3
Translated from the French by Darian Meacham
Moore’s preface to the 1984 publication in French of Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (The Relationship between the Physical and the Moral in Man), volume VI of the collected works of Maine de Biran published by Vrin, provides an exemplary philological contextualization of the efforts that went into establishing the text which is translated in this volume. Some of the points made in passing by Moore, aimed at a readership likely to be more familiar with the historical, intellectual, and philological context of the text and Biran’s work more generally, are dealt with in more detail by Delphine Antoine-Mahut in her preface, written for this volume. Chief among these is the role played by Victor Cousin in the publication and reception of Biran’s work immediately following his death and also the nature of the Mémoires or Essays that Biran wrote in response to questions posed by various academies and institutes around Europe (the Royal Academy of Copenhagen, the Academy of Berlin and the Institut de France, to be precise). These questions were the basis for what we could call essay competitions, which Biran entered and won. The text published in Volume VI of the Vrin collected works, and translated here is a version of the text that Biran wrote in response to a question posed by the Royal Academy of Copenhagen in 1810. The precise question, forming the basis of the competition, was:
There are people who still deny the utility of the doctrines and physical experiences to explain the phenomena of mind and the inner sense. Others instead reject with disdain the observations and psychological reasons in research that have the body as its object, or restrict the application to certain diseases. It would be useful to discuss these two feelings, to show and to establish more clearly to what extent psychology and physics can be linked, and to demonstrate by historical evidence what each of these two sciences has done so far for the advancement of the other.
The philological detail of Moore’s preface may seem somewhat extravagant to a reader coming into contact with Biran for the first time, but we hope that it will serve as a guide to further investigation, should our readers so desire. It also provides an absolutely essential contextualizing of The Relationship between the Physical and the Moral in Man within the trajectory of Biran’s philosophical endeavour.
– The editors
‘Maine de Biran is a man of only one book, and this book he never wrote.’1 The steps of this unfinished philosophical programme are however apparent in the work that he has left us, of which the majority remained unpublished at the time of his death.
The heritage of these manuscripts is unfortunately no longer intact. Victor Cousin, entrusted by Lainé2 (the executor of the will) to make an inventory of the manuscripts, arrived too late in Bergerac. ‘The pamphlets and manuscripts from the objects left by the deceased were thrown in a basket marked papers without proper discernment and brought to the grocers by one of the servants of the house.’3 But the manuscripts underwent still further losses after this date: Ernest Naville, thanks to whose work we now have the possibility to proceed with an edition of Maine de Biran’s collected works, lent some, which have today disappeared.
It is thus that we lack today several texts and that others contain more and less serious gaps. This is the case notably of the Copenhagen Essay.4 The details of these gaps will be indicated below.
1. Context of the work
The Copenhagen Essay belongs to the second great stage in the work of Maine de Biran: the properly Biranian stage that began with the Essay for the Institute of France, ‘Sur la décomposition de la pensée’ (1804), and continued with the Berlin Essay, ‘On Immediate Apperception’ (1807) and the essays read at the Bergerac Medical Society, ‘Sur les perceptions obscure ou les impressions génénerales affectives et les sympathies en particulier’ (1807), ‘Observations sur les divisions organiques de cerveau’ (1808), ‘Nouvelles Considérations sur le sommeil, les songes, et le somnambulisme’ (1809), and finished with the incomplete text ‘Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie’ (1812).
During this stage, Biran rethought the notion of reflection or sens intime, placed the consciousness of voluntary movement at the forefront of his investigations, and distinguished between ‘two lives’ in man. Consequently, he was led:
(1)to revise the Lockean empirical psychology that he had inherited; and
(2)to construct a new framework that would reunite the physical sciences, psychology and medicine with this new ‘anthropology’.
The essays for the Institute of Berlin aimed especially at the first of these tasks, those from Bergerac and Copenhagen at the second, the Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie sought to bring the two together.
2. History of the work
In the 14 May 1810 edition of the Moniteur français, the Royal Academy of Copenhagen proposed a question on the relations between psychology and physics. This question reanimated the ideas that Biran had developed in the Essays given at the Institute of Bergerac. The ‘new question’, Biran later recalled, ‘again seduced me and launched me in the direction I was being pulled in … by the inclinations and habits of my mind… ’.
Of this work, we possess today some of the drafts and the official copy (la minute) that occasionally refers to other manuscripts where we find passages that we must insert. Biran copied this version and sent the essay to Copenhagen. It was declared the winner on 1 July 1811 and he was invited to publish it. Having been in contact with the publisher Courcier since 1810, Biran agreed a contract in August 1811 for one work entitled Analyse des faits du sens intime, and another, Des rapports de la physiologie avec les connaissances des facultés de l’espirit humain – versions, clearly, of the Berlin and Copenhagen essays.
Since the official copy can no longer be found at the Copenhagen Academy, and since we have among the manuscripts a fragment of a copy that corresponds very precisely with the official copy, we can conclude that Biran requested his copy from Copenhagen in order to facilitate publication. The Academy would have sent it, with a request that Biran return it to them. We can offer this conjecture in interpreting a note added in parentheses to his Idea linguae universalis, written at the time when he read, pen in hand, Leibniz. This brief note indicates: ‘before the end of 1811 to Mr Thomas Bugge, secretary of the society, councillor of the state, etc. to Copenhagen.’ It seems clear that this refers to the date by which Biran was to return his essay to Copenhagen.
Not only would Biran not send it back, but he also quickly abandoned the project. It is possible that he had the intention to publish the essay as it was or with some small corrections. We can see the trace of these corrections at the beginning of Rapports des sciences naturelles avec la psychologie.5 But soon the corrections would go too far and he concluded that he could not publish the previous essays separately:
The two essays, from the Institute of France and the Academy of Berlin, were not susceptible to being published separately since, as I had said, they nearly form one theme done in two ways. It was necessary to recast them again in a third, more consistent and careful, composition …, But the last work, awarded by the Academy of Copenhagen, having also been thrown into the same mould as the other two and being composed of a basis of similar ideas; it should also be included in the same plan.6
The stage of the essays thus passed, even though Biran continued his voyage in search of his one ‘only book’. It is a change that we can easily date since Biran had already written in October 1811, in a letter to Durivau, of his ‘complete work’.7 The story of this work does not concern us here, apart from one important detail that we shall return to later because we must fill a gap in the official copy of the Copenhagen essay with a certain passage from the Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie.
But the story of the Copenhagen essay has a follow-up. In August of 1820, Biran wrote in his journal: ‘I spent all this month and the end of last month in serious occupations of my choosing. I rewrote my essay to the Academy of Copenhagen with the intention of sending it to the doctor M. Royer-Collard [Antoine-Athanase, brother of Pierre-Paul] who consulted me on a course that he intended to do at Charenton on the subject of mental alienation.’8 Biran incorporated a part of the original Copenhagen essay directly into this text. He delivered the new essay to Royer-Collard, and in August 1821 deemed it ready for publication. He again established a contract with the publisher Courcier and was ready to deliver the first volume of around 300 pages, entitled, Nouvelles considerations sur les rapports du physique et du moral; this would be ‘followed by another that would contain a philosophical essay awarded by the Academy of Berlin’.9
We cannot see very well, however, what text this was, since Biran spoke of a work much longer than the one edited by Victor Cousin in 1834 under the title Nouvelles considerations sur les rapports du physique et du moral (which must be the one sent to Royer-Collard). The idea that Biran thought to add for publication three other texts (two of which had already been published) is unlikely.10 A simpler hypothesis would be that Biran made use of a copyist who wrote in large handwriting and who left wide margins, like the one he made use of when he was working on the Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie. In any case, the publication of the two essays, once more put into process after a delay of ten years, did not take place. But twenty years later, Hippolyte Royer-Collard published, in the second volume of the Annales medico-psycologiques, an ‘Examen de la doctrine de Maine de Biran sur les rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme’ (where Antoine-Athanase commented on the Nouvelle Considérations), with annotations by Biran himself.
3. Notes on the publication of the text
In his inventory from 15 August 1825, Victor Cousin wrote, concerning the Copenhagen Essay, that it consisted of the ‘author’s copy (minute de l’auteur) and there is a copy in a rather bad state. The work is long and of the greatest importance’. Naville added: ‘to print this essay we must also procure a copy of the manuscript from Copenhagen.’11 But in his catalogue, drawn up after the death of his father, Naville wrote: ‘Copenhagen Essay – consists only of a short fragment of the copy.’12 Without forming a hypothesis about what Naville could have been looking at, I shall summarize the results of my own research on what Naville called the ‘chaos’ of Biran’s manuscripts.13
For the Copenhagen essay, we have the following:
(1)Notes and drafts. A great deal of this preparatory work remains, especially in BI, Ms 2147. It is sufficiently interesting, but does not serve to establish the text of the Copenhagen Essay.
(2)Minute. The minute or official copy is the principle source for the text, but it contains ten gaps, of which eight can be filled in without difficulty.
(3)The copy sent to Copenhagen (N). The majority of this copy is lost. What remains consists of a fragment joined to the manuscript of Nouvelles considerations sur les rapports du physique et du moral (BI, Ms. 2148).
(4)Fragments of another copy (C). This second copy, which contains only eight pages, is sometimes less faithful to the Minute than the first copy, as we can see at the end of the essay, where there is a passage that remains not only in the Minute, but also in the two copies. We can choose between two hypotheses to explain this second copy, most of which is lost:
(I)The essay passed through three stages before being sent to Copenhagen:
a.the Minute
b.a first copy (C or N)
c.a final copy (N or C).
(II)Biran did not make the copy N before sending it to Copenhagen, but in revising the essay in preparation for its (aborted) publication in 1811, he made another copy, C.
Yet what remains of these two copies reassures us about the use of the Minute as the basis for the text (published here), since in the pages that we do have, the Minute and the copy are parallel. The differences between the two are minimal and are due for the most part to the copyists’ errors or to their difficulties in decrypting the philosophical writing. In the three cases, the copies also help us to fill in the gaps in the Minute. When it is not the case, there are certain signs that permit us to reconstitute the missing text – for example, where Biran refers very clearly to the manuscript of Perceptions obscures, or to the discussion of ‘Bichat’s division’. In only two cases do the gaps remain irremediable: after M 23 there are several words that we have put in brackets using other similar sections as a guide;14 after M 28 there is at least a page missing. There was no question of substituting for the author here, so we have merely indicated what could have been the essential content of this passage.15 The manuscript that properly serves as the reference for this text is thus the Minute (M).16
1 H. Gouhier. Les conversations de Maine de Biran, Paris: Vrin, 1948, p. 6.
2 Joseph Henri Joachim Lainé (1768–1835), a French lawyer, politician and friend of Maine de Biran – ed.
3 E. Naville, Notice historique et bibliographique sur les travaux de Maine de Biran, Geneva: F. Ramboz, 1851, p. VII.
4 The French word mémoire does not really have a direct translation in English. I am translating it here as essay; other possible translations would be report, project or thesis. – ed.
5 F.C.T. Moore. The Psychology of Maine de Biran, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1970, p. 192.
6 See appendix XX of Œuvres de Maine de Biran, V. VI, Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme VI Paris: Vrin, 1984, p. 172.
7 Moore, The Psychology of Maine de Biran, 191.
8 Maine de Biran. Journal v. II, ed. H. Gouhier, Neuchâtel, Éditions de Baconière 1955, p. 287.
9 Maine de Biran. De l’aperception immediate, ed. J. Echeverria, Paris, Vrin, 1963.
10 Moore, The Psychology of Maine de Biran, p. 157.
11 Naville, Notice historique et bibliographique sur les travaux de Maine de Biran, p. X.
12 Naville, Notice historique et bibliographique sur les travaux de Maine de Biran, p. XXXIII.
13 Naville, Notice historique et bibliographique sur les travaux de Maine de Biran, p. XXIV–XXVIII.
14 See pp. 61–63 of this edition. – ed.
15 See pp. 65–66 of this edition. – ed.
16 The final section of Moore’s preface has been omitted as it pertained to editorial operations within the translation that we have opted not to indicate for the sake of simplicity.