François Maine de Biran

Maine de Biran, Pierre-François (1766–1824)

Maine de Biran claimed that the starting point for our understanding of human beings lay in introspective psychology: it was the awareness of willed effort. A proper understanding of the will should be the foundation of all work in psychology, including empirical psychology, as well as in the human sciences in general, which should work together towards a coordinated ‘anthropology’. Contrary to the assumptions of associationist psychology, mental facts were essentially relational, and language was a constitutive feature of them, rather than being a secondary device intended to represent them. But conscious mental life arose from and was influenced by a subconscious underlayer which could be studied only by the joint use of physiological and introspective methods. Biran rejected the view that mental states can be reduced to, or are nothing other than, physical states. There was a partial ‘symbolic’ correspondence between them, which meant that physical accounts and mental accounts could not be translated into each other without loss. Later in his life, though still maintaining the belief that psychology was primary, he held that it was necessary to accommodate questions of metaphysics, morality and religion. He published very little during his lifetime, and many of the ‘works’ found in editions are (sometimes conjectural) editorial restitutions made from a jumbled mass of much corrected manuscripts. His failure to complete a single work on what the eighteenth century had called the ‘Science of Man’ (which he said was the greatest interest of his entire life) reflects the times: this eighteenth-century project was fragmenting into the multiplicity of human sciences which were emerging as the nineteenth century came. But his insistence on the primacy of the will remains a major challenge for the human sciences of today.

1 Life and works

Pierre-François Gont(h)ier de Biran, French philosopher and public figure, was born at Bergerac in 1766. His father was a doctor. In 1785, after his schooling in Périgueux, he became a royal guardsman and in 1789 was wounded at the defence of Versailles. Though the Guards were dissolved in 1791, Biran (who by now was called ‘Maine’, a name acquired from a family estate at his majority) still envisaged a career in the military engineers, but this came to nothing. At the end of 1792, he retired to the estate of Grateloup, near Bergerac. At this time, reading was a main occupation and he wrote mainly notes or meditations, rather than works. He did begin a translation of Beccaria with a commentary and somewhat later a memoir on signs. But both these works were left incomplete, setting a pattern repeated throughout his life of intellectual work only sometimes carried to the point of completion.

Gouhier (1948) said of him that ‘he was a one-book man – but he never wrote the book’. This book would have been an attempt to fulfil the eighteenth-century project of a ‘Science of Man’, and he worked at it constantly, once calling it ‘the greatest interest of my entire life’. In earlier stages, his attention was focused on psychological topics. His memoir on habit (Mémoire sur l’influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser, 1803) received a prize from the Institut de France in 1802, and another reflecting the conception of mental science held by the idéologues (Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée, 1804) was awarded the prize in 1805. Publication of this work was stopped at the page-proof stage for mysterious reasons. A memoir on the data immediately present to consciousness (De l’aperception immédiate, 1807), replying to a question set by the Academy of Berlin, was awarded a prize in 1807. There followed a series of memoirs on much more specific topics delivered to the Medical Society of Bergerac, which Biran founded, the first on unconscious perception, the second on phrenology, and the third on sleep, dreams and somnambulism. Biran then returned to larger-scale work, with the memoir on the relations between body and mind (Mémoire sur les rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, 1811), submitted to the Royal Academy of Copenhagen, which awarded him the first prize in 1811. In the same year, he signed a contract with a Paris publisher for the publication of revised versions of the memoirs of Berlin and Copenhagen. But he quickly changed his mind, speaking now of a single ‘large work’. We know that he regarded this in 1811–12 as ‘almost finished’. It concerned the foundations of psychology and its relations to the natural sciences (Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie, et sur ses rapports avec l’étude de la nature). But Biran came to think that metaphysical questions of a kind which he formerly disqualified now needed to be treated. This already emerges in a work allied in subject matter to the Essai (Les rapports des sciences naturelles avec la psychologie), which may have arisen as a reworking of the second part of the Essai and may be dated to around 1814. Within a year or two, Biran began to take a much stronger interest than before in questions to do with the nature of morality, and this further extension of interest put completion at a greater distance. In 1819, he congratulated himself in his diary on not having published ‘anything definitive’ yet, since the spiritual life now needed to be taken into account. In 1820, a specific project intervened. He revised the memoir of Copenhagen for the use of a doctor, Antoine-Athanase Royer Collard, who had consulted him in connection with a course on insanity (aliénation mentale) which Royer Collard was to give in the asylum of Charenton in the following year. At the same time, he signed another contract with the same publisher as before for the publication of this revised work, together with the memoir of Berlin, thereby reinstating the plan of ten years earlier. But the publication did not take place, and in 1822 Biran wrote in his diary of going back to his manuscripts and making a work from them which could shortly be published. Among his last attempts at this was a work on ‘anthropology’ in the broadest sense, with the title Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie (1823), now making explicit in the title itself the nature of Biran’s ambition; but he died in 1824 without fulfilling his lifelong goal.

2 Problems of the manuscript tradition

The many thousands of surviving folios, often much corrected, present a fascinating spectacle of a mind at work, and a headache for subsequent editors, one of whom wrote in exasperation a generation after Biran’s death of this ‘atrocious scribble’ (‘affreux barbouillage’). The first editor was Victor Cousin (delegated by Biran’s literary executor). He was careless and unscholarly, publishing only four volumes. The second initiative came from François-Marc Louis Naville, a Protestant pastor from Geneva who had met and admired Biran, and who was helped by his son Ernest. They collected about 12,000 pages of manuscript, and Ernest wrote ‘what a task to bring light into this chaos!’. They did a considerable amount of work, recruiting various helpers, and published a version of Biran’s Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie. The third editor was Pierre Tisserand, who produced between 1920 and 1949 an edition of Biran’s works in fourteen volumes. Though incomplete and not very scholarly, it made available for the first time a wide and representative collection of texts. Henri Gouhier produced an edition of the philosopher’s diaries between 1954 and 1957. Finally, a more scholarly thirteen-part edition (consisting of seventeen volumes) of the collected works was started in 1984, under the direction of François Azouvi. This edition, for the first time, makes it sufficiently clear to the reader that many of the ‘works’ of Biran were never regarded by him as complete, and that texts have often had to be established by editorial conjecture.

Why Biran completed (and published) so little has been a subject of discussion. A simple answer is that he was too busy with other things. He led an active public life, holding regional and national offices during the revolutionary period, under the consulate of Bonaparte, under the Empire of Napoleon and after the Restoration of the monarchy. Yet this answer seems too simple. Voutsinas diagnosed a deep narcissism in Biran: he avoided publication since he feared the wound of his work not being esteemed. Despite the somewhat obsessive character of Biran’s constant revisions, additions, deletions and reorderings, it may be more enlightening to place his work in its broader intellectual context. For the ‘Science of Man’ was already being fragmented. Biran was thinking about these questions during the birth-pangs of neurophysiology, empirical psychology, social anthropology, economics, political science, linguistics and so on. He was well aware that his project demanded some way of coordinating all these emerging disciplines. He himself made a serious study of some of them. We also find attempts at tabulation. The core should be a reflective psychology which would recognize the will in a way which the British empiricists and their successors had failed to do, and the multiple empirical disciplines studying human nature should be related to and should depend upon this core. But he was never satisfied with his own attempts at seeing how they should fit together. In short, he was pursuing an objective which ran against the temper of the times. Arguably, he was trying to complete a task which, by its nature, could never be completed.

3 The mature position

Biran’s philosophical work stands at a time of transition from the certainties of classical thought. Its character and content permit it to be seen in the context of the meditative tradition of such as Montaigne and Pascal, a tradition which gives prominence to the intimate workings of one’s own mind. This is clear not only from the philosopher’s personal diaries, but also in the central role which he gives to introspection or reflection in his mature theory. Those who see him in this light regard him as part of a lineage which leads to late nineteenth-century French ‘spiritualism’, illustrated by authors like Ravaisson. On the other hand, Biran allies himself strongly with the eighteenth-century empiricist tradition illustrated by authors like David Hartley, Condillac and Charles Bonnet. This emerges not only from his own avowals, but also from his account of the mind which, though diverging from those of his predecessors, is nevertheless clearly a successor to them. It is also associated with Biran’s detailed interest in a variety of fields of empirical study, attested both by the contents of his library, and by the references made in his works. He was interested in physiology, psychiatry, penology, experimental psychology, hypnotism, linguistics, phrenology, ethnography, medicine, pedagogy. In the latter case, it may be noted that he corresponded with Pestalozzi, and appointed one of Pestalozzi’s pupils to establish and run a school on Pestalozzian principles in Bergerac (see Education, history of philosophy of §8). It would be insufficient however to give Biran only this double lineage, from the empiricist and the meditative traditions, for he also took an interest in the rationalists, writing on Leibniz. In addition, he read and reckoned with Kant.

It is the works of the first decade of the nineteenth century, culminating in the Essai, which develop the position in and about psychology for which Biran is especially known. He accepted what was regarded as a commonplace, that John Locke was the pioneer of mental science. But he held that Locke had made a number of crucial errors. Locke was right to hold reflection to be one of the two sources of knowledge, but wrong to think that it consisted in awareness of ‘ideas’ (a term newly adapted to mean ‘mental representations’). This was to give rise to an essentially passive model of the mind. Perception became the simple reception of data, and action would be either the mechanical result of reception of such data (together with any internal mechanisms at work), or an arbitrary event mysteriously outside the world of causality (see Perception). This view gave rise to a series of problems which Biran thought that no one could answer, or had answered (including Kant). He held that the primary datum of consciousness was the awareness of willed effort (and, in particular, muscular effort) (see Action §4).

The inability of classical empiricism to give an adequate account of the will was illustrated by Hume’s claim that the will is ‘nothing but the internal impression we…are conscious of, when we knowingly give rise to any new motion of our body’. The circularity of this account is frequently criticized by Biran, who insists that what is given to consciousness is essentially relational. An example of a primary fact would be the awareness of raising one’s arm. This cannot properly be decomposed into two elements – awareness of a volition and awareness of the arm going up – for then the relation will escape us. ‘The inner sense has no object.’ What is given is a fact, not an object. Of course, we can express our understanding of the fact by referring to the terms of a relation; but the relation is prior to these terms. When I raise my arm, the relation already exists in the effort exerted. It is not that there are two successive components of the experience, either of which might exist without the other.

It may seem that problems arise here. Is there not a causal process capable of empirical study, which consists of successive events in the nervous system which result in the arm going up? Biran conceded this: indeed, he took an active interest in physiology. But he rejected the reductionist view of mental events (see Reductionism in the philosophy of mind). The relation between the awareness of raising one’s arm and the physiological story was, he said, ‘symbolic’. That is, the one story corresponded systematically but only partially to the other. Neither could be translated into the other without loss.

But if I can be aware of raising my arm, it seems that this presupposes knowledge. I must know that it is my arm that I am raising. This leads to another important difference between Biran and Locke. For Locke thought that ideas were prior to language, and that the function of language was simply to communicate them. Biran, by contrast, held that ideas could not exist without language. Thus a first deliberate raising of the arm is itself the birth of language, since it must bring into being the awareness of the arm. In so far as the movement itself expresses this awareness, it is a sign in the making.

But how can some creatures raise themselves by their bootstraps into a conscious life? Here, Biran departs both from the rationalist and from the empiricist traditions. For he maintains the existence of a passive underlayer of our experience, a great range of affective states which are capable of being drawn up into our conscious life, and which influence it. His interest in this is evidenced not only in his diaries, but also in his philosophical writings, where he discusses at length phenomena such as dreams. There was ‘an inner New World to be discovered some day by a Columbus of metaphysics’ (Maine de Biran: Journal, vol. 1: 176). Physiology and introspection would be needed to ‘plunge into the underground caverns of the soul’ (Maine de Biran: Journal, vol. 1: 240).

These, then, are the main features of Biran’s mature position. The awareness of willed effort, a new distinction between passive and active, the crucial role of language, the relational nature of mental phenomena.

4 Later views

While elaborating these views, Biran usually held on to the rejection of ‘metaphysics’; but he found increasingly that questions about the ‘primitive facts’ could not be properly treated without approaching metaphysical, moral and religious questions. His attempts at dealing with these questions can be seen in the generally more fragmentary works of the last decade of his life.

Near the end of his life, Biran reviewed what he had been doing in his diary, saying that he had come to:

scorn everything that had previously been my main concern, and to which I had attached some importance and some glory, and I reproached myself for spending my life in erecting a mere scaffold…. However, giving today the chief importance to man’s relations with God and with the society of his fellows, I still think that a thorough knowledge of the relations of the self…with the concrete person must precede in order of time or study all theoretical or practical research on these two first relations; it is experimental psychology, or a science at first purely reflective, that should lead us in due order to the determination of our moral relations with our fellows, and our religious ones with the infinite and higher being…

(Maine de Biran: Journal, vol. II: 376)

Biran’s partial disillusionment with his own work must be taken seriously: it plays a part in understanding why he completed so little. Yet it opened many very different paths to the future. His claim that mental states are essentially relational (‘rien n’est dans la conscience qu’à titre de rapport’) prefigures phenomenology (see Phenomenology, epistemic issues in). His claim that there is an internal relation between language and ideas prefigures contemporary critiques by analytic philosophers of the older empiricist tradition. His work coincided with and influenced the early development of empirical psychology. His meditative style prefigures French spiritualism. His claim that there is a new world of the unconscious to be explored by some Columbus versed in physiology and introspection prefigures Freud. And these are not merely points of historical interest. For the central role which he gives to the will, and the way in which he pursues it, are of great current importance, given that late twentieth-century debates about the nature of the mind, including those concerning the development of cognitive science, still often make assumptions which Biran decisively challenged two centuries earlier.