Modern French Philosophy | Page 4

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I

To find the origin of many of the tendencies which appear prominently
in the thought of the second half of the nineteenth century, particularly
those displayed by the new spiritualistic philosophy (which marked the
last thirty years of the century), we must go back to the period of the
Revolution, to Maine de Biran (1766-1824)-- a unique and original
thinker who laid the foundations of modern French psychology and
who was, we may note in passing, a contemporary of Chateaubriand. A
certain tone of romanticism marks the work of both the literary man
and the philosopher. Maine de Biran was not a thinker who reflected
upon his own experiences in retreat from the world. Born a Count, a
Lifeguardsman to Louis XVI. at the Revolution, and faithful to the old
aristocracy, he was appointed, at the Restoration, to an important
administrative position, and later became a deputy and a member of the
State Council. His writings were much greater in extent than is
generally thought, but only one important work appeared in publication
during his lifetime. This was his treatise, or _mémoire_, entitled
Habitude, which appeared in 1803. This work well illustrates Maine de
Biran's historical position in the development of French philosophy. It
came at a tome when attention and interest, so far as philosophical
problems were concerned, centred round two "foci." These respective
centres are indicated by Destutt de Tracy,_*_ the disciple of Condillac
on the one hand, and by Cabanis_/-_ on the other. Both were
"ideologues" and were ridiculed by Napoleon who endeavoured to lay
much blame upon the philosophers. We must notice, however, this
difference. While the school of Condillac,_/=_ influenced by Locke,
endeavoured to work out a psychology in terms of abstractions,
Cabanis, anxious to be more concrete, attempted to interpret the life of
the mind by reference to physical and physiological phenomena.
[Footnote _*_ : Destutt de Tracy, 1754-1836. His Elements of Ideology
appeared in 1801. He succeeded Cabanis in the Académie in 1808, and
in a complimentary Discours pronounced upon his predecessor claimed
that Cabanis had introduced medicine into philosophy and philosophy
into medicine. This remark might well have been applied later to
Claude Bernard.]
[Footnote _/-_ : Cabanis, 1757-1808, _Rapports du Physique et du

Morale de l'Homme_, 1802. He was a friend of De Biran, as also was
Ampère, the celebrated physicist and a man of considerable
philosophical power. A group used to meet chez Cabanis at Auteuil,
comprising De Biran, Cabanis, Ampère, Royard-Collard, Guizot, and
Cousin.]
[Footnote _/=_ : Condillac belongs to the eighteenth century. He died
in 1780. His _Traité des Sensations_ is dated 1754.]
It is the special merit of De Biran that he endeavoured, and that
successfully, to establish both the concreteness and the essential
spirituality of the inner life. The attitude and method which he adopted
became a force in freeing psychology, and indeed philosophy in general,
from mere play with abstractions. His doctrines proved valuable, too, in
establishing the reality and irreducibility of the mental or spiritual
nature of man.
Maine de Biran took as his starting-point a psychological fact, the
reality of conscious effort. The self is active rather than speculative; the
self is action or effort-- that is to say, the self is, fundamentally and
primarily, will. For the Cartesian formula _Cogito, ergo sum,_ De
Biran proposed to substitute that of _Volo, ergo sum_. He went on to
maintain that we have an internal and immediate perception of this
effort of will through which we realise, at one and the same time, our
self in its fullest activity and the resistance to its operations. In such
effort we realise ourselves as free causes and, in spite of the doctrine of
physical determinism, we realise in ourselves the self as a cause of its
own volitions. The greater the resistance or the greater the effort, the
more do we realise ourselves as being free and not the absolute victims
of habit. Of this freedom we have an immediate consciousness, it is
_une donnée immédiate de la conscience._
This freedom is not always realised, for over against the tendency to
action we must set the counter-tendency to passivity. Between these
two exists, in varying degrees of approach to the two extremes,
habitude. Our inner life is seen by the psychologist as a field of conflict
between the sensitive and the reflective side of our nature. It is this
which gives to the life of this homo duplex all the elements of struggle

and tragedy. In the desires and the passions, says Maine de Biran, the
true self is not seen. The true self appears in memory, reasoning and,
above all, in will.
Such, in brief, is the outline of De Biran's psychology. To his two
stages, vie sensitive and vie active (_ou réflexive_), he added a third,