Tran Duc Thao, a brilliant student of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Super- ieure within the post-1935 decade of political disaster, born in Vietnam shortly after the F ir st World War, recipient of a scholarship in Paris in 1935 37, was early noted for his independent and originaI mind_ While the 1930s twisted down to the defeat of the Spanish Republic, the compromise with German Fascism at Munich, and the start of the Second World War, and while the 1940s began with hypocritical stability at the Western Front fol- lowed by the defeat of France, and the occupation of Paris by the German power together with French collaborators, and the n ended with liberation and a search for a new understanding of human situations, the young Thao was deeply immersed in the classical works of European philosophy. He was al so the attentive but critical student of a quite special generation of French metaphysicians and social philosophers: Gaston Berger, Maurice Merleau- Ponty, Emile Brehier, Henri Lefebvre, Rene le Senne, Jean-Paul Sartre, perhaps the young Louis Althusser. They, in their several modes of response, had been meditating for more than a decade on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, which came to France in the thirties as a new metaphysical enlighten- ment - phenomenology.

Tran Duc Thao, a wise and learned scientist and an eminent Marxist philoso pher, begins this treatise on the origins of language and consciousness with a question: "One of the principal difficulties of the problem of the origin of consciousness is the exact determination of its beginnings. Precisely where must one draw the line between the sensori-motor psychism of animals and the conscious psychism that we see developing in man?" And then he cites Karl Marx's famous passage about 'the bee and the architect' from Capital: ... what distinguishes the worst architect from the best of bees is this, that the architect raises his structure in the imagination before he erects it in reality. At the end of every labor process, we get a result that already existed in the imagination of the laborer at its commencement. (Capital, Vol. I, p. 178, tr. Moore and Aveling) Thao follows this immediately with a second question: "But is this the most elementary form of consciousness?" Thus the conundrum concerning the origins of consciousness is posed as a circle: if human consciousness pre supposes representation (of the external reality, of mental awareness, of actions, of what it may), and if this consciousness emerges first with the activity of production using tools, and if the production of tools itself pre supposes representation - that is, with an image of what is to be produced in the mind of the producer - then the conditions for the origins of human"

Tran Duc Thao, a brilliant student of philosophy at the Ecole Normale Super- ieure within the post-1935 decade of political disaster, born in Vietnam shortly after the F ir st World War, recipient of a scholarship in Paris in 1935 37, was early noted for his independent and originaI mind_ While the 1930s twisted down to the defeat of the Spanish Republic, the compromise with German Fascism at Munich, and the start of the Second World War, and while the 1940s began with hypocritical stability at the Western Front fol- lowed by the defeat of France, and the occupation of Paris by the German power together with French collaborators, and the n ended with liberation and a search for a new understanding of human situations, the young Thao was deeply immersed in the classical works of European philosophy. He was al so the attentive but critical student of a quite special generation of French metaphysicians and social philosophers: Gaston Berger, Maurice Merleau- Ponty, Emile Brehier, Henri Lefebvre, Rene le Senne, Jean-Paul Sartre, perhaps the young Louis Althusser. They, in their several modes of response, had been meditating for more than a decade on the philosophy of Edmund Husserl, which came to France in the thirties as a new metaphysical enlighten- ment - phenomenology.