conceit that it possesses everything that it regards as absolute truth, like a privilege over the happy, which is precisely what constitutes its spiritual inferiority. This stupid arrogance is the vice that determines the whole being of the Muselmann. The apparent simplicity of his worship instills in him an unjustified contempt for the other religions. "

- Ernest Renan

Jamal ad-Din al-Afghani , an Islamic philosopher, took a critical look at Renan's statements and tried to refute Renan. However, both agreed on elitist thinking: Philosophy carries further than religion - reason unites people, while religion separates them, because in contrast to the latter, whose dogmatic (mis) understanding is very simple, the former is only a few people immediately accessible. So it is not so much modern Europe facing the lagging Orient, but rather two intellectuals facing each other who have the same problem in mind.

anti-Semitism

In his Études d'Histoire Religieuse (studies on the history of religion) he claims - also in the tradition of Christian Lassen - that " Semites " are alien to military, political, scientific and spiritual progress; Intolerance is the natural consequence of their monotheism , which they have imposed on the Aryans, who are influenced by polytheism, from their culture. Her arrogant electoral awareness has been responsible for the hatred of her for 1800 years. By this he meant the Jews and the Muslims, in particular the Arabs, who, like the Jews, belong to the Semitic language group and ethnic group. Moritz Steinschneider , among others , a Jewish bibliographer and co-founder of Judaism, contradicted him and called Renan's assessments anti-Semitic for the first time .

In 1862, when comparing Sanskrit and Hebrew , Renan came to the conclusion that the “terrible simplicity of the Semitic mind” made the human brain “shrink” and closed it “to any higher intellectual achievement”. In 1883 he spoke in a “lecture about the Semitic peoples” about the supposed inability to achieve scientific and artistic achievements because of “the terrible simplicity of the Semitic mind, which makes the human mind inaccessible to every subtle idea, every subtle feeling, every rational research to oppose the same tautology 'God is God' ” .

Overall, Renan reduces Judaism to a preliminary stage of Christianity. Since he believes in human development and progress, he never uses the concepts of race theory in a biological-deterministic sense. In addition, he is convinced that the further development of mankind is based precisely on their intermingling, so that individual races are becoming increasingly less important. He spoke out resolutely against the anti-Semitism and racism that emerged after 1870.

reception

In 1919 the Société Ernest Renan was founded, whose first members included René Dussaud and Paul Alphandéry . Renan's influences can be found in Henri Bergson and in 19th century Russian literature.

Fonts

  • De la part des peuples sémitiques dans l'histoire de la civilization. Discours d'ouverture du cours de langues hébraïque, chaldaïque et syriaque au Collége de France. 2nd edition. Paris, Michel Lévy Frères, 1862
  • The life of Jesus , Paris, 1863, in the 1st volume of his "Histoire des origines du christianisme" (7 volumes, 1863–1883). Reissued in 1898 as a "popular edition" by Calmann Lévy.
  • Paul. Brockhaus; Levy Freres ;, 1869
  • L'Abbesse de Jouarre: Drame . Paris: Calmann Lévy, 1886
  • The apostles . Leipzig 1866 or Berlin, Hasselberg'sche Verlagshandlung, approx. 1870
  • Drames Philosophiques. Paris, Calmann, 1888
  • Childhood memories . With a foreword by Stefan Zweig . Frankfurt / M., Frankfurter Verlags-Anstalt 1925
  • Sur Corneille, Racine and Bossuet. Paris: Les Cahiers de Paris, 1926
  • My sister Henriette . Tübingen: Alexander Fischer, 1929
  • Morceaux Choisis. Èdités et annotées par Anna Brunnemann and Philipp Rossmann. Frankfurt am Main, Moritz Diesterweg, 1928
  • What is a nation , Speech on March 11, 1882 at the Sorbonne . With an essay by Walter Euchner , Europäische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg 1996; ISBN 3-434-50120-7 .
  • La Réforme intellectuelle et morale. Précédé de: Les Origines de la France contemporaine by Jean-Francois Revel. Paris: Union Générale d`Édition 1967
  • Islam and Science , a. u. ed. by Klaus H. Fischer, Schutterwald / Baden 1997
  • Spinoza , a. u. ed. by Klaus H. Fischer, Schutterwald / Baden 1996.

literature

Web links

Commons : Ernest Renan  - Collection of pictures, videos and audio files
Wikisource: Ernest Renan  - Sources and full texts
Wikisource: Ernest Renan  - Sources and full texts (French)
Wikiquote: Ernest Renan  - Quotes

Remarks

  1. ^ Members of the previous academies. Ernest Renan. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences , accessed on June 4, 2015 .
  2. ↑ Prof. Dr. Ernest Renan , member of the Bavarian Academy of Sciences .
  3. ↑ Ernest Renan; Dialogues et fragments philosophiques, 1876 (German 1877)
  4. ^ Joxe Azurmendi : Historia, arraza, nazioa . Elkar, Donostia 2014, ISBN 978-84-9027-297-8 , p. 187.
  5. ↑ Islam and Science , europa.clio-online.de ; L'Islamisme et la science , p. 3, archive.org ; see. also Ahmad Ali Heydari : Reception of Western Philosophy by the Iranian Thinkers in the Qajar Period , Diss., Bonn 2003, p. 124.
  6. ↑ Birgit Schäbler: Modern Muslims. Ernest Renan and the history of the first Islamic debate in 1883. Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2016, ISBN 978-3-506-78418-6 .
  7. ↑ Islam Debate of the 19th Century - A Struggle for Tradition and Reform . In: Deutschlandfunk Kultur . ( deutschlandfunkkultur.de [accessed April 20, 2018]).
  8. ↑ Birgit Schäbler: Modern Muslims. Ernest Renan and the history of the first Islamic debate in 1883. Ferdinand Schöningh, Paderborn 2016, ISBN 978-3-506-78418-6 .
  9. ^ Andreas Künzli: LL Zamenhof (1859–1917) . Esperanto, Hillelism (Homaranism) and the “Jewish question” in Eastern and Western Europe. Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2010, ISBN 978-3-447-06232-9 , p. 194 f . ( Limited preview in Google Book Search [accessed March 14, 2016]).
  10. ↑ See more recently Shlomo Sand : De la nation et du “peuple juif” chez Renan . Les liens qui libèrent, Paris 2009, ISBN 978-2-918597-03-2 .
  11. ↑ The life of Jesus
personal data
SURNAME Renan, Ernest
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French writer, historian, archaeologist and orientalist
DATE OF BIRTH February 28, 1823
PLACE OF BIRTH Tréguier
DATE OF DEATH October 2, 1892
Place of death Paris