6
Pierre Montebello, University of Toulouse II, le Mirail
Maine de Biran (1766–1824) is considered the inventor of the philosophy of consciousness, and at times he is celebrated for developing a philosophy of the lived body. But his signature discovery does not lie in the feeling of free activity coinciding with personal existence and self-consciousness, nor even in the feeling of a subjective body, lived as one’s own; it is rather the idea that our consciousness derives from a relationship of effort between voluntary force and body. This relationship includes the body, by essence. The body is there; it exists; it is part of consciousness. One cannot be conscious without a body, nor can one think without a body. But consciousness is characterized by a duality – voluntary force and body. Thus, the body does not belong to consciousness as a particular mode of thought, but as the other pole to the voluntary (hyper-organic) force that we exercise over our bodies. Thought and consciousness are born of this polarity of forces (resistance and will). This explains why our own psychological reality is never given in the form of an absolute. The absolute designates that which can be grasped in and of itself, in its substantial, objective, exterior unity, without any fissures, whereas the free, conscious, existing subject only perceives itself within a relationship of effort that constitutes it – a relationship that is at the heart of psychology.
In a sense, Biran never ceased opposing consciousness’s ‘life of relation’1 to the metaphysical absolutes that pose a subsistent reality, complete in itself, such as the soul or body. Biran wrote to Destutt de Tracy that one must consider ‘the self in the unitary will, always the same, which is not in an absolute manner abstracted from all conditions, but only in relation to the whole of all the parts that obey it, in an essentially relative effort whose object, resistant but obedient, and whose subject (which only exists as conscious force in resisting its action) are inseparable and are only constituted with respect to each other’.2 In other words, what is called consciousness, or existence, or thought, or individual liberty (all equivalent concepts), is given to us in a dual, heterogeneous, strained experience that at the same time is simple, unique, and incapable of being split into parts. Such is the ‘primitive fact’ that imposes itself upon us;3 such also is the transcendental horizon of all philosophical consciousness and, for that matter, of all perception, all representation and all knowledge.
Although Maine de Biran’s thought had a prestigious influence on the philosophers of his time and those of the late nineteenth century (in particular, Cousin, Renouvier, Ravaission, Tarde and Bergson), it faded little by little from memory before finding a renewed interest today. His philosophy has even been described recently as the precursor to Husserl’s phenomenology (though Biran’s philosophy differs in that it gives to the body a role that Husserl does not). In reality, if Biran’s philosophy remains of interest to us, it is because we have not yet escaped from the question that it poses. Through his philosophy, Biran sought to explore an unexplored domain, a terra incognita: psychology – but without leaving the body. Biran’s philosophy sought to give the status of explicit philosophical question to personal existence (or consciousness or apperception), which cannot be reduced to anatomy or psychology, and whose phenomena are never truly grasped in and of themselves. The exploration of the phenomenon of consciousness requires a radically different method, an internal observation, a study of the acts of consciousness and of the way in which they envelop the body. No physico-physiological analysis is capable of reducing this singular mode of being and its unique apperceptive and phenomenal order. It is the feeling of this irreducibility that defines Biran’s philosophy. While the clean divide between neurology and psychology does not exclude empirical correlations, physiological observation and psychological observation do not have the same foundation, are not talking about the same thing, and do not describe the same causal chain. The masterful work, The Relationship between the Physical and Moral in Man, is a testament to Biran’s modernity concerning the mind–body problem.
Because it does not have an objectivist perspective, Biran’s philosophy is without doubt the first philosophy really to take into account the role of the body in the genesis of the intellectual and passive faculties. The body apprehended here is not the body of the anatomist (a spatial and objective body), nor that of the metaphysician (absolute substance); it is first and foremost that immediate and lived body through which sensations are situated and perceptions are constructed. This lived body, which is one with our existence, is connected to our voluntary power, and can only be known subjectively, is clearly distinct from the body of the anatomist, whose representation is objective and anonymous, and from the absolutist body of the metaphysician, which is pure exteriority-to-self of extensive substance. But this initial understanding of a subjective body could not become a philosophical problem so long as the very definition of consciousness as immaterial ‘thinking substance’ was taken for a definitive truth. Biran will destroy this construct of dualism by pushing the entire psycho-physical question towards that point of action within us: effort. If the feeling of personal existence coincides with effort, it implies the immediate apperception of an action exercised upon the body by the will (there is no need to understand how the body works; it is lived from within by being subjected to our motor power, contrary to the desiring body which is permeated by affects and passions). The lived body resides in a causal relationship between will and the physical body, without which there are neither sensations, nor perceptions, nor even apperceptions. This new idea of what must indeed be called the corps propre will have notorious success in psychology.
But what exactly does the term ‘effort’ indicate? What is the significance of effort as a relationship between a non-organic force and the body? First, it signifies that consciousness is not pure thinking presence-to-self, but an activity, which is not pure physiological presence-to-self, but tension and attention, and even intention. Effort is proof that consciousness is not a substantial reality; it is the uninterrupted activity that implicates the body in the genesis of sensory, perceptive, and reflective series. If effort is primary, one cannot construct a theory of the faculties without taking it into account. Our psychological activity implies a differentiated relationship with the body through which affects, sensations, intuitions, perceptions and reflections are distinguished. However, underlining the preeminent role of the body in the relationship to hyper-organic power in no way involves reducing the intellectual faculties to an objective and neutral body. Such an approach would destroy the body’s internal and intimate connection to the will and, with it, the psychological sphere.
Biran’s philosophy is an urgent reminder that ultimately no one has been able to trace the genesis of our psychological activity from the primitive will/body duality that is constitutive of the phenomenon of consciousness, nor sought to probe the modalities of its exercise, nor even attempted to define the main functions of consciousness. What is feeling, perceiving, remembering, imagining, reflecting? Must we adopt the attitude of many modern philosophers of mind who claim to rid us of these questions? Is it possible, in constituting a philosophy of mind, to do without reflecting on the unique acts of thought in relation to the subjective body? These are questions that surpass historical doctrines; they involve tacit philosophical assumptions that will long structure the modern discourse on the relationship between mind and body.
Let us note a strange reversal of our era, perhaps a sign: after a long eclipse, the problem of mind has resurfaced, as John Searle noted disappointedly in his book The Rediscovery of the Mind, one chapter of which bears the telling title: ‘What’s Wrong With the Philosophy of Mind’4 In this book, Searle simply rediscovers Biranian arguments. He critiques the materialism that prevails in the science of mind, the bad reductionism, the lack of a subjective ontology. What’s wrong with the philosophy of mind is exactly what Biran denounced a long time ago, namely the tendency to objectivize the mind, which over the centuries has taken the form of cybernetism, emergentism, functionalism, etc. Many have accepted the idea that physical reality is the only reality that exists is physical reality, and that there is no point retaining the concept of psychological experience. At bottom, Searle laments that modern science let itself fall into this trap, that it tacitly accepted that mental phenomena are reducible to causal physical structures, computational states, behavioural dispositions in which none of the properties of consciousness can be found.
Searle’s attitude stems from a desire to rethink the relationship between mind and body. Searle re-examines the tenants of ‘biological naturalism’, which still dominates today and which holds that ‘[m]ental phenomena are caused by neurophysiological processes in the brain and are themselves features of the brain’.5 This framework is simple enough, but what is not simple are the postulates on which it rests. The problem is not merely that we do not know what to do with irreducible consciousness, non-‘phenomenic apperception’, as Biran would call it, nor that we cannot escape from interminable discussions about the ‘mental’, ‘phenomenal’ or ‘immaterial’, nor that an objective methodology appears inappropriate as soon as the psyche is at issue. The problem is also, according to Searle, why this methodology has dominated the mind–body problem.
Searle adopts Biran’s position almost verbatim in asserting that Descartes, in substantivizing thought, paved the way for the objective analysis of subjectivity. In the chapter of The Rediscovery of the Mind entitled ‘What’s Wrong With the Philosophy of Mind’, Searle undertakes to account for the materialist tradition that is ‘massive, complex, ubiquitous and yet elusive’.6 According to Searle, the materialist tradition is founded on several axioms that rest upon an undemonstrated metaphysical postulate: the belief that reality is physical. Even if this belief goes against our deepest intuitions, materialist solutions are inspired by the obvious fear of Cartesian dualism: that one cannot imagine a substance that is not res extensa. And believing in mentalism is believing that consciousness is not physical.
Searle attacks materialist discourse by developing a four-part argument:
(1)The mental is tied to consciousness.
(2)Reality is in part subjective: mental states have an irreducibly subjective ontology that is in the first person and non-neutral. Searle laments:
It would be difficult to exaggerate the disastrous effects that the failure to come to terms with the subjectivity of consciousness has had on the philosophical and psychological work of the past half century. In ways that are not at all obvious on the surface, much of the bankruptcy of most work in the philosophy of mind and a great deal of the sterility of academic psychology over the past fifty years, over the whole of my intellectual lifetime, have come from a persistent failure to recognize and come to terms with the fact that the ontology of the mental is an irreducibly first-person ontology.7
(3)‘Because it is a mistake to suppose that the ontology of the mental is objective, it is a mistake to suppose that the methodology of a science of the mind must concern itself only with objectively observable behavior.’8 Searle thus rediscovers the very Biranian idea of a first-person science. This idea forms the basis of Biran’s constant critique of Condillac. Thought cannot be observed from the exterior. Thought is essentially activity, and the position of the spectator presupposes an inevitable passivity. Subjectivity cannot be understood in the third person.
(4)‘The Cartesian conception of the physical, the conception of the physical reality as res extensa, is simply not adequate to describe the facts that correspond to statements about physical reality.’9 Conceiving the real in micro-physical terms, or believing that everything is made up of particles, is the inevitable paradigm of modernity. But it is also a simplistic belief system that does not resolve anything since it does not give precision to reality’s differentiated modes of existence. By accepting as given the Cartesian definitions, dualism, like materialism, exhibits a certain incoherence. Searle remarks that ‘materialism is … the finest flower of dualism’.10 Biran has said the same thing a hundred times. Indeed, once two substances are posited, the belief that physical reality excludes the mental leads inevitably to materialism. ‘The mistake is to suppose that these two theses are inconsistent.’11 The reality is that one leads to the other; the mind ends up having the same experimental status as the body. How else can one understand the relationship between two realities that have nothing in common? But, more broadly, how can one escape from a dualism that leads so inevitably to the monism of matter? Finally, how does one deal with all these intermediary processes: grammar, coding, programming, unconscious, etc.?
What must be underscored above all is that, for Searle, ‘the fact that a feature is mental does not imply that it is not physical; the fact that a feature is physical does not imply that it is not mental’.12 This position undermines the foundations of scientific materialism and calls into question the postulates that have been commonly accepted over the last half-century. Physicalism deals with the mind on a physical level and claims to identify mental states and brain states. If consciousness is a mere cerebral process, mental states can be reduced to processes of cerebral physiology – or alternatively to functions. Nonetheless, contrary to the various forms of functionalism that attempt to break the mind down into a series of simple mental processes that can be compared to the basic operations of a computer, few experiments shed light on the brutal affirmations of an identity between the mental and physical. Functionalism is more fertile because it draws upon artificial intelligence to arrive at … an impasse. According to functionalism, ‘[a]ny system whatever, no matter what it is made of, could have mental states provided only that it had the right causal relations between its inputs, its inner functioning, and its outputs.’13 Thus, the brain is no longer the only object possibly endowed with mental states. Such an analysis coincides with behaviourism by excluding all subjective and affective references. As Searle notes, this full-blooded materialism, in the Cartesian manner, holds that the brain is not really important to the mind! But all these materialisms are not the same. Identity materialism is not that same as functionalist materialism, which rejects the strong type-type version of identity (since the functions can also be produced by a computer), and is not the same as emergent materialism, which attempts to surpass identity itself by affirming that mental states are caused by the interaction of subsystems of the brain and emerge from cellular components. How is this emergence accomplished? What does it consist of? The transition problem remains.
For Searle, the ‘irreducibility’ of consciousness is nothing mysterious; it derives from our existence, from the subjective experience we have of it, from undeniable structural qualities: fine sensory modalities, unity of states of consciousness, intentionality, subjective feelings …14 This is not to say that these mental states are not supervenient with respect to neuro-physiological events (emergentism), or that they lack a real causality. Contemporary discussion of these issues has often been very confused, and disconnected from reality. Sometimes it is argued that the irreducibility of consciousness proves that dualism is correct; other times, it is argued that this irreducibility mars the scientific process by creating an exception in nature. But although it is likely that ‘macro mental phenomena are all caused by lower-level micro phenomena’,15 this does not prevent these macrophenomena from possessing a reality, an ontological sphere of their own. We can understand this fact by transcending the tendency to objectify (and to fall into spontaneous dualism) whereby we consider as of lesser being, or as nothingness, anything that does not belong to the microphenomenal level, or anything that cannot be reduced to it. There is a ‘causal efficacy’ to the macrophenomenal level that cannot be denied. That new forms of top-down causality arise from the relationship between micro and macro does not diminish the real causal features of macro-physical forms. In other words, if consciousness is a characteristic property that emerges from neural systems, it cannot be reduced to the mere physical structure of neurons, but involves the causal interaction between these neurons or parts of the brain. This also means that consciousness has a real causality that can only be explained by the causal behavior of neurons.16 Searle distances himself from reductionism as much as from radical emergentism, which holds that ‘consciousness could cause things that could not be explained by the causal behavior of the neurons’.17 Finally, he denies any intermediary, any common background between the two levels of brain and conscience:
There are brute, blind neurophysiological processes and there is consciousness, but there is nothing else. If we are looking for phenomena that are intrinsically intentional in principle to consciousness, there is nothing there: no rule following, no mental information processing, no unconscious interferences, no mental models, no language of thought, no 2 ½-D images, no three-dimensional descriptions, no language of thoughts, and no universal grammar.18
That clarifies things; psychology must account for the phenomenon of mind in and of itself.
Without realizing it, Searle basically reinvents Maine de Biran. The Relationship between the Physical and Moral in Man articulates many of the Searlean arguments that I just laid out. The motto with which Biran began Relationship speaks for itself: ‘O Psychology, preserve thyself from physics.’ By violating this precept, the emerging science of man attempts to objectify thought, to read thought through the movement of brain fibres. The project of a science of man is haunted by the dream that the inner workings of thought can be completely unveiled, and by the belief that we can put thought ‘into images’.
Very generally, if thought is broadly understood as an activity, it cannot be described as a thing. An activity is not a structure of any kind. We can certainly establish a relationship between structure and activity, between conditions and conditioning, but we also must understand when conditions no longer explain things – and are incapable of doing so – because the acts specific to thought can only be examined by considering a higher apperceptive order. Biran does not stop repeating this position.
To put thought into images (modern imaging technology aids this metaphysical project without ever questioning it) is not really to explain thought, to say what constitutes acts of thought, or differences between affects, sensations, perceptions, memories and thoughts:
Can all modes, ideas or acts that enter the mind also be subjected to an external perspective and grasped in the material traces of received impressions? Are these impressions themselves not in some cases the product of acts that are perceived before them or without them? Are there not thoughts, inner wants, which can in no way be read from the outside, or be represented by any kind of image? To conceive of them, would one not need to identify with the active and knowingly productive force of such acts; with the ego itself that is felt or perceived in its operations, but not seen as object, nor imagined as phenomenon?19
What is troubling in the desire to put thought into images is the way in which it defaces our singular activity and utterly nullifies the differentiation process by which we distinguish between feeling, perceiving, remembering, imagining, etc. Thought reduced to images is thoughtless thought, akin to the lifeless life of the mechanistic Cartesian paradigm. Knowing what thinking means cannot consist in reducing every thought process to its underlying hardware; it requires us to examine multiple features of experienced consciousness. When we attempt to translate psychological life into what Biran calls ‘the movement of the fibres’, we lose the personal individuality and the movement of consciousness. Just as the body is not equivalent to life, psychological life cannot simply be equated to animal life, for ‘internal fact cannot be conceived or felt outside of the individual’s sense of its cause or productive force’.20 Biran often quoted the formula of Boerhaave: man is simple in vitality, double in humanity. Homo duplex means that human physiology is complicated by an additional causal, psychological order.
Thus, Biran’s critique of the phrenology of Dr Gall proclaims the divorce between two emerging sciences: neurology and psychology. Gall’s phrenology may seem laughable when it attempts to explain coquetry in women or thieves’ propensity to steal by means of physiological flaws. Gall’s project is nevertheless the first robust attempt to connect the manifestation of mind with organic structure, the intellectual faculties with cerebral organs: ‘The various properties of the soul and spirit each have various organs, and the manifestation of these properties depends on their organization.’21 Biran immediately understands that such a theory brings the relationship between physical and psychic into a new episteme, into a metaphysics of manifestation that subordinates thought to the image and the visible. The entire science of man takes this very path. Does this science seek a clear correspondence between the intellectual faculties and the brain? In this context, one often speaks of dispositions of the mind (in the double meaning of a topos and a habitus, a brain mapping and a mental development). For the phrenologist, a disposition of the mind reflects not only an ability but an arrangement of the skull’s surface. The mind itself forms a bodily protuberance, sticks out, offers itself to sight, becomes legible in the silent arrangement of cranial convolutions. The mind leaves the inner sphere, abandons its immateriality, becomes an image for the viewer, a boney text for science. The paradigm of the complete determination of man – a paradigm that is so prevalent even today – is based on the implicit metaphysical principle that the mind can be exhibited in spatial and material form: ‘This doctor must have told himself at the outset: I must throw all of interior man into a kind of relief, so that one may know him by inspecting and touching the bumps of his skull.’22 The secret hope of this enterprise is clear, its unspoken dream is transparent: to make thought visible, legible. Thus, the physicalist paradigm is accompanied by a fantasy that also permeated Cartesianism (embodied in Descartes’s mistake regarding the thinking substance, which paved the way for a physical characterization of this impersonal substance): the fantasy of a radical unveiling of thought. To go behind the curtain and see thought, see the movement of neurons perfectly isomorphic to our actions. Is this not the dream of neuroscience? To read man as one reads a letter, to map out man – neurologically and genetically.
The extreme violence of this new paradigm consists in separating the individual from herself, turning her mind into unravelled physicality, and assigning to science a power that deprives the individual of its own truth, for this truth is only revealed after death. The subject is expelled from her own existence, from her own dimension of being. The truth of the individual is subjected to anatomical inspection and only emerges in the cold anonymity of death. To put thought into images is to objectify the subject, physiologize psychology; it means perpetual confusion between physical and psychic, imagination (which sees only extended things) and apperception (existence):
The sense of sight is dominant in human organization, to it we reduce all; it communicates its own forms to the entire system of our signs and our ideas, and one need not look further for the cause of our penchant to move always toward the outside, of our general disgust of interior observation, of the challenges that are unique to this study, whether we are simply collecting phenomena, or especially when we are expressing them, and to transmit them by appropriate signs. It is by reducing to the sense of sight the principles of language and psychology that we managed to exclude the facts of reflection or inner perception, and thus put the whole intellectual system into representations, all of thought into images.23
Biran is not questioning the procedure of science. He does not dispute the need to correlate heterogeneous phenomena to clarify what belongs to physiology and what belongs to psychology. So long as anatomophysiology seeks to establish vital conditions, it is within its rights. But it cannot claim to reduce apperceptive and reflexive phenomena to these conditions. Its analysis must stop at the organic without claiming to determine from the outside the forms that the intellectual faculties take on for inner sense; these are two different orders: ‘This relationship of coexistence between the facts of two natures excludes any parity, any analogy, any immediate and necessary relationship of cause and effect, or between the acting force and its product.’24 By relying on the joint observations of the physiologist, who observes vital functions, and the physiologist, who observes intellectual faculties, the psychologist can teach us how psychological facts are linked to the organic conditions without which they could not manifest themselves or take place. But she can tell us nothing more; she can give us no insight into the nature of the organic causes that purportedly produce thought. On this issue, one may formulate all sorts of hypotheses, but ‘in each case’, says Biran, ‘you will only imagine or form a representation of types or modes of movement which have no relationship with the self’s sensation or perception, nor with any of the phenomena of internal sense’.25 The conditional organic relationship is not a causal relationship capable of taking us from the organic to the psychological. The relationship between condition and conditioned is a relationship of existence: if the condition does not exist, the conditioned does not exist. The anatomophysiology goes further: it claims to assign a causal link; it holds that the condition produces the conditioned.
But it’s not so simple. For example, regarding the question: ‘What is the faculty of understanding which is particularly impaired as a result of organ damage … imagination, memory, attention, thinking, etc.’, physiology leaves its domain and must borrow from psychology.26 What force guides and psychologically actualizes vital conditions? Can we identify it by its mere structure? Gall himself was aware of the problem: ‘I do not mean that our faculties are a product of organization; that would be to confound conditions with efficient causes. I limit myself to what we can submit to observation.’27 However, by assuming an analogy between faculties and organs, Gall already has gone too far according to Biran; he thereby destroys the empirical method on which he claims to rely, goes beyond experience. Empirical observation can show us how often or how consistently these heterogeneous phenomena correlate to each other. But the phrenologist goes far beyond this method when he claims to locate the productive centre of thought in organic conditions, or when he claims to be able to situate within organic structure the psychological faculties themselves. In so doing, he continues to confuse organic conditions and psychological causality. And if he reflects on this relationship that he established surreptitiously, he is forced to admit that, to locate a psychological faculty, he must first have the inner sense of this faculty; he must first have some apperception of it. What does Gall mean by the term ‘faculty’? On what psychological experience does he base its value?
Gall does not at all realize that his starting point for dividing up the brain mass into parts is precisely these ‘actually distinct’ faculties that derive from inner sense and that are the subject of psychology. The idea that the faculties are naturally divided is based on the inner feeling that we have of their distinction. And in fact, Biran wonders whether we can even establish the meaning of these faculties on any other basis than the value that they have psychologically for the subject, the inner sense of their distinction. Gall did not end his inquiry there because he did not see the problem. He did not dwell for a moment on the feeling of an internal psychological distinction of intellectual faculties, because he was so preoccupied with discovering an assignable link between brain organization and mental faculties. ‘Who will deny,’ he writes, ‘that the inclinations and faculties are the domain of the physiologist?’28 Gall nominally distinguishes faculties without knowing how they are formed, nor what operations of thought they echo, nor how they are differentiated by inner sense. Without worrying in the least about psychological analysis, he gives a conventional value to each faculty, then assigns ex abrupto a given faculty to a given cerebral zone or protuberance. Gall fixes the value of these faculties without any psychology. Gall’s analysis is so permeated with the morals of the time, those of a certain era, that Biran asks ironically if brain forms vary in nature according to the type of society and the degree of civilization in which they emerge.
A physiological division tells us nothing about the meaning to be given to the corresponding psychological faculties; this calls for an entirely different investigation. Biran attempted to defend the point of view of psychological understanding against the emerging hegemony of physiological explanation. He emphasized the need to consider a dimension of being in his own originality, that of the psyche. The psyche is indeed constituted in direct relation to the body, but can never be reduced to the body of the anatomist: ‘Whatever we do,’ Biran writes, ‘there will always be absolute heterogeneity or complete lack of analogy between the two orders of facts.’29 ‘Miniature neurology’, as Bonnet called it, was driven by the hope of a full determination of the brain that would amount to a complete reading of man, a complete prediction of his actions. But this desire to reconstruct the life of the psychological faculties by the summation of infinitely small components is a chimera. The subject lies neither in this spatial dispersion nor in its functional dissemination. However you look at it, the psychological sense of our own activity is never elucidated by anatomophysiological analysis, which can only provide the ever more complicated conditions of this activity.
Biran’s interest in the relationship of thought to the body led him to raise a second, equally modern problem. He saw that consciousness is always traversed by something that it does not create but that is imposed upon it. He thus developed a deep theory of the impersonality of emotional life, which immerses us in the unconscious order of spontaneous sequences of images, movements, passions, affects. From this point of view again, nothing is ‘more informative for the reasonable man than the history of madness’.30 Biran’s Journal is a wonderful testament to the impotence of thought when impersonal life rises up within consciousness like a dark and tormented background. This vital impersonal background threatens at every moment to engulf awareness and to collapse the exercise of active faculties. The threat is serious – serious enough to poison an existence and be the object of a journal. In this sense, Biran’s Journal is not an autobiography. It does not tell the story of a life; its only topic is the impotence that threatens thought. ‘There is no balance in my being. I think of nothing, I am nothing.’ ‘Empty thoughts and meditations.’ ‘I have no ideas or views of any kind; I lack energy: my moral being is destroyed.’ ‘Inability to think.’ ‘I have no more thoughts.’ The Journal is the testimony of a growing inability to ‘exist’, to bring oneself into being. It is the sign of a life that escapes, that escapes from the subject to the point that we can probably say this text foreshadows the relationship between romanticism and melancholy.
Biran finds here a whole plane beneath consciousness that extends, as it were existentially, his studies of dreams, delusions, magnetism, and somnambulism. What is at issue in Biran’s Journal is quite simply the discovery of an affective unconscious. Biran has even been compared to Freud in this regard. Indeed, Biran painted an unsettling picture – based on the simple observation of himself – of the spontaneous associations of affects, images and movements that arise from the concentration of sensory or motor forces in the internal organs or brain, and that inhibit thought:
The current mode of exercise of conscious force itself depends on the condition and specific arrangements of the body on which the force is deployed, and thus all the changes that we experience in the state of our faculties, in the sad or pleasant feeling of existence, in the disorder or order and harmony that we feel in ourselves and that we enjoy outside ourselves, depend upon certain organic conditions, which it is not in our power to change and over which we have even less power in that they are the very sources of our power and of our will.31
An individual’s temperament depends primarily on affective life, which for each of us takes on the allure of destiny (Freud also speaks of a destiny of the drives). Affective life is characterized by spontaneity, by the eclipse of the self and the will. And thus a very unpredictable, insistent, fluid life, consisting of bizarre, strange associations, starts to cross consciousness without being in any way constituted by consciousness – a life that ‘works in us without us’. This life consists in the persistence of affective traces and spontaneous resonances of affects, persistence of images linked to affects and spontaneous association of images (in irregular, bizarre combinations, aggregated without connection or order), persistence of motor determinations (responses to excitative stimuli), and spontaneous production of movements. Spontaneous reactions are felt at all levels of affective life, in all phenomena that are associated with it. Pure affects, image-affects and movement-affects are the fabric of a sensory life that exists beneath consciousness, the marker of an ‘absolute nullity of consciousness’. Affect is the positive mode of existence radically cut off from the ego. The Journal says that we find this mode ‘whenever the intellectual nature is weakened or degraded, thought is dormant, the will is limp, the self is absorbed in sensory impressions, the moral person no longer exists; in sum, whenever our nature, mixed, double in humanity, becomes simple in vitality’.32
These spontaneous associations of affects, images and movements form an underground stream into which our general sense of existence is tossed; they give us this ‘vague feeling of a kind of inner life that we might call impersonal as there is not yet a person or ego able to see and know’.33 It is not a psychic unconscious that Biran discovers, but a somatic unconscious that permeates consciousness and alters its concatenations, often precluding them from even occurring – which explains Biran’s melancholy. This affective life is the ultimate domain of the unknowable. It is what the individual feels without thought, what he cannot communicate to himself and others, an unfathomable background, an invincible otherness within oneself: from affective life ‘comes the inability which we all experience to know thoroughly what one of our fellows is as living and feeling and to show what he is in himself’.34 Affective disorders are not likely to be illuminated by an act of consciousness. They flee as soon as consciousness is exercised. They cannot be memorialized as they are not linked to acts of consciousness. Hence the impression of a fleeting, mobile, elusive life, which runs through us and opens within us its unpredictable successions, which can border on delirium. For Biran, the concept of destiny has no other source. He expresses this rising of life, this emergence of the moving background, this choppiness of the surface caused by the movement of the depths – in short, a life that one cannot connect to our voluntary acts: ‘The power of destiny, which was one of the most powerful theatrical forces, is perhaps but an expression of this fact of internal sense that shows us, in the depths of our being, a kind of organic necessity opposed to moral freedom.’35 Our first destiny is this unconscious life to which ‘we are forbidden to return’; it is that ‘part of our being to which we are most totally blind’.36 Biran’s philosophy of the body captures these dual modes of the body, which depend on whether or not it enters within our voluntary power: as anonymous power of life and as personal power to exist, as unconscious affective life and as personal conscious life, as involuntary activity and as voluntary effort. Conscious life does not free us from the power of rich emotional life. Indeed, it tends to channel it, to connect it with voluntary acts, but what the Journal teaches us is that nothing can ever fully emancipate the subject from the threat of a momentary or radical dispossession.
Our baseline feeling of existence is thus the expression of the general communication of sensations, sometimes pleasant, sometimes painful – ‘of the infinite multitude of simultaneous impressions’ that flow from internal nerve centres. This makes up the baseline tone of our existence, the gaiety or the unspeakable sadness that invades us, or inundates us, without our control. These ‘various modifications of the general feeling of existence’ form the background of our lives, and are a sign of our deep character. ‘There is no mirror’ for this part of ourselves, no face for this part of our face, no shape to this obscure and fluid life. Our ego is irreparably fractured by the moving background of affective life that overflows in us – a strange affective life that ‘does not have the capacity to grasp itself in any of its variable forms and disappears in the very instant that the self wishes to observe it more closely (l’approfondir), like Eurydice, whom a glance repels into the shadows’.37 Maine de Biran’s Journal is the story of this foreignness to self and the melancholic echo it causes: never being able to fully belong to oneself.
Once thought is linked to the body, new questions arise: What becomes of thought if it is no longer closed upon itself, if it is not a substance that always thinks, if it does not stand in opposition to the body as that which is absolutely heterogeneous to it? What does it mean to think day by day, yet not at all times, to think with your body, not against your body, to think when effort alone – never substantiality – reveals us to ourselves? What does it mean if forming a plane of bodily resistance is necessary for thought to guide itself and think properly? This body that thought must create by habit, this plane of bodily resistance that it must erect within itself to lean upon, this consistency that requires all the operations of thought, hides a more mobile, fluid, fleeting body, the incessant flow of affects, movements, spontaneous pulses of the nervous machine, bizarre associations of all kinds that threaten at every moment to take us in an unpredictable direction, that reminds us every day how difficult thought is, always threatened from within by the powerlessness of thought, by imbecility and idiocy. Has there ever been a more beautiful testament to the impotence of thinking than this Journal of Biran, this profound meditation on the relationship between bodily forces and forms of thinking. ‘It is these conditions that we experience too often,’ writes Biran, ‘where, absolutely incapable of thinking …, I rebel against my ineptitude, I try to pull myself out of it by applying myself to various things, I move from one object to another; but all my efforts only render my inanity more perceptible.’ The Journal is not a diary; Biran describes it ‘as being totally devoid of adventure’. The only adventure is that of the flashes and eclipses of thought; the only theme is that thought contains within it the very possibility of unthought in the form of agitations, delusions, nervous states – of these thousand affective movements of internal sensitivity that form a fluid body unfit for the consistency of effort. Biranianism is a unique experience of the disaster of thought that is the exact inverse of its freedom.
1 Maine de Biran, The Relationship between the Physical and Moral in Man, p. 101.
2 Maine de Biran, Correspondance avec Destutt de tracy, Edition Pierre Tisserand, Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1930, p. 256.
3 Maine de Biran, The Relationship between the Physical and Moral in Man, p. 69.
4 John R. Searle, The Rediscovery of the Mind, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1992.
5 Ibid., p. 1.
6 Ibid., p. 9.
7 Ibid., p. 95.
8 Ibid., p. 20.
9 Ibid., p. 25.
10 Ibid., p. 25.
11 Ibid., p. 28.
12 Ibid., p. 15.
13 Ibid., pp. 41–42.
14 Ibid., p. 118ff.
15 Ibid., p. 125.
16 Ibid., p. 112.
17 Ibid., p. 112.
18 Ibid., p. 228.
19 Maine de Biran, Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, Œuvres complètes, V. III, Paris: Vrin, 1988, p. 326.
20 Maine de Biran, Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, p. 331.
21 Gall, Sur l’origine des qualités morales et des facultés intellectuelles de l’homme et sur les conditions de leur manifestation, Paris: T I, Librairie J.B. Baillière, 1825, p. 433.
22 Maine de Biran, Discours à la société médicale de Bergerac, Œuvres complètes, V. V, Paris: Vrin, 1984, p. 68.
23 Maine de Biran, Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie et sur ses rapports avec l’étude de la nature, Edition Pierre Tisserand, Paris: Librairie Félix Alcan, 1932, p. 367.
24 Maine de Biran, Discours à la société médicale de Bergerac, p. 39.
25 Maine de Biran, The Relationship between the Physical and Moral in Man, pp. 57, 60, 78, 90, 128.
26 Maine de Biran, Dernière philosophie, Existence et anthropologie, Œuvres complètes, V. X-2 Paris: Vrin, 1989, p. 41.
27 Gall, Sur l’origine des qualités morales et des facultés intellectuelles de l’homme et sur les conditions de leur manifestation, Paris: T I, Librairie J.B. Baillière, 1825, p. 189.
28 Gall, Sur l’origine des qualités morales et des facultés intellectuelles de l’homme et sur les conditions de leur manifestation, p. 10.
29 Maine de Biran, The Relationship between the Physical and Moral in Man, pp. 71, 92, 93.
30 Maine de Biran, Discours à la société médicale de Bergerac, p. 105.
31 Maine de Biran, Journal, III, Neuchâtel: Editons de la Baconnière, 1957, pp. 317–318.
32 Maine de Biran, Journal, III p. 286.
33 Maine de Biran, Journal, III, p. 288.
34 Maine de Biran, Discours à la société médicale de Bergerac, p. 29.
35 Maine de Biran, Journal, III, p. 291.
36 Maine de Biran, Journal, III, p. 291.
37 Maine de Biran, The Relationship between the Physical and Moral in Man, p. 117.