Who is Tran Duc Thao? Life and Work of a Vietnamese Philosopher

by Alexandre Féron

Perhaps not many people have ever heard of Vietnamese philosopher Tran Duc Thao (1917-1993). To some people, his name may sounds vaguely familiar. Those interested in the philosophy of phenomenology may remember the remarkable presentation of Husserl's work offered in the first part of his book Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism (1951). Enthusiasts of the Indochina wars may have come across his name in a list of activists of Vietnam's independence movement. For some others, the name may evoke the image of a philosopher who had refused a promising academic career in France to return to North Vietnam in 1952 to join the struggle for national liberation. In short, for most people, Tran Duc Thao is unknown.

It is not without reason. The man was at the junction of many different and opposing positions, too many for anyone to "claim," to "rediscover," or to "rehabilitate." If he was far too Marxist for the phenomenologists, he was also, conversely, far too phenomenologist for the Marxists. Likewise, his Marxism was never orthodox enough for the Stalinists; but it was far too orthodox and Stalinist for non-Stalinists. Too militant for university philosophers, he was too much of a philosopher for the militants.

But that is exactly what makes Tran Duc Thao interesting. He was at the crossroads of a multitude of contradictions of the twentieth century: colonialism, the place of intellectuals in capitalist countries, debates on Marxism and its relationship to other currents of thought, struggles for independence and then the Cold War, the place of intellectuals in a socialist country, the future of Marxism in countries claiming to be "communist," Asian communism, etc. His life was an attempt to face and overcome these contradictions, which were as much his own as those of the century. But his life took a tragic turn as he kept bumping into these contradictions. Ultimately, we can only state with sadness that his life had been a failure: a political failure and a philosophical failure.

The purpose of this article is to present the life and work of Tran Duc Thao. More precisely, it aims to present his activities and his theoretical work, and to show how the manner in which his work was produced was the result of his struggle with the contradictions of the peculiar world in which he lived.

From a child of the colonies to an attempt at a synthesis of Marxism and phenomenology (1917-1947)

The early life [1] of Tran Duc Thao may be held as a perfect case justifying the "positive effect" of French colonization. A son of a small post office official, born on September 26, 1917, he was a brilliant student at the French Lycée Albert Sarraut in Hanoi. After finishing second in philosophy in the general competition, he was admitted to the French baccalaureate in 1935. This allowed him to obtain, in 1936 from the General Government of Indochina, a scholarship to go to France to prepare for the competitive examination for the École Normale Supérieure. After passing through the Louis-le-Grand and Henri IV secondary schools, he joined the École Normale in 1939 [2]. The French defeat of 1940 brought him to Clermont-Ferrand, where he met Jean Cavaillès, thanks to whom he discovered the work of the founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl. He wrote a remarkable thesis on "the phenomenological method in Husserl" [3] and was placed equal first in the agrégation [competitive examination for civil service in the French education system] in philosophy in 1943. He then began writing a thesis on Husserl, became a research associate [attaché de recherches] at the CNRS and spent time at the Archives-Husserl in Louvain. A brilliant career of an academic and philosopher was opening up to him.

But one could already see rifts under this cursus honorum. First of all, one must remember that the access of a Vietnamese to French education was an exception. At all stages of his journey, Tran Duc Thao was constantly being reminded of his status as a colonized. He was awarded the second place in the ENS competition in the capacity of a "French protégé" and with the mention "numero bis" [4] (which implies that there was also a "true" winner of the second prize). When he became the first Vietnamese to pass the agrégation in philosophy, he was given the "unclassified" mention − which excluded any possibility to apply for a position in the French education system. Many such experiences helped generate the "monsters" (to use his own expression) who form the "intellectual elite" from the colonies. Indeed, these individuals were torn by double allegiance: on the one hand, an allegiance to France because of their schooling and the French culture to which they belonged [5], and on the other hand, an allegiance to the people of their origin [6].

The worsening of the situation in the colonies in the 1930s, following what was called "the explosion of 1930," made a choice between France [7] and the fight for an independent Vietnam necessary. It was probably during the war that Tran Duc Thao decided to choose the anti-colonialist struggle. In the 1930s opposition to France took either a nationalist or a communist form. Tran Duc Thao very quickly chose "communism, which, by giving a precise meaning to the colonial exploitation, removes any trace of xenophobia from the national sentiment" [8].

At the start of his activism [9], Tran Duc Thao was close to the Trotskyist group GBL (Groupe bolchévik-léniniste indochinois) [10]. He participated in their action in directing the ONS, the Vietnamese unskilled workers recruited in 1939 and sent to mainland France to help the war efforts and then left in camps after the defeat. He was one of the major players in the attempt to organize the movement of the Vietnamese in France: in December 1944, during the Congress of Indochinese in Avignon, he became a member of the "General Delegation of Indochinese" (consisting of 40 members) and of the central committee (15 members), of which he would even be the general secretary. He actively participated in the drafting of the program and the demands. At a press conference in September 1945, shortly after Ho Chi Minh declared independence for Vietnam, being asked how the French expeditionary force would be welcomed, he replied "with gun shots!" Already closely watched by the Renseignements Généraux, following this statement he was arrested on September 21 and imprisoned at La Santé Prison until December. Upon release he continued his militant activities and was suspected of organizing the refusal by dockers in Marseille to load war material bound for Indochina.

What were his philosophical positions at this time? At the time of the Liberation, those who wish to combine political engagement and philosophical reflection had two major philosophical options: one being the "orthodoxal" Marxism (of either Communist or Trotskyist variants), and the other being existentialism, which was moving closer to Marxism. This latter position was taken, in a representative way, by Maurice Merleau-Ponty [11], one of the first teachers of Tran Duc Thao. Tran Duc Thao related that during the war, as a “caiman” in the ENS, Merleau-Ponty would read excerpts from his thesis to them and "often said of all this will end with a synthesis of Husserl, Hegel and Marx." [12]

Tran Duc Thao's first philosophical program can therefore be defined as an attempt to synthesize Marxism and existentialism [13], following a trend quite characteristic of what is called "Western Marxism" [14]. This involved a double act by Tran Duc Thao. First, it involved a "radical revision" [15] of Marxism. According to this view, Marxism by itself is too "mechanical," as it does not pay enough attention to the superstructures (which it considers to be pure illusions), and lacks a solid epistemological foundation. All these shortcomings will be resolved by bringing in the method of phenomenology − which, conversely, thanks to Marxism, would be able integrate praxis, social class, history, and the revolutionary perspective into its analyzes. However, and this is what the second act is about, this revision was in fact a "return to the original inspiration" of Marx − which must admittedly be understood as a "return to Marx" against the Marxist tradition, which claims Marx's name. Perhaps it was a return to the original inspiration of Marx himself: the old Marx, the scientist of the Capital, was to be contrasted by the young Marx the Hegelian, whose analyzes would not only be found compatible with a phenomenological interpretation, but would even have a phenomenological dimension.

This philosophical orientation is visible in the first articles published by Tran Duc Thao in 1946: "Marxism and Phenomenology" [16] (in Revue internationale) and "On Indochina" (in Les Temps Modernes). These two articles should be read together, because the first expounds a conceptual and philosophical framework that the second implicitly refers to. In these articles, Tran Duc Thao developed what one may call the "existential infrastructure theory." The idea is that Marxism lacks a mediation between the economic infrastructure and the various superstructures. Tran Duc Thao thought that he has discovered this mediation in what Husserl called "the pre-predicative experience," i.e., our experience of the world, not yet fully conscious and not yet formulated in language. All explicit or "superstructural" significations (at the level of consciousness, in language; and therefore in art, morality, law, religion etc.) are derived and draw their meaning from this pre-predicative experience. These analyzes relate to what Marx said about Greek art at the end of his 1857 Introduction:

"Greek art presupposes Greek mythology, in other words that natural and social phenomena are already assimilated in an unintentionally artistic manner by the imagination of the people." [17]

That means Greek art (which is a superstructural signification) draws its meaning, for the Greeks, from their pre-predicative experience of the world, i.e., from the largely implicit or unconscious "imagination of the people" and finds its first formulation in mythology.
It was to this "existentialist" theoretical framework that he appealed when, in the prison cell, he wrote his first article on the situation in Indochina [19]. This article, which would be published in Les Temps Modernes in February 1946, was written while the Indochina war had not yet truly started: the clashes between the newly disembarked French and the Vietnamese were mounting, but the situation was not irreversible, and a process of "negotiation" was taking place. Tran Duc Thao's analysis sought to show why the French and the Vietnamese could not get along. French and Vietnamese lived in different "worlds" because they had different pre-predicative experience: "There is an original community, the one to which one belongs by birth and early education, that cannot be abandoned, because through it each of us immerse oneself in the roots of existence" [20]. As a result, they give different meanings to the same situations, to the same statements, to the same words.

"The opposition is radical, based on the mode of existence, on two ways of living and understanding the world. It is not about discussing any particular fact. The discussion itself is useless, since each fact is interpreted, perceived in a different way. When the arguments made by the Annamese in favor of their independence penetrate the horizon of the Frenchman, they immediately take on such significance as to exclude precisely this very independence. This is a radical misconception, which no explanation can dispel, because all sentences are understood in a sense opposite to the one in which they were pronounced. […] Dialogue is a perpetual misunderstanding, a misunderstanding total and without remedy. Opposition precedes discourse at the very sources of existence, where the possible meanings of words are already determined." [21]

However, one should not be mistaken about what Tran Duc Thao meant. This inability to communicate was not a legal impossibility. It was linked to a factual situation: the different world experience that the colonized and the colonizer had, i.e., the colonial structure. Tran Duc Thao did not reject universalism. On the contrary, he called upon us to "rise above the particular horizons and place ourselves at a human point of view" [22]. We find again this position in an anecdote reported by Louis Althusser:

"At the École [Normale Supérieure] I got to know Tran Duc Thao […]. Thao gave us private lessons, he explained to us: “You are all transcendental equals, and you are all equal as egos" (« Vous êtes tous des égaux transcendantaux, et vous êtes tous égaux comme egos. ») [23].

Thus, in 1946, the contradictions that Tran Duc Thao carried as a member of the colonized "intellectual elite" seemed to have found a certain balance. He experienced his fight against French colonization as an expression of loyalty to his origin, but also to his education (the French universalism). Likewise, his philosophical positioning strived to synthesize the philosophical conceptions resulting from his education (phenomenology, existentialism) and those of the international revolutionary movement (Marxism). However, the evolution of the political situation would quickly upset this precarious balance and force him to make more radical choices.

Overcome the contradictions: Viet Minh and "dialectical materialism" (1947-1951)

The fundamental event in Tran Duc Thao's life, which took place in 1946-47, was his rallying to the positions of the Viet Minh. The meeting with Ho Chi Minh at the time of the Fontainebleau conference (in July 1946) and the strategy of broad union with the national movement seem to have been decisive. The distancing from the Trotskyist movements took shape in June 1947 when he published a review of an article by Claude Lefort [24] in Les Temps Modernes: “On the Trotzkyst [sic] Interpretation of the Events in Indochina" [25]. But for Tran Duc Thao, political evolution and philosophical evolution were closely linked, and from this time he distanced himself from existentialism [26] and rallied to the communist philosophical program under the banner of “dialectical materialism.” One could interpret this double move as an attempt to align with himself by trying to eliminate the contradictions resulting from his education. This attempted elimination takes two successive forms. First was a "French" attempt (1947-51), which corresponds to the political and philosophical rallying to communism, then a "Vietnamese" attempt when he decides in 1951 to return to Vietnam to participate in the national liberation struggle − a return which he explicitly presented as a way of resolving his own contradictions [27].

An important fact to understand his new philosophical orientation is the replacement of the term "Marxism" by "dialectical materialism." This expression, not present in Marx's writing, was imposed from the 1930s onwards when Soviet philosophy was stalinized [28] to differentiate the latter from the mechanistic and non-dialectical conceptions of Marxism advocated by the Second International. But above all, it constitutes the watchword of the scientific research program launched by the USSR, which aimed to respond to the "crisis of reason" by reuniting all knowledge under the banner of "dialectical materialism" [29]. The use of this formula by Tran Duc Thao clearly signals his philosophical rallying to this research program − even if he refused to be "fenced in" by the Stalinist orthodoxy.

In 1948, Tran Duc Thao defined a new philosophical project which he would pursue until the end of his life: to achieve a Marxist understanding of man; or, in other words, to lay the foundation of a Marxist psychology or anthropology. This understanding of man must be based on a two seemingly contradictory requirements. The first is an "ontological" requirement: it must be done within a materialist framework and therefore must break away from dualism of any form. Then comes what one might call a "phenomenological" requirement: it must honor the specificity of human consciousness. On the one hand, one must show how man is a product of natural evolution, and in this sense, one must arrive at a "naturalization" of man and show how it is in continuity with the rest of the living world. But on the other hand, one must not ignore the specific difference of man, i.e., that evolution is not pure continuity, but the production of new structures, according to what is sometimes called “logic of emergence.” In short, evolution is not linear and mechanical, but dialectical. Here is how he summed up in 1948 the "project" he had "conceived since 1948":

“To grasp in depth the genesis and the development of consciousness starting from material production." [30]

And it was in this sense that the phrase "dialectical materialism" fits perfectly with this new research program that he was implementing.

The first formulation of this project was made in an article published in 1948 in Les Temps Modernes: "The Phenomenology of Mind in Its Real Content" [31]. This was a review of the work by Alexandre Kojève Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, which was by itself a transcript of the famous courses he gave between 1933 and 1939. These courses played a fundamental role for the post-war generation of existentialists [32] (Sartre, Merleau-Ponty, Simone de Beauvoir). In these courses Kojève established an existentialist and anthropological reading of Hegel that he "marxized" (in particular by highlighting the moment of the fight to the death between master and slave), and also proposed a “Hegelianized” reading of Marx through his early texts. Tran Duc Thao believed that it was the critique of Kojève's existentialist reading of Hegel that induced him to to make a theoretical break with existentialism and affirm his own philosophical project [33].

The main point of his criticism is Kojève's "dualism," which distinguishes the reign of man from the reign of nature to assert that dialectics has to be human, i.e., in the relation of man to the world and to other humans. Kojève thus refused any possibility of a "dialectics of nature." Tran Duc Thao believed, on the contrary, that while one certainly needs to recognize that there is a difference between consciousness and matter, it should not be elevated to an ontological difference between two types of beings. One must see consciousness as a new structure produced by a natural dialectics and overcome non-dialectical dualism with a "materialist monism."

This is an important modification of his philosophical problematics. When he was trying to synthesize phenomenology and Marxism, he was trying to address what may be called the problematics of the foundation, that is, the basis for the relationship between the infra- and the superstructures. From now on, what needed to be found is a genesis. One must find the real genesis from non-conscious materiality to conscious materiality.

It is this genesis that he exposed in the second part of his work Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism [34]. In this part, titled "The dialectic of real movement", in the space of a hundred pages, he retraced the whole evolution from single-celled organisms to the establishment of communism. One could say that one of the challenges of these developments is the elucidation of two of Marx's assertions found in The German Ideology. The first is to understand the real genesis of "the first premise of all human history" or even the "natural basis" of all human history, namely "the existence of living human individuals [...] the physical organization of these individuals and their consequent relation to the rest of nature […], the actual physical nature of man" [35]. There Tran Duc Thao shows how, in evolution, the relation to exteriority which characterizes the living never ceases to exceed its own limitations until reaching, in the case of man, the "consciousness about the object" and the ability to produce one's own means of production. There is a dialectic of evolution in that the higher organisms integrate the structures which characterize the simpler organisms, but giving them a new meaning (it is therefore a question of a dialectical overcoming of the lower structures).

The next is to understand the relationship between consciousness and existence. That is to establish materially and biologically, what Marx affirmed in The German Ideology: "Life is not determined by consciousness, but consciousness by life" [36]. Tran Duc Thao tried to show how, from the level of living things, or even from what he calls the "sensori-motor psychism," the structure of the different organisms (the biological "infrastructure") determines their behavior (their "praxis", that is what they are capable of doing), and therefore the way in which the "world" appears to them ("superstructures"): animal "consciousness" [37] is only an ideal transposition of a type of real behavior. What Tran Duc Thao showed is that this idealization is the product of a certain inhibition or repression of behavior: each type of organism is "aware" only of the types of behavior that it is able to suppress. This means that there is a gap between what an organism is capable of doing and what it is "conscious" of, between "the real act" and the "lived meaning": the action always goes beyond its representation. Tran Duc Thao therefore established, at the level of the living things, both the secondarity of consciousness in relation to existence (life), and the discrepancy between consciousness and action − two principles at the basis of Marx's materialist method in The German Ideology.

Finally, moving to the level of human consciousness, Tran Duc Thao established two phenomena. First of all, regarding the discrepancy between structure of behavior and representation, he showed that from an objective point of view the characteristic of human activity is productive activity, i.e., work that produces use value. However, a use value is, in itself, a use value for everybody; productive activity is therefore a straightaway social activity. But man has not yet realized this social dimension of his work and sees his work as being linked to a form of property. Ownership is the denial of the social dimension of all work, in the form of exclusion and appropriation. Communism therefore designates, for Tran Duc Thao, the moment when man becomes aware of his activity as universal activity.

The second thing that Tran Duc Thao established at the level of human consciousness is the way in which the idealization, peculiar to any form of "consciousness," becomes idealism, i.e., the representation of a difference and an autonomy between consciousness and matter. Human consciousness is characterized by a "forgetting of its material origins" in praxis: the inhibition characteristic to all "consciousness" then becomes "denial-negation" (dé-négation) [38]. Man has a distorted representation of himself as of a pure consciousness distinct from matter.

Thus, between 1947 and 1951, the political and philosophical positions of Tran Duc Thao were turned upside down. We have tried to see it as an attempt to overcome the contradictions in its previous positions. But soon, Tran Duc Thao finds himself confronted with an even greater contradiction: the contradiction between his position as an intellectual in France and his support for the national liberation movement of Vietnam. This is what he evokes when speaking of the writing of Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism:

"The principle positions, clearly asserted, were enough to convince me to return to Vietnam. It was necessary to put life into accordance with philosophy, to accomplish a real act, which responds to the theoretical conclusions of my book." [39]

Therefore he decided, in 1951, to leave the French intellectual milieu in which he had lived for fifteen years, to return to Vietnam.

Return to Vietnam: the impossible synthesis (1952-85)

The Vietnamese revolution as "path to the solution" [40] (1952-58)

One can imagine the enthusiasm that presided over this return to Vietnam. It is more difficult to know how Tran Duc Thao experienced the first years of his return to Vietnam, which from the start was based on misunderstanding. We can distinguish three great moments before 1958. [41]

Tran Duc Thao arrived at Viêt-Bac [42] in 1952, in the middle of the Indochina war. He was immediately assigned to various jobs in the service of this war. He was first tasked with writing two reports (on business and the education system), before being sent to the Secretary General of the Party Truong Chinh to translate the leader’s works. He is described by some accounts as "naive and enthusiastic" (To Hoai): he abandoned Western clothes and went as far as to refuse to sleep with a mosquito net (which will cause him to catch malaria). All of this testifies to a desire to transform his relationship to the world, to deny his Western schooling, to "(re)-become" what he would have been, had he not been educated by the colonial system.

But in 1953 the "inaugural trauma" [43] intervened: he was assigned to an ideological re-education brigade of agrarian reform. Indeed, he arrived in Vietnam at a time when Maoism, after the victory of the Chinese Revolution in October 1949, assumed considerable importance. The slogan of a broad national coalition against France was abandoned. The avowed objective, according to Truong Chinh, the leader of the turn to Maoism, was to "create a split and provoke a collective emotional shock." We have no testimony about what he did, saw or suffered during this period, except that he was, according to Philippe Papin, "in the worst place and at the worst time."

Finally, with the end of the Indochina War in 1954, a more peaceful period seemed to begin. He returned to the job as an academic. First he taught ancient history at the University of Hanoi (1954-55), he then became professor of philosophy history in 1955. In 1956, he was even appointed dean of the faculty of history. His courses, which he gave while wearing military fatigues, focus on "the history of thought before Marx" [44]. They are interesting as much for the proposed reading of the history of philosophy as for the effort deployed to adequately translate concepts of Western philosophy to Vietnamese.

The big change taking place in the production output was due to the fact that he abandoned using French, repeating, in a certain way, at the theoretical level, what the re-education campaign had done at the practical level. All the articles he wrote during these years were in Vietnamese [45]. These can be classified into two main groups: five articles were on Vietnamese history and literature, and two articles extending his materialist works on consciousness to "The origin of consciousness in the evolution of the nervous system" (1955).

In 1956, the position of intellectuals in Vietnam was turned upside down. In the whole "socialist" world there was a movement toward openness: the "Thaw" or "de-Stalinization" in the USSR and the "Hundred Flowers" in China. In Vietnam, the enthusiasm among intellectuals was even greater, since after the end of the war they no longer felt obliged to accede to the political line. It was then that two journals, "Nhan Van" (Humanity) and "Giai Pham" (Masterpieces) were born, which were to be at the forefront of the criticism movement. Tran Duc Thao participated in this movement. It was he one who found a translator to make the text on the "Hundred Flowers" was available in Vietnamese. He also published two articles in 1956. The first article, titled “Social content and forms of freedom” (October 1956) dealt with the connection between individual freedom and collectivism in socialism: communism must not be the negation, but, on the contrary, the realization of freedom. The second article, "Let us strive to develop freedoms and democracy" (December 1956) was more daring; it denounced the bureaucratization of the regime and the "mistakes" made during the land reform.

These two texts would seal his fate for the rest of his life. Tran Duc Thao, despite having limited responsibilities in the protest movement, became a scapegoat for the general campaign launched by the Party against "revisionism." Removed from his post at the University of Hanoi in December 1956, he was tried at the university's premises in March and April 1957. At the same time, a smear campaign against him was carried out in the press. He is accused, in particular, of "Trotskyism" because of his militant past. In June 1957, he was declared "enemy of the fatherland and of socialism" by the Ideology and Culture Commission of the Party's Central Committee. He is accused of being an "rootless" person who had lost contact with the Vietnamese "people." In May 1958, he made his public self-criticism, but it was not considered satisfactory. That was the start of his long internal exile.

Internal Exile (1958-85)

We have little information about this period of its life. Between 1958 and 1961, Tran Duc Thao was sent to an agricultural farm for re-education. When he returned to Hanoi in 1961, he was expelled from the university and lost his housing. He held a precarious status of "external collaborator" of the publishing house "Su That" for which he did translations. His living conditions worsened when the start of the war with the United States (1964-1975) further deteriorated the material situation in North Vietnam. He, who had hoped to put his intellectual knowledge at the service of the Revolution and the socialist construction of Vietnam, now found himself marginalized and useless. However, at no time does he sought to become a dissident. On the contrary, it seems that he would rather to wait for "rehabilitation."

His working conditions were also difficult. He was very isolated. He was however allowed to receive some publications from abroad, but not enough to be able to follow the development of the European intellectual community. Olivier Todd, on a trip to Vietnam, was allegedly instructed by Sartre to try to get in touch with Tran Duc Thao - which he tried to do, to no avail. We can feel that Tran Duc Thao was looking for interlocutors, as evidenced by the letter accompanying an article he sent to La Pensée:

"You know that here we have virtually nothing that appears in France. Would it be possible for you to possibly share with me any criticisms that might be addressed to me? You would help me a lot for the continuation of my research" [46].

Although he did not publish any text in Vietnam during this period, he was allowed to send a number of articles to France for the communist journals La Pensée and Nouvelle Critique.

Despite all these material difficulties, the 1960s were for Tran Duc Thao a period of revival of creative philosophical activity. The philosophical project remained that of 1948: to grasp the real genesis of consciousness from materiality. However, he judged that Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism does not realize the project in a satisfactory manner. In fact, he explained in an article from 1974 that the analyzes of his work only gave "results effective for the understanding of animal behavior" [47]. On the other hand, everything that concerned "the analysis of human realities" had to be redone. He was too trapped in the idealism of Husserl and Hegel. In short: "One has to redo all the work from the beginning" [48].

Tran Duc Thao's work until the 1980s were along two directions. The first line of research involved an analysis of dialectics and in particular of the relationship between Hegel and Marx. It means reading again the texts of Marx and Hegel to try to understand the exact nature of the reversal that Marx inflicted on Hegelian dialectic. The idea was that this would allow him to better understand the way he must disengage himself from phenomenological influences. This research found its culmination in an article on “The rational nucleus of Hegel's dialectic” [49] (1965) and the problematic was examined in his 1974 article “From phenomenology to the materialist dialectic of consciousness (I)”.

But the main focus of his research was a reworking of his materialist analysis of consciousness. The most important change was a reassessment of the place of language in relation to consciousness. While in Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism language had played only a secondary role in the constitution of human consciousness, language is now seen as the "immediate reality" [50] of consciousness. To understand the transition from the animal's "sensorimotor psyche" to human consciousness, one must therefore analyze the acquisition of language. Hence the title he gave to his second work was Investigations on the Origin of Language and Consciousness [5].1 He reiterated his problematic of genesis, but now, to understand the genesis of consciousness, one must understand the genesis of language.

This work was formost an important contribution to a "materialist" or "Marxist" conception of language. Criticizing structuralist conceptions (Saussure, Jakobson) for which language only refers to itself, Tran Duc Thao asserted the need to understand language from its function of reference [52]. Thus the original element of language is the acquisition of what he called the "gesture of indication," i.e., the capacity of man to relate to an object grasped as external. The acquisition of this "original form of consciousness" initiated the exit from animal life with the appearance of the "prehominians" (australopithecines). Then, the development of tools and language marked different stages of evolution until the appearance of modern man. To try to understand the different stages of this genesis, Tran Duc Thao elaborated a formal language from three fundamental elements: the “this” (the gesture of indication, “C”), the “form” (“F”) and the "movement" ("M"). It is through different combinations of these three elements that the language of modern man was gradually formed. Thus these works of Tran Duc Thao were as much contributions to a materialist theory of language as to a materialist conception of anthropogenesis or "hominization".

An important Marxist concept that he introduced in this work is that of “the language of real life" [53]. It is a set of objective meanings which are constituted independently of consciousness, in the material activity of men. This concept replaced that of "pre-predicative experience": while this experience was individual and "silent" (prior to any expression), the concept of "language of real life" allows to designate the immediately social dimension of human existence, which is always already bathed in a set of meanings already constituted by the society.

The last battles of Tran Duc Thao (1985-1993)

It was during the 1980s that Tran Duc Thao's situation improved. Again, this was a consequence of the development of the international situation with the start of the perestroika in the USSR. Towards the end of the decade, he again became a figure of some political importance. This also allowed him to relaunch his philosophical activity.

Part of his work was to try to formulate a critical assessment of Stalinism and Maoism. In the text Stalin's Philosophy, written in 1986, Tran Duc Thao analyzed Stalin's Dialectical and Historical Materialism to point out the non-dialectical conception that underpinned Stalin's conception of the world. On the whole, Stalinism has fallen back into dualism and did not understand the dialectic: in particular, it has neglected the fact that any dialectical suppression is also conservation - an important element during the transition to socialism, since it cannot be simply to deny everything in the capitalist society, but it is to "go beyond" it dialectically. Against Stalinism and Maoism, notably in The Question of Man and Antihumanism [54] (1988), Tran Duc Thao defended a "Marxist humanism."

At the same time, he took up his 1948 project for a third time with the writing in 1986 of La Formation de l'homme, as well as two articles published in La Pensée: one on “The birth of the first man” [55], and the another on “Logical Dialectics in the Genesis of the Capital" [56]. They were all about the dialectical understanding of the passage from one state to another (from animal to man; from feudalism to capitalism; from capitalism to communism).

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, the situation worsened again in Vietnam. The supporters of the Perestroika, including Tran Duc Thao, found themselves in a difficult situation. It was in this context that he left Vietnam for France - a country he had not seen for forty years. There are divergent versions on the reasons for this trip: Tran Duc Thao had said that he was sent to France to stand a political trial initiated by the French Communist Party [57]. But one must remember that his persecution complex had become real paranoia near the end of his life. In fact, Philippe Papin found an official letter coming directly from the Central Committee, which appointed Tran Duc Thao for an "official political mission" to be accomplished “at the expense of the Party." He was housed in Paris on the premises of the Vietnamese Embassy. In reality, it seems that his mission was to come to Paris to defend the official version of the regime on the case of "Nhan Van Giai Pham."

In Paris, he tried to reconnect with his old philosophical acquaintances (Jean-Toussaint Desanti, Paul Ricoeur, Maurice de Gandillac), while keeping a good distance from the "Althusserians." He gave a number of lectures (at Paris VII on Stalin's philosophy, at the ENS on Husserl; another on his Investigations on the Origin of Language and Consciousness), and began writing a third philosophical work. He took up Husserl and Hegel by returning to what he had written in Phenomenology and Dialectical Materialism on temporalization and what he called the “living present” [58]. He also wanted to keep abreast of the latest discoveries in biology and anthropology, undoubtedly still with the idea of continuing his project of 1948. But, in a very degraded physical and psychological state, following a fall, he died in the Broussais hospital on April 24, 1993.

The fate of Tran Duc Thao undeniably has a tragic dimension. First of all, it was a political failure: like so many others in the twentieth century, he committed himself body and soul to the construction of communism, but bumped onto the rigidity of Stalinism and the bureaucratic regimes. The sacrifice of his life would ultimately bring no political benefit. As for his philosophical work, assessment is more difficult. While part of his work was subject to political censorship or self-censorship, Tran Duc Thao had tried to conduct original research in areas little explored by Marxism: the study of language, anthropogenesis, evolution, etc. The philosophical failure was, above all, the absence of interlocutors during his life (hence the iterative dimension of his research) and the fact that his work is hardly studied or even read.

However, his posthumous fate has not yet been decided. In Vietnam he seems to be undergoing some form of rehabilitation, as in 2001 he was posthumously awarded the "Ho Chi Minh Prize." It has to be said that most of his theoretical output since the 1960s has never been published. It is estimated that in an archival and documentary collection in Vietnam there are more than 8,000 pages of unpublished manuscripts, drafts, notes etc. Perhaps a significant part of Tran Duc Thao's thought is still to be discovered?

See the original www.contretemps.eu/qui-est-tran-duc-thao-vie-et-oeuvre-dun-philosophe-vietnamien for references.

Vietnamese translation: www.viet-studies.net/TDThao/Feron_TranDucThaoLaAi.htm

Italian translation: www.doppiozero.com/materiali/chi-e-tran-duc-thao