Background
Rosset, Clément was born in 1939.
Neo-Nietzschean and Schopenhauerian
Rosset, Clément was born in 1939.
École Normale Supérieure (Agrégé in Philosophy).
From 1967, Mâitre-assistant then Professor of Philosophy, Faculté des Lettres et Sciences Humaines de Nice.
Rosset has taken up themes from Nietzsche and Schopenhauer and developed them into a ‘philosophie tragique’, whose central concept is that of chance or risk. According to La Philosophie tragique (1960), there are two attitudes to life, the moral and the tragic. By a transvaluation of values he proposes that the moral is bad and the tragic good. He sees the moral tradition of Plato, Voltaire. Hegel and Marx as perversely extolling happiness. The antithesis of this tradition, Rosset believes, is to be found in that of the tragic, as embodied, for example, in Rousseau and Beethoven. By overlooking the tragic nature of reality, he maintains, we are ‘dying of happiness': of this we become aware, at least momentarily, under the ‘tragic’ spell of great music or poetry. Rosset’s writings of 1972 and 1973 developed this view further in terms of the concept of chance, understood as designating the fundamental, selfsufficient reality. And in his works of 1976, 1978 and 1979 he attempted to determine the attributes of chance, to formulate an ontology of chance. Writing in an exalted style and with a sense of mission. Rosset has presented a philosophy that boldly challenges traditional philosophical assumptions and ontologies.