Tran Duc Thao

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Trần Đức Thảo (1917-April 24, 1993) was a Vietnamese philosopher. His work (written primarily in French) attempted to unite phenomenology with Marxist philosophy. His work had some currency in France in the 1950s and 1960s, and was cited favorably by Jacques Derrida and Jean-François Lyotard.

Born in Hanoi, Vietnam, he was educated there, completing his baccalaureate at 17. In 1936 he continued his studies in France, becoming a student of Maurice Merleau-Ponty. In 1943 he completed his agrégation with a thesis on the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl. Through the 1940s he worked on his first book, Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism. The book argued that the defects of the phenomenological account of consciousness could only be remedied by the Marxist account of labor and society. In the 1940s and 50s Tran Duc Thao's ideas achieved some currency among the elite philosophical circles of France. At the same time he became an active anti-colonialist, publishing articles in Jean-Paul Sartre and Merleau-Ponty's journal Les Temps modernes about colonialism in Indochina; these articles were read by Frantz Fanon and other anticolonialists. From October to December 1945, Tran Duc Thao was jailed by the French government as a threat to its security. Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism was published in 1951, and in the same year he returned to Vietnam, working in support of the Communist Party. In 1956 he was named the Dean of History in the country's first national university.

But he became critical of the Party over land reforms which had led to many deaths in 1956, and Tran Duc Thao was caught up in the "Nhan Van-Giai Pham affair" in which the dissident intellectuals of the late 1950s were publicly criticized or punished. Though Tran Duc Thao was never jailed, he fell out of favor with the ruling Party, publishing two self-criticisms in Nhan Dan and leaving his position of authority in 1958. None of his work was published in his home country from 1965 until 1987. For the next thirty years his profile was lower, as he worked in the rural provinces translating philosophy into Vietnamese and preparing his book Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness. This book, published in France in 1973, combined materialist biological and cognitive accounts of subjectivity and consciousness with the Marxist account he had elaborated earlier. In the liberalized political climate of the 1980s he was able to return to France for medical treatment, and there he met many of his old philosophical colleagues again. He died in Paris in 1993.

[edit] Works

Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism (1951). English edition: ISBN 90-277-0737-5
Investigations into the Origin of Language and Consciousness (1973). English edition: ISBN 90-277-0827-4