Yvon Quiniou is a French Marxist philosopher. He published several interesting books, such as Atheism and Materialism Today (2004), Critique of Religion, a moral and intellectual imposition (2014), and especially a very useful For a critical approach to Islam (2016), of very cruel actuality.
Jean C. Baudet makes a very profound analysis of the last book of Yvon Quiniou, Misery of the contemporary philosophy, with regard to materialism (Misère de la philosophie contemporaine, au regard du matérialisme), L’Harmattan Edition, Paris, of his vigorous attack on the “literary” drift of the most publicized contemporary philosophers, denouncing the powder thrown into the eyes of the university (and hence of the media, and therefore of public opinion, and thus of politicians developing a single politically correct discourse of thought), and dismantling the statues of those that René Pommier called “sacred cows”. Quiniou chose to criticize in depth four of these thinkers sacred by the media prostrations: Husserl, Heidegger, Foucault, Deleuze, but he cites some others in passing.
Indeed, the dominant and even dominating current (one can speak of “intellectual terrorism”) of the high European-American intelligence begins with the works (very solid at the beginning) of Edmond Husserl who, at the beginning of the 20th century, undertakes to reconstruct philosophy and finally to give it the gnoseological status of a science. But strangely enough, the great German thinker turns away from the science (biological evolution, psychoanalysis, sociology, comparative history of religions, radioactivity, quanta …), and he bases an inextricable amphigouric logomachy under the impressive name of ”transcendental phenomenology “, which becomes a sterile irrationalism. Husserl wanted to turn philosophy into a science by turning its back to science in the process of accelerating its evolution in a spectacular way!
For the author, philosophy must now think “theoretically with positive science and rethink its objective, on the materialistic basis that science imposes“.
The materialism, Quiniou rightly tells us, is “a monistic conception of the Being which affirms that the real unity of the world consists in its materiality and that this is not proved by a few jugs of a conjurer, namely speculation (…) This conception of the world therefore affirms the exteriority of material reality in relation to consciousness (…) and it applies to human thought whose essence is considered material.”
In truth, Yvon Quiniou attacks the idealism that is constantly reviving in the history of philosophy and the various aspects of today’s anti-science, such as constructivist epistemology. (“Why to regret that science does not give meaning to the human adventure? It must be admitted that the latter is absurd in itself.“)
And here is the conclusion: “Philosophy can no longer be what it claimed to be for a long time (…) an immediate knowledge of being through simple reflection. The sciences, which it had included in itself, detached itself from it and revealed, in so doing, that reflection had no cognitive power, whether or not it pleased those who profess it and prided themselves on it.”
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