While Maine de Biran’s works have thus far been exclusively psychological, his final, unpublished works show a new interest in religious experiences. Furthermore, while Maine de Biran began as a follower of ideological school of Destutt de Tracy and then moved away from this school through Kantian influence, in his last works Maine de Biran also wanted to distance himself from the conservative school of de Bonald and Lamennais. Although Maine de Biran did not have much to say about the politics of the French conservatives, he did ridicule their way of arguing with analogies - although body might be ruled by soul, one could not deduce from this that country should be ruled by a monarch.
In fact, Maine de Biran could not even accept de Bonald’s definition of human being as a soul or intelligence served by an organism. Firstly, he noted that one might equally well say that bodily organism is served by the guidance of intelligence. Furthermore, he added that both statements describe only a certain harmonious condition in which humans might exist, while often these two elements of human being are at odds with one another, and indeed, in the fallen state of humanity this discord is prevalent.
Maine de Biran did accept the basic dualistic account of human being, but unlike French conservatives, he expressly did not want to endorse it just because of religious authority. Instead, Maine de Biran held on to Platonistic notions, according to which human being can through introspection note that there’s something more stable than fleeting sensations. Means for rising to this stable, intellectual level were, for instance, love of not particular beauties, but beauty in general, and pure geometry.
In one of his last, unpublished works, Nouveaux essais d'anthropologie, de Biran tried to outline the basic structure of the whole human being - hence, the use of title anthropology, instead of the more usual psychology. Human being is not just soul or mental, de Biran wants to say, but also has its bodily aspect. On the other hand, against some physiologists of his time, de Biran wants to emphasise that mere organic processes cannot explain all of human behaviour. More precisely, de Biran wants to state that biology does not explain the mental side of human being. At most, it could tell us something about sensations, which we share with animals, but the consciousness of these sensations is still something beyond mere biology.
In addition to physiologists, de Biran also spoke against metaphysicians like Malebranche and Leibniz, who did accept the existence of body and soul, but then made their interaction into a divine mystery. Interestingly, de Biran notes, Malebranche and Leibniz faced this problem because of opposite reasons: Malebranche made human soul into something completely passive, which could not act on anything, without the help of God, while Leibniz thought that body was a complex of similar active monads as soul, but because of their activity, soul could not truly affect these other monads. The obvious solution to this conundrum is then, de Biran notes, that mental and physical sides of human being are, respectively, active and passive.
This basic notion of the difference of mental and physical de Biran connects with Kantian and Fichtean considerations. What de Biran is searching for is not soul as a substance, which at best is just an abstraction out of concrete experience of ourselves and at worst suggests that our mental side would be a substance in the same sense as all physical objects. Instead, de Biran says, when we begin from the very experience of ourselves as controlling our body, we perceive ourselves as activities or forces. De Biran appears to connect this activity that we are with will, which he distinguished from mere organic desires.
Just like Fichte before him, de Biran notes that this active I can break out from a solipsist outlook by noting that something hinders its own activity - we can justifiably belief in the existence of external world, because we cannot control everything. Furthermore, this hindrance extends even to our own bodies, which we at times must struggle to make obey our commands. This experience of willing to control an unwilling body, de Biran sometimes appears to suggest, contains a hint toward the final, unwritten part of his work, where he would have tried to argue for the existence of a personal God. De Biran’s particular target would have been pantheism of Spinoza and Schelling, where all things would have been modifications of one basic force. Instead, de Biran appears to suggest, the world is not swallowed by a single force, but we experience many contrary forces, although we have an inkling of a higher entity, which can use its force without any external hindrance.
