MAINE DE BIRAN, FRANÇOIS-PIERRE. – Philosopher and statesman, b. at Bergerac on 29 November 1776, d. in Paris on 22 July 1824. A nobleman and opponent of the Revolution, though not a reactionary, he held important political offices during the Empire and the Restoration (member of the Council of Five Hundred, Quaestor of the Chamber, etc.).
Biranian philosophy presents itself as a path of personal meditation that finds its most significant expression in the « Diary » (Journal intime): beginning ideology (v.), it concludes in a spiritualistic style and with a religious outcome in the effort to recover, against the tendencies of ideologism, within the psychological self the substantial self and an adequate principle for its metaphysical deepening. This principle is the inner sense, an immediate and direct form of contact and presence of the self to itself. The first constitutive fact of inner sense is the effort, or tendency toward being, the starting point of self-consciousness, and therefore the primary condition of the psychic mechanism and at the same time the criterion for knowledge of its metaphysical reality: an element equivalent, in this sense, to the Cartesian cogito, but entirely different from II. In the effort, in fact, the existent becomes conscious of itself not as formal thought but, concretely, as an active tension applied to a passive resistance. Proceeding in this way from a critical standpoint analogous to Kant’s, M. de B. tends, rather than to admit the partial truth of empiricism and rationalism, to find in inner sense and in the effort a third measure, after external sensible experience and pure rationality, for human knowledge, such as would permit the existence of metaphysical knowledge. The effort, in fact, potentially provides, through its composite nature (which reveals the primordial idea of active force and absolute resistance), the a priori forms of being, substance, force, duration, space, the absolute, etc., which make human knowledge in general possible and which constitute, in particular, the terms of validity of metaphysics. These ideas are nothing other than a translation of the primitive belief implicit in inner sense, which thus becomes, par excellence, the faculty of absolute principles, or, as M. de B. puts it, the faculty of beliefs. The primary ideas, apprehended concretely in their reference to the self, thus present themselves as objective and absolute (the system of absolute principles pertaining to metaphysics), and are at the same time dynamic and formal in the sense that they condition the system of acquired notions pertaining to science. This distinction enables M. de B. to conceive the faculty of belief as directly open to metaphysical knowledge of God. In apprehending itself as form and as activity, the self presupposes contained in this concrete knowledge of itself the notion of activity or absolute force, not in an abstract or general sense but, proportionately to the very nature of the self, as the absolute Subject, the free acting Cause: the idea of God, supplied by the faculty of belief, is therefore objective, absolutely necessary, and designates not a generic principle but a personal Subject, the very specific Subject of religious faith, God. On this basis M. de B. tends to recompose the outline of a complete anthropology: human life, which is fundamentally a tendency toward an elementary and animal psychic equilibrium, whose epicenter is already the effort, but still as a biological striving (first life or animal life or life of the senses), later becomes a tendency toward an equilibrium of a non-biological but moral nature, having as its epicenter the effort viewed as spiritual self-consciousness and directed toward making the self master of itself (second life, or properly human life). In the final M. de B. (1815–24), who was moving toward religious as well as intellectual conversion to Christianity, a third form of life’s equilibrium emerges: the Christian one, centered on the active presence of an element transcending the soul (third life, life of the spirit or of Grace). The coexistence of the three lives, understood not psychologically but metaphysically, describes an anthropology with an ascending and unified vision, which is the final creation of Biranism.
His refined sensitivity to spiritual autobiography and his acute introspective disposition place M. de B. within the tradition of the great French « moralists » and « essayists ». But the principal merit of Biranian speculation is its capacity to incorporate within the inner probing of man, profoundly and personally lived, the salient philosophical questions of the modern world, first and foremost the critical problem. M. de B. is a theoretician and metaphysician, as well as a great writer of intimate experience, because he denounced the absolute necessity of a joint solution to the critical and metaphysical problems, and because he glimpsed the possibility of achieving this conjunction along the line of a deepening of the modern conception of self-consciousness, freed from Cartesian abstraction and made capable both of accounting for the synthetic a priori character of knowing, illustrated by Kant as a condition of critical knowledge, and for the objectivity and concreteness of inner sense and of the original knowledge of the self, discovered by Augustine as the basis and locus of metaphysical knowledge. The limitations of M. de B.’s philosophy are multiple: the persistence of an analytical curiosity, acquired in the school of the ideologues, hinders a coherent and concrete understanding of the third life and renders the speculation fragmentary, just as the taste for intimacy often tends to confuse life with speculation about II. Hence the opposing, and nevertheless inaccurate, though understandable, accusations of autobiographical psychologism or abstract scientism made by critics. The influence of Biranism on the subsequent French tradition was extremely important (Ollé-Laprun, Blondel, Le Senne, etc.).
Fundamental works, almost all published posthumously: Journal intime (1792–96; 1815–24); Nouveau essais d'anthropologie (1823–24; reproducing part of the Journal, especially 1818–19). Other essential texts: Premier and Second mémoire sur l'habitude (1800, 1801–1802); Mémoire s. la décomposition de la pensée (1805–1807); Mém. s. les rapports du phys. et du moral de l'homme (1811); Essais s. le fondem. de la psychol. (1812); Des rapports d. sciences natur. avec la psychol. (1813); Fragments relatifs aux fondem. de la morale et de la religion (1818); Nouvelles considér. s. les rapports du phys. et du moral de l'homme (1820); Considér. sur les principes d'une divis. de faits psycholog. et physiolog. (1822).