Maine de Biran: New essays on anthropology (and other late writings)

While Maine de Biran’s works have thus far been exclusively psychological, his final, unpublished works show a new interest in religious experiences.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In one of his last, unpublished works, Nouveaux essais d'anthropologie, de Biran tried to outline the basic structure of the whole human being - hence, the use of title anthropology, instead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.

Maine de Biran: Essay on the fundaments of psychology (1812?)

When I last time considered the philosophy of Maine de Biran, we saw him follow in the footsteps of a tradition of Condillac and Cabanis, when he tried to describe different capacities of human mind considering also the viewpoint of physiology.

In Essai sure le fondements de la psychologie, not published in his life time, Maine de Biran adds to this sensualist tradition of philosophy also considerations of the traditional Cartesian and Leibnizian metaphysics, and what is even more striking, of Kant, Fichte and Schelling. Maine de Biran groups all of these philosophers together as dealing with mere abstractions, instead of the concrete embodied mind, like in the Condillacian tradition – worst example in his eyes is Schelling's philosophy of identity, which tries to start from the notion of existence common to both physical nature and human mind. Yet, he is also quick to point out that the philosophers of abstraction have some interesting contributions to the discussion of the capacities of human mind.

One particular discovery of Kantians Maine de Biran mentions is the remark that Lockean ideas or sensations are not as simple as they appear to be, but consist of two components. One is the affection as such, the mere feeling or mood that we just passively receive in sensations (say, that something greenish in front of us). The other component is the appropriation of this feeling as belonging to me. It is just this act which turns mere feeling into a proper sensation, Maine de Biran says. Human sensation is for him, then, born of two different things. Even Descartes had an inkling of this duality in human experience, when he separated physical nature from human soul – still, Descartes made a mistake in substantialising these two different fields of experience.

But the true innovation in Maine be Biran's eyes is to be found in the Fichtean notion of I and its contrast to not-I. He is not satisfied with mere naming of these concepts, but also notes that the source of this separation lies in human striving and resistance of the environment against this striving. Because of these two elements, we regard some affections a belonging to our body – those we can change easily – while others we view as belonging to space outside us – those that we cannot change so easily. Again, this is a very Fichtean notion, although Maine de Biran tries to give this idea a more physiological twist by situating the striving in human brain.

The hierarchy of different capacities of human mind follows more or less closely Maine de Biran's work on habit, although here it is perhaps a bit clearer that the capacities are arranged according to the level of control the active side of human mind has over the passive side. Thus, perceptions differ from mere sensations, says Maine de Biran, because in perceiving we actively put our attention to some facets of what we sense. This capacity of attending is then basis for various other capacities like making comparisons and making generalisations based on similarities.

The highest state of human capacities for Maine de Biran is then the capacity of reflection. This involves, firstly, capacity of making deductions, which is for Maine de Biran essentially a capacity based on memory – the individual steps of deductions should be immediately convincing and memory just assures us that we have considered all the steps in the process (notice how psychological Maine de Biran's notion of deduction is – there's no consideration of cases where a machine would have made the necessary deductive moves, but we humans couldn't verify the truth of these moves, because the proof would be too long for humans to comprehend).

It is quite clear that such deductions alone cannot furnish any truths, unless some truth would have been given before deductions. Here Maine de Biran faces the very Kantian question of synthetic a priori judgements, and his answers are also quite similar as with the followers of Kant. Maine de Biran suggests that we have some basic experiences, which can be taken as such basis for deductions. For instance, we have a fundamental experience of some resistance, and even more, of resistance situated in space. Geometrical axioms are then mere abstractions from this original intuition.

In addition to mathematics, Maine de Biran accepts the existence of such fundamental experience in metaphysics or psychology. If mathematics is based on our primal experience of what is not me, metaphysics, on the other hand, is based on our primal experience of ourselves – we have the ability to recognise ourselves as existing, which Fichte expressed with the formula I = I. Maine de Biran is quick to point out that we cannot use this primal experience in Cartesian manner to deduce that we would be some sort of ”thinking substances” - following Kant's criticism of paralogisms, Maine de Biran suggests that this would involve confusing our experience of ourselves (thinking) with us as we are in ourselves. Indeed, we are not just thinkers, Maine de Biran says, but essentially also active doers, and we wouldn't know ourselves as ourselves without our active striving.

The main thing one can base on this primal experience of ourselves as active agents, according to Maine de Biran is what Kant would have called categories. We are unified agents and in a sense stable elements of our experience – through abstraction, we can then get such categories like unity or substance. What is especially important is Maine de Biran's idea that we draw the notion of causality from our own acting – we think other things as causes, because we first experience ourselves as active agents and then draw analogies from our own case. Similarly, the account of modalities is generated from our original experience that some things we can freely decide, while others are necessarily decided by other things.

Maine de Biran's work presents then an interesting take on Kantian philosophy. It would undoubtedly not satisfy purist, formalist Kantians, who want to keep Kant completely removed from psychological and anatomical considerations. From a more extensive perspective, Maine de Biran offers a refreshing take on a too familiar philosopher.

Maine de Biran: Considerations on the influence of habit (1800 and 1802)

1766-1824

Marie-François-Pierre-Gonthier Maine de Biran - or as he is usually called, Maine de Biran - counted himself in the so-called ideological tradition of philosophy, continuing and building upon the works of Condillac and Cabanis - at least in his first major work, Mémoires sur l'influence de l'habitude, published in two parts. The word “ideology” does not refer to any political set of opinions, but to the Lockean habit of calling the basic elements of human consciousness ideas.

Although Maine de Biran identifies his work with the tradition beginning with Locke and Condillac, he is also extremely critical of the somewhat speculative manner in which the two gentlemen carried out their project. Instead, he is eager to follow Cabanis in his attempt to ground human mentality in concrete physiological studies. Thus, his first task is to differentiate between sensations and perceptions in physiological terms and not just by defining perceptions as a clearer form of perceptions. In fact, Maine de Biran appears at times even to suggest that when sensations have more clarity, perceptions are less clear, and vice versa.

In the first book, Maine de Biran suggests a quite concrete physiological difference between sensations and perceptions, sensation being an affection of sensory organ, while perception is formed by brain acting upon such affections. In the second book, the difference is laid out in more abstract terms - while sensations are passive, perceptions are active, just like nervous system consists of affective and motive nerves. In effect, Maine de Biran is giving a new physiological twist on the old idea of the difference between cognition and volition.

Since sensations and perceptions are two quite different and even opposed states of human mind, it is quite easy to see why making one stronger will weaken the other - if we are overwhelmed by strong sensory effects, we are far more likely to lose our ability to perceive the objects around us clearly. Then again, when the force of new sensations subsides, for instance, when we become accustomed to them, it is far easier to e.g. distinguish objects around us.

The example above shows us also an example of the supposed main topic of the book - the influence of habit. Indeed, it is just this habit of having sensations that allows us to have more control over our perceptions. This habit makes it easier for us to decide what aspects of our sensory field do we want to concentrate on, just like practicing any activity will make that activity easier for us.

Yet, Maine de Biran continues, habit is not just a positive force. This is especially the case with our imagination fathoming combinations between two quite distinct things: for instance, whenever we’ve seen one event following another, we easily conclude that one is the cause of the other, although there wouldn’t actually be any connection between them.

If imagination is involuntary and passive association of our ideas, the corresponding active movement from one idea to another Maine de Biran calls memory. Memory, he says, is essentially based on taking some sounds or inscriptions as signs of our ideas, and through their means actively recollecting the ideas associated with them. The recollection might stop at the level of mere signs, and then we are dealing with mechanic memory, that is, with mere repetition of a string of signs or words, known by heart. Then again, words might recollect, not ideas, but mere unclear feelings, and then we are dealing with sensitive memory - this is the faculty of poets and mystic philosophers.

The perfect mode of memory or representative memory works in many cases in close cooperation with the two other modes of memory. For instance, Maine de Biran points out that when we use words from ethics, such as good or virtue, we do attach to these words clear representations, but also certain affective emotions. Further complications arise from the fact that the representative memory has to sometimes deal with abstractions like time and space, which refer to a number of ideas.

A further level of habituation generates judgements - that is, a judgement is born when we frequently associate some ideas and signs together. If this association is made quite passively, the judgement is mechanical - like when we repeat the multiplication table by rote - but when we actually follow the train of ideas and signs we are dealing with a reflective judgement. Finally, the effect of habituation on judgements might again be either passive and harmful or active and beneficial. We might associate judgements which have nothing to do with one another, which leads to faulty reasoning. It is then no wonder that Maine de Biran concludes with the thought of representing all judgements in a Leibnizian-style universal calcul, which would allow perfect reasoning, like in mathematics.