4
Delphine Antoine-Mahut, ENS de Lyon, IHRIM, UMR 5317, LABEX “COMOD”
This volume presents the first English translation of an essay by Maine de Biran (1766–1824), awarded a prize by the Royal Academy of Copenhagen in 1811: The Relationship between the Physical and the Moral in Man (Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme).1 In this sense, it is an editorial event. But it can only be described as such against the background of a historical frame that gives it meaning, precisely because it breaks this framework. This break is also thus the break of a silence or a lack, in any case, an absence. This calls for several remarks and raises questions.
Firstly, it should be noted that if the recognition of Maine de Biran’s work in the English-speaking world has been a long time in coming, France also took its time. Not until the 1980s and the titanic effort of the publication of the Oeuvres complètes de Maine de Biran (Vrin, CNRS), under the direction of François Azouvi, was a synoptic and scientific view of Biran’s work possible. Another good indicator of the passage of a ‘classic’ author towards his integration into comprehensive philosophical training in France is having him appear in competitive teacher recruitment exams. Maine de Biran appeared twice, on the external aggregation of philosophy,2 in 1996 and in 2014, but only as text from which questions might be referenced during an oral question period, and not as a canonical author and, both times, on the basis of the same text: the essay on the decomposition of thought (Sur la décomposition de la pensée), awarded by the Institut de France in 1804. While this essay does mark the beginning of Biran’s properly Biranian thinking, it does not fully announce itself as such.
Yet if there is a philosophy that we generally label as French, just as idealism or romanticism are designated as German and empiricism is largely assigned to England or Scotland, it is indeed spiritualism that lays claim to Biran: the philosophical current recognizing both of the autonomy and the superiority of the mind (esprit) over the body. And although, most often, the genesis of Spiritualism was traced to Descartes, it remains the case that in the nineteenth century, Biran was, chronologically at least, the first of these spiritualists. How, then, can we understand having waited so long before one of the texts that may be the source of a newly deemed national philosophy, or at the very least, one of its designated singular currents, is made known? The first answer that comes to mind is the formula of Henri Gouhier: ‘Maine de Biran is the man of one book, and this book, he never wrote.’3 The text of Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme is part of a triptych consisting of two other essays: the essay from the Institut de France, Sur la décomposition de la pensée, and a third that was awarded by the Berlin Academy in 1807, De l’aperception immédiate. Biran had proposed to bring together and consolidate these three, but the project was never brought to fruition.
However, the particularity of these texts should be noted. The three essays are answers to competition questions posed by the members of a committee of a given scholarly academy, with the aim of clarifying or resolving a problem specific in a context. In the case of The Relationship between the Physical and the Moral in Man, the question posed by the Royal Academy of Copenhagen was to fit into the burning debate between metaphysicians and psychologists, on the one hand, and physicists and physiologists, on the other, by updating the contrasting genesis of relations between these two pairs of disciplines and how each was likely to contribute to the advancement of the science of man.
The exact question posed by the Royal Academy of Copenhagen that Biran would have read in 14 May 1810 edition of the Moniteur français was the following:
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.4
The writing of a competition essay assumes that it first and foremost is written within the context of responding to a command and not in writing a standalone book. Exterior pressures and demands also played a role in the subsequent revisions and corrections made to these competition texts: prior to the publication of the texts, jury members would demand preliminary alterations. The difficulties encountered by Biran in considering his own work as successful and worthy of being published are therefore derived from the nature and circumstances of this kind of essay. From a certain view, then, to not publish Biran, or to wait to publish Biran and, a fortiori, to translate Biran, would be to respect the will of Biran himself. And we would respect this because, implicitly at least, we would prioritize and distinguish different types of writings based on the authorship regime to which they belong. Some rewritten essays are in this sense more esteemed as ‘works’ than some original essays.
The second possible answer is more general and, in a sense, less generous to Biran. It is rooted in the observation of the philosophical eclipse of the latter by most important masters in the history of the French spiritualist tradition, including the Magisterium Bergsonian5 or by the perennial success of new branches of this school, such as phenomenology. It would have been expected that before becoming public, because it would be considered a second-order philosophy, or of less important than those of Bergson or Merleau-Ponty, it would have swept away in their waves. Returning to Biran in this sense allows for a nuancing of our understanding of the historiography of this spiritualist current, but without significantly changing the balance. It would only restore a link in a signifying chain, which would, however, remain intelligible without him.
Yet these explanations only intensify the initial question: according to what criteria should Biran be considered a minor author, including within his own camp? We can understand the need to distinguish the historical figure Maine de Biran (and if one were interested in this figure, it would be necessary to provide the full biography; but contrary to other prefaces mentioned here, the aim of this one goes beyond historical and bibliographical details, and focuses on receptions of Biran) from the Biranian figure built by successive readers and receptions, i.e. his historiography, or what one has made of him and said about him. But it is not yet clear in what capacity this historiography carries value as truth concerning the same work, or what, symmetrically, returning to Biran could do to alter our perception of this historiography.
To answer, we need to clarify the nature and purpose of this preface. A preface is a threshold used to carry a link between a context and a text. Biran’s text, however, has already been received through three mediations, including two prefaces: one by F.C.T. Moore (1984), translated in this volume; the historical and bibliographical notes on the work of Maine de Biran by Ernest Naville (1851),6 upon which Moore based his work; and the preface by Victor Cousin, in his edition to the Œuvres posthumes de Maine de Biran (March 1834). The latter included, in addition to the unpublished text, the Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, the Examen de la philosophie de M. Laromiguière (already published by Fournier in 1817) and the article on Leibniz (Exposition de la doctrine philosophique de Leibniz, published in 1819 by Michaud but composed with Stapfer in 1817 for the Biographie universelle de Michaud). Rewriting a preface to the Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme thus requires identification of classifications or main hierarchies that were dominant at the writing of these antecedent texts and the imposition of a certain Biranism. In short, it requires us to ask what aspects of Biranism these texts allow us to see and what they consigned to the shadows.
From this point of view, there is one common point in the texts of Moore and Naville: both focus on the difficulties of unifying and establishing a definitive version of Biran’s papers, therefore on more philological than thetic themes, and both bypass the polemical dimension of Cousin’s enterprise and initial preface.
Yet who is Victor Cousin in 1834? He exercised and in many ways continues to exercise all the power: Conseil supérieur de l’instruction publique, présidence de l’Agrégation de philosophie et de l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques, direction de l’École normale. He is the ‘king of philosophers’.7 He is the uncontested leader of a new eclectic spiritualist school that is reflected institutionally in curriculum content, teaching and teacher recruitment choices, writ, as the dominant philosophy, or a state philosophy. He is seen as the French founder of a modern historiography placing at its centre a Cartesian cogito designated as the absolute foundation of a psychology both experimental and rational.
Returning to Victor Cousin’s preface is thus a way to provide ourselves the means to understand the contours and the figure of the Maine de Biran which was made public and even institutionalized in the vast camp of spiritualists as early as the first third of the nineteenth century. It is a return to the origin of the storylines and background in which the editing and scientific translations of Biran appear as events. It is to produce the reason of an effect, which this volume is the completed expression of and may be so unconsciously. And then, by identifying the problems raised by Cousin’s preface, we can restore Biran’s voice.
In tracing this genealogy, we shall proceed in three stages:
(1)We shall first discuss the main criticisms levelled at Victor Cousin’s edition by Pierre Leroux (1797–1871).8
(2)We shall then return to the main arguments of Victor Cousin’s preface.
(3)Finally, we shall ask if the return to the text of Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme is or is not likely to correct our reading of the essay.
We can then draw all the consequences regarding the place of Biranism in modern historiography.
1. Mutilation versus occultation: back to the genesis of silence
The decision to make a strong accusation against the person that has identified himself as the father of the great spiritualist family is obviously not a neutral one. It aims to revise (and more than that) Biran’s assignment to a subordinate place in this family. It intends to focus gradually on what Biran himself said, rather than on the theses that were attributed to him, or how the editing and the translation of his work appear as a requirement produced by the intrinsic nature of this work rather than as foreign to this work.
The interest in Pierre Leroux’s approach lies in the comparison of the treatment of two figures in the history of French spiritualism who both shared an interest in presenting the relationship between psychology and physiology, and whose work was only made public posthumously by Victor Cousin. They are Maine de Biran and Théodore Jouffroy (1797–1842). The argument concerning Jouffroy therefore reflects indirectly on the analysis of the posthumous Œuvres of Biran. But while for Jouffroy, Cousin’s intervention is comparable to a real ‘mutilation’,9 in the case of Biran it takes the form of a deafness to an occultation.10
First, a brief introduction. Théodore Simon Jouffroy was a student of Cousin from 1815 to 1822. He worked at Le globe, Courrier français and l’Encyclopédie moderne. He was, successively, lecturer at the Ecole Normale Supérieure and then professor of ancient philosophy at the Collège de France, and held the chair of philosophy at the Faculty of Letters in Paris, from which he took leave for medical reasons in 1839. In 1833 he was elected to the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences (l’Académie des sciences morales et politiques), the Royal Council of Public Instruction (Conseil Royal de l’Instruction Publique) in 1840 and president of the Aggregation Jury in 1838, 1840 and 1841. He is best known for having focused on the refutation of materialist physiology from within the French spiritualist school. His ambivalent, near dissident, character, emphasized by Leroux and Giuseppe Ferrari (Les philosophes salariés, 1849), stemmed from the particularity of his position: interrogating the advances and scientific demands of physiology upon psychology, rather than refuting them. This is the reason for his close proximity to Maine de Biran and for discussing Cousin’s treatment of his posthumous publications alongside his treatment of Biran’s.
What happened to Jouffroy? Leroux shows that between the time of its writing and the presentation of excerpts in the Revue des deux Mondes, and its posthumous publication in the Nouveaux mélanges de Jouffroy11 in 1842, the text of De l’organisation des sciences philosophiques was the subject of a censure or even a rewrite by Cousin. By connecting the mutilation of Jouffroy’s texts to Cousin’s censorship of Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann’s work on Hegel in the publication of Cousin’s translation of Tennemann’s Manuel de l’histoire de la philosophie in 1829,12 Leroux shows that the ‘critical’ and censured passages of De l’organisation des sciences philosophiques involved, either developments unflattering to Cousin and his courses, or considerations on the philosophical religion or philosophy of religion. To rehabilitate what he sees as the ‘true’ Jouffroy, Leroux thus brings to the fore writing that appeared in Le Globe in 1825, republished with the agreement of Jouffroy in the Revue indépendante in 1841, and presents as an Appendix to his 1843 ‘De la mutilation d’un écrit posthume de Theodore Jouffroy’ the text titled ‘Comment les dogmes finissent’, where Jouffroy incorporates and extends the ideas from his courses of 1830 and 1834. Leroux intends therefore to denounce and correct censorship by Cousin by giving a voice to Jouffroy himself.
Concerning Biran and Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, the analysis is substantially different. Leroux denounces the ‘twelve lost years’ between Biran’s death and the publication of the posthumous edition (1834). He directly attributes to Cousin a desire for silence about Biran. And by bringing this strategy of silencing together with the mutilation imposed on Jouffroy, he shows how not giving the author his voice amounts to burying him a second time. A delay in the distribution of a work undermines it and destroys its originality. We even gain time to appropriate and to digest it, and then claim the main results – that is to say, to annex it. It is worth reproducing at length Leroux’s condemnation of Cousin:
When Maine de Biran died nearly twenty years ago, he left numerous writings, which fell, after his death, into the hands of M. Cousin. Our late friend doctor Bertrand, who had been closely linked with Maine de Biran, for whom he was the doctor, seeing, after a year or two, that these writings, which he knew where in part ready for printing, seemed not to appear, spoke several times to Cousin to have a sense of this enigma. He did not achieve clarity, and we were handed a letter that we printed in Le Globe, where he denounced this fact to the friends of philosophy. He attested in this letter that he had had in his own hands many of these writings completely finished. He attested that Maine de Biran, in his last moments, asked that at his death there be only a short delay for them to be public. Mr Cousin claimed at first that there was no editor: Bertrand found him three; then, that the Biran family was opposed to the implementation of the wishes of the deceased, but he added that these scruples could easily be lifted. In the meantime, he kept for twelve years the manuscripts that had been entrusted to him, without making it known to the public; After ten years he published some, publication which, gave him great honour. But twelve years lost, when it comes to discoveries and a man like Maine de Biran is not nothing. It would seem that he had promised Maine de Biran’s writing, like that of Jouffroy, not to the present epoch but to the future.13
But Leroux identifies no censorship of the manuscript and pronounces the same interpretation on the same content as that proposed by Cousin in his preface. Therefore, to return to the text of Biran, we must revisit and rediscover important lines and the context that influenced their first reception. We must go back to Cousin.
2. Annexation versus reduction: the battle for the ‘true’ spiritualism
We can highlight two intellectual mechanisms in Cousin’s interpretation of Biran: annexation and reduction. Both mechanisms describe respectively how Cousin appreciates what he shares with Biran in their common cause of a reigning spiritualism, as well as the manner in which he considered it important to distinguish himself from Biran and, if possible, to surpass him so as to maintain his dominant position.
Biran is portrayed above all as the ‘first metaphysician’ of the modern age.14 This characterization is both negative and positive. Its negative connotation is pronounced and founded on an opposition against those who are designated by Cousin as the partisans of the school of sensualism and physiologists, or, in other words, those who refuse to recognize consciousness as a distinct reality from sensation. From Cousin’s perspective, Biran’s contribution consists foremost in undermining any identification of human beings with a product of physiological organization. Claiming Biran as an ally in this way allows Cousin to consolidate his opposition against Condillac’s heritage, as represented by Pierre Jean George Cabanis (1777–1808), widely considered to be the principal physiologist of the ideologues, or as represented by Antoine Destutt de Tracy (1754–1836), who was recognized as the metaphysician of this school, or as revived during the early 1830s through the French reception of Franz Joseph Gall’s phrenology (1758–1828). Biran is thus brought into the service of Cousin’s cause.
But there is also a positive sense to Biran’s metaphysics with its reintegration of activity into consciousness. Such a reintegration is based on three compelling ideas: genuine activity is volition; volition is personality and personality is the self (le moi) itself; lastly, to will is to cause, and thus the self is the first cause given to us. Biran thus promises a form of spiritualism that is everything except
extravagant and without relation to the world that we inhabit, since the mind [esprit] that we are, the self, is given in a relation of which it is the first term, but which the second term is [a] sensation, and a sensation is localized at a certain location in the body. In this manner, mind [esprit] is given along with its opposite, the outside along with the inside, nature along with human beings.15
Biran’s relevance in 1834 is thus foremost as a sophisticated precaution and forerunner of Cousin’s spiritualism against the adversary of materialism understood broadly.
The second form of argument mobilized by Cousin’s interpretation of Biran concerns the notion of experience. Just as Biran does not deny organic reality and the external world, he does not hypostasize the basic fact of consciousness. In claiming for the basic fact of internal sense – its object of investigation – the same kind of experimental truth as that claimed by the sciences, the new psychology can thus fight on equal footing against the physical sciences. The main contribution of Biran’s thinking to spiritualism is thus the displacement of a debate that beforehand experienced difficulty in engaging with its opponent. Combat always aspires to the establishment of a monopoly, but this time on a common territory, namely the experimental territory with the primacy of inner experience. Once again, Biran is called upon as reinforcement in a common struggle.
If this were all, Leroux would be vindicated, since one would no longer understand how Cousin could legitimately remain in the position of the father of the spiritualist school. In order either to return to this position or retain it, despite the publication Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, one must thus reveal the limits of what Cousin called the reduction of Biran’s thinking. Reduction thus legitimates annexation in making Biran’s contribution a simple dimension of a more encompassing project, namely Cousin’s. This runs the risk of appearing like an alternative spiritualism, far more heuristic than Cousin’s spiritualism, and yet absorbed by the latter.
Because if Biran has expanded philosophy in enlarging consciousness from the givens of sensation to the domain of active and voluntary experiences, he has equally left a ‘massive lacuna’:16 rational experiences in the broad sense. This is not a lacuna among others; it is a lacuna that inhibits that anything can be observed in consciousness. Yet, according to Cousin, this rational substantiality of consciousness is the condition of possibility for all interior experience.
On the metaphysical level, the hierarchy between rational and voluntary phenomena implies a further consequence: it rehabilitates the notion of substance at the foundation of the notion of cause in the sense that if the will causes the act, only reason can provide a cause in itself, or, in other words, substance. Biran’s spiritualism is distinct from Cousin’s in terms of a different relation to the original categories of thinking; Cousin’s choice: the integration of rationality at the foundation of volitional activity grounds and thus surpasses Biran’s options.
Equally at stake is another conception of modern historiography.17 The principal contribution of Biran’s thinking consists in a novel interpretation of Leibniz’s monadology. In Biran’s Leibniz, as interpreted by Cousin, ‘the apperception of consciousness provides knowledge of the self, [as] substance and cause together, [as] a simple force [of] the monad, and which is developed through activity that is manifest through effort’. Modern philosophy becomes thus re-centred on the image of a Leibniz who erases by the same stroke the presumptive experimental truths of the so-called philosophers of the eighteenth century. But once again, Leibniz risks eclipsing Descartes, the father of modern rational psychology. To demonstrate how the irreducibility of the self is grounded in reality on its substantiality would at the same time put Leibniz back in his proper place with respect to Descartes.
One can now understand why French spiritualism took its time before becoming finding a home in Maine de Biran. Without a doubt, Biran was not mutilated directly. But maybe Biran was temporarily gagged. In any case, everything was done such that he could be eclipsed in such a fashion that only king Cousin could continue to reign at the institutional court.
The final part of this preface will therefore aim to give a voice back to Biran on those aspects that Cousin had labelled either as problematic or inadequate. This will hopefully leave us in the position – with a proper understanding of the relevant matters – to determine whether Cousin or Biran has the most rightful claim to reign.
3. Rebalancing versus demarcation: the experimental science of man according to Maine de Biran
Reading The Relationship between the Physical and the Moral in Man in accordance with Cousin’s preface yields two mechanisms, corresponding to those of annexation and restriction, which we shall call rebalancing and demarcation.
From the outset, the rebalancing concerns Biran’s metaphysical contribution to the analysis of the duality of the primitive fact of innermost sense in the experience of effort. As regards what was at stake in the question set by the Copenhagen Academy, Cousin made this duality in Biran perfectly clear. Yet he has equally transformed the (thoroughly spiritualist) priority given to mind over body in this relation into an unconditional superiority of mind over body. In other words, Cousin has passed over the vital dimension18 of the Biranian self in utter silence. It is precisely by way of this dimension that Biran retains a connection to physiology. What Cousin has selected, or indeed isolated, as concerns Biran must therefore be reinstated in reading the latter. Biran opposes ‘physiologists become metaphysicians’ just as much as ‘metaphysicians transformed into physiologists’19 – in short, he is against those who seek to conflate the irreducible distinction of soul from body with a negation or an absorption of one by the other.20
This rebalancing can here be made apparent in three ways.
The first way is in considering a dimension of the reference to Descartes. Indeed, for Biran, it is because Descartes radically distinguished soul from body that he was able to generate a materialism just as much as he was the contrary position.21 If the difference is overstressed, we risk producing what we fear. To strengthen spiritualism against its alternative, the physiological dimension of the science of man must not be neglected but, on the contrary, be accorded its full significance.
The analysis of Cabanis in The Relationship between the Physical and the Moral in Man confirms this thesis. As Cousin was to remark, Biran clearly emphasizes (as Cabanis puts it) ‘the genius of the science of physiology’.22 But this is equally to explain the profit we may draw from physiology when we no longer claim to make it into the complete explanation:
This great work seems to me eminently appropriate to make clear, on the one hand, the abuse and the danger of physiological theories in the explanation or deduction of the phenomena of inner sense, and on the other hand, the genuinely useful type of application one may make of these theories to a particular class of sensitive phenomena that take their necessary place in the philosophy of the human mind.23
Just as taking spiritualism in the sense of a rationalism risks producing its contrary, so a physiologism properly understood guards against a kind of idealization of inner sense.
The rebalancing that Biran proposes for spiritualism therefore consists in abandoning the sterile struggle with its alternative to the benefit of integrating, in the self, the irreducible phenomena that are the confused perceptions of a living organization: ‘Then, doubtless, psychology, to the extent that we include within it this particular species of fact, will find itself bound intimately to physiology.’24
We now see where Cousin’s demarcating line runs, and in what sense a different form of enlargement might answer the accusation of restriction. For Biran, on the metaphysical plane, it is when psychology seals itself against its other, and restricts itself in this sense, that it risks a suffocating death. To rationalize the self is to lack the interiority of sensations, affects and passions. And to ground the will’s causal force by way of substantiality is to sever the vital force.
Contrary to Cousin’s historiography, the history of modern thought, according to Biran, must therefore make room for authors such as Thomas Willis (1621–1675), Georg Ernst Stahl (1659–1734), David Hartley (1705–1757), Charles Bonnet (1720–1793), François Gigot de Lapeyronie (1678–1747), Marie François Xavier Bichat (1771–1802), Philippe Pinel (1745–1826) or further Franz Joseph Gall (1758–1828) – that is, those whom dominant or institutional thought strives to expel from the corpus of ‘philosophy’. In contemporary terms, we could say that Biran is one of the first defenders of the fertility of an interdisciplinary approach to the human being, and that this interdisciplinary approach is for him the only measure of the scientific status of the psychology he promoted.
Yet a question remains. If Biran indeed proposed an alternative to Cousinism, why was his voice not heard once his writings were published? Why did no school issue from him? Why did he not introduce a clear line of demarcation at the heart of French spiritualism?
We could answer that, each in their own way, authors such as Théodore Jouffroy, Félix Ravaisson (1813–1900) or Francisque Bouillier (1813–1899),25 drew precisely on the threads that tightly bond psychology to physiology (for Jouffroy), habit (for Ravaisson) or even to a form of vitalism (for Bouillier), which issued directly from Biran’s canvas. We could equally consider Bergson’s élan vital and Merleau-Ponty’s study of perception as singular, new grafts onto unnamed Biranian roots.
That these roots remain unnamed may then be interpreted in two ways. We may note the perennial force of authoritarian thought that makes it risky to take sides with this alternative voice. But we may value the power of this voice, despite institutional pressure, and let it resonate in other bodies of work in order to test its capacity to intervene in turn.
We began with an idea according to which this first English translation of Maine de Biran would be an event. It has now become one of the first nodes in the network of a history other than the authoritarian. In its turn, it could therefore make an intervention.
1 The three essays by Biran discussed here, the 1811 Rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme (of which this volume is a translation), De l’aperception immediate from 1807, and Sur la décomposition de la pensée of 1804 were written as responses to competition questions posed by the Academy of Copenhagen, the Academy of Berlin and the Institute of France (Institut de France), respectively. Maine de Biran effectively entered these essay competitions and won. – ed.
2 The external aggregation of philosophy was established in France in 1825. This is a competitive examination for professors of philosophy wishing to teach in the final year at high schools. The competition includes written tests for eligibility (a general philosophy essay, an essay on a theme of the curriculum, and an explanation of text on an author in the programme) and oral admission tests (a general philosophy lesson, a lesson on a field in the curriculum, an explanation of French text on the curriculum – it is within this framework that the essay on the ‘decomposition of thought’ fits – and an explanation of text in a foreign language). On this French specificity and its history, see the book by B. Poucet, Enseigner la philosophie. Histoire d’une discipline scolaire (1860–1990). Paris: CNRS Editions, 1999.
3 H. Gouhier, Les conversions de Maine de Biran, Paris: Vrin, 1948, p. 6. See also F.C.T. Moore’s introduction in this volume for a further explanation of the never-written book. – ed.
4 On the context of this question, cf. Elizabeth A. Williams, The Physical and the Moral. Anthropology, Physiology, and Philosophical Medicine in France, 1750–1850. Cambridge: CUP, 1994.
5 Cf. F. Azouvi, La gloire de Bergson. Essai sur le magistère philosophique. Paris: Gallimard, 2007.
6 Erenest Naville, Notice historique et bibliographique sur les travaux de Maine de Biran, Geneva: F. Ramboz, 1851.
7 ‘The revolution of 1830, which had made Louis Philippe king of the French, had made Mr Cousin king of philosophers. But Louis Philippe was only a constitutional King, Mr Cousin was an absolute King’ (Jules Simon, La Philosophie et l’enseignement officiel de la philosophie, private archives, Fonds Jules Simon, 87 AP 16, cited by P. Vermeren, Victor Cousin. Le jeu de la philosophie et de l’État, Paris: L’Harmattan, 1995, chap. 7, p. 176).
8 Pierre Henri Leroux (1797–1871) was the founder of the periodical Le Globe, a journal of young people opposed to the regime of the restoration. Following that, he founded the Revue Encyclopédique, then in 1836, with Jean Reynaud, the Encyclopédie nouvelle, to which he also contributed over one hundred articles. Directly opposing the official state philosophy of Victor Cousin, he proposed, notably, a history of philosophy that rehabilitated the philosophers of the eighteenth century. On the various aspects and issues surrounding the polemic between Cousin and Leroux, see Lucie Rey, Les enjeux de l’histoire de la philosophie en France au XIXe siècle. Pierre Leroux contre Victor Cousin. Paris: L’Harmattan, 2013.
9 See, P. Leroux, ‘De la mutilation d’un écrit posthume de M. Jouffroy’, Revue Indépendante, 1 November 1842.
10 P-H. Daled studies the efficacy of occultation concerning eighteenth-century philosophers in Le matérialisme occulté et la genèse du «sensualisme». Ecrire l’histoire de la philosophie en France. Paris, Vrin, 2005. I show here that this strategy of occultation was applied even within the same intellectual family – spiritualism.
11 By Jean-Philibert Damiron (1794–1862). Damiron became a member of the Academy of Moral and Political Sciences in 1836 and obtained a chair in Modern Philosophy at the Sorbonne in 1838. He is notably the author of Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie en France au dix-neuvième siècle (1828) and Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie en France au dix-septième siècle (1846). His relation of dependency vis-à-vis Cousin, who secured his post for him, occassionaly placed him in delicate situations like the one concerning Jouffroy related here.
12 Wilhelm Gottlieb Tennemann. Manuel de l’histoire de la philosophie, translated from German by V. Cousin, Professeur à la Faculté des Lettres de l’Académie de Paris, Paris: Pichon et Didier, two volumes, 1829.
13 The passage on Biran is located on page 293 of ‘De la mutilation d’un écrit posthume de Théodore Jouffroy’.
14 Nouvelles considérations sur les rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, Ouvrage posthume de M. Maine de Biran, edited with a preface by Victor Cousin. Brussels: Haumen and Co., 1834, p. 39.
15 Cousin, Nouvelles considérations, p. 10.
16 Cousin, Nouvelles considérations, p. 26.
17 Cousin quite rightly points out that Biran’s theory impacts upon ‘the history of philosophical systems, I mean, the history of modern systems, the only ones to occupy French philosophy at this time’ (Cousin, Nouvelles considérations, p. 15).
18 On the vital dimension of the self in spiritualism, see especially Dominique Janicaud, http://www.universalis.fr/encyclopedie/spiritualisme.
19 The Relationship between the Physical and the Moral in Man, p. 80.
20 F. Azouvi, Maine de Biran. La Science de l’homme. Paris: Vrin, 2000.
21 Azouvi, Maine de Biran. La Science de l’homme, p. 21.
22 Azouvi, Maine de Biran. La Science de l’homme, p. 144. Biran adds that Cabanis omits ‘the entire intellectual and truly moral aspects of the phenomena of man doubled in humanity [duplex in humanitate]’.
23 Azouvi, Maine de Biran. La Science de l’homme, p. 144.
24 Azouvi, Maine de Biran. La Science de l’homme, p. 106.
25 On Ravaisson, cf. Dominique Janicaud, Ravaisson et la métaphysique. Généalogie du spiritualisme français (Paris: Vrin, 1998). On Francisque Bouillier’s place in the French Spiritualist stream, and on the role granted to the history of philosophy, and particularly to Leibniz, in Bouillier’s strategies against Cousin, cf. D. Antoine-Mahut, ‘Reviving spiritualism with Monads. Francisque Bouillier’s impossible mission (1839–1864)’, British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Special Issue, 300 Years of Leibniz’s Monadology, ed. Pauline Phemister and Jeremy Dunham, 2015. 23(6), pp. 1106–1127.