Perspectives on Science

I

François-Pierre-Gontier Maine de Biran (1766–1824), better known as Maine de Biran, has often been described as the man of a single book—a book that, nevertheless, he never wrote.¹ As a matter of fact, he was a prolific and indefatigable writer, whose ideas, however, took a long time to be made public. If Biran himself published very little during his lifetime², the considerable number of manuscripts that he left behind had several editorial vicissitudes. The first, partial, edition of his works, edited by Victor Cousin³, only appeared in 1834, ten years after Biran’s death. Titled Nouvelles considérations sur les rapports du physique et du moral [End Page 1] de l’homme (New Considerations on the Relations of the Physical and the Moral of Man) (Paris: Lagrange), this edition only included a very limited selection of Biran’s texts.⁴ In a second edition in four volumes, published in 1841 with the more comprehensive title Œuvres philosophiques de Maine de Biran (The Philosophical Works of Maine de Biran) (Paris: Lagrange), Cousin finally added other key texts, such as the essay Influence de l’habitude sur la faculté de penser (Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking), already published by Biran himself in 1802, and the Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée (Dissertation Concerning the Decomposition of Thought, 1804), which became known for the first time.⁵ However, it wasn’t until the 1859 edition in three volumes, Œuvres inédites de Maine de Biran (Unpublished Works by Maine de Biran) (Paris: Dezobry, E. Magdeleine), edited by Ernest Naville and Marc Debrit⁶, that we get a more accurate idea of what, from this moment on, will be called “Biranism,” meaning the proper Biranian doctrine supported or even shaped by the different layers of its reception. Together with the Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie et sur les rapports avec l’étude de la nature (Essay on the Foundations of Psychology and its Relationship to the Study of Nature), this new edition also revealed to the public for the first time other key texts, such as the Examen critique des opinions de M. de Bonald (Critical Examination of the Opinions of Louis de Bonald) and the Nouveaux essais d’anthropologie (New Essays on Anthropology), Biran’s final and comprehensive work, which nevertheless remained unfinished. Likewise, Naville and Debrit’s edition also made available the first complete and systematic catalog (Catalogue raisonné) of the philosophical works by Maine de Biran, drawn up for the purpose of allowing the foundation of a new “spiritualism” in line with what Biran [End Page 2] himself had called, in his Critical Examination of the Opinions of Louis de Bonald, “the important problem of man.”⁷

While his thought had never explicitly resulted in the establishment of a school and his philosophy remained for a long time outside institutional channels, Maine de Biran was well known among his contemporaries. During the nineteenth century, his ideas circulated widely in France and in Europe, often anonymously, crossing paths with and sometimes determining the developments of modern and contemporary philosophy, from Théodore Jouffroy (1796–1842) or Félix Ravaisson (1813–1900)⁸ to Gabriel Tarde (1843–1904)⁹ up to Existentialism and Phenomenology. According to Henri Bergson, Biran was the greatest French metaphysician since the time of Descartes and Malebranche and the undisputed founder of French spiritualism.¹⁰ In L’être et le néant (Being and Nothingness, 1943), in the chapter devoted to the body and the structures of consciousness, Jean-Paul Sartre cannot overlook, even while criticizing it, the “famous ‘sensation of effort’” theorized by Maine de Biran.¹¹ In his 1959 lecture on “What is psychology?,” Georges Canguilhem proposed a well-known analysis of Biran’s psychology of interiority, in which Biran is presented not only as an exemplary figure at the intersections between psychology, anthropology, and epistemology but also as an essential milestone for an epistemology of the “Science of Man” in which psychology can properly resist its appropriation by physiology.¹² At the end of the twentieth century...