Maine de Biran, François-Pierre

MAINE DE BIRAN, FRANÇOIS-PIERRE. - Philosopher and politician, b. at Bergerac on 29 Nov. 1776, d. at Paris on 22 July 1824. A nobleman, anti-revolutionary but not reactionary, he held important political offices during the Empire and the Restoration (member of the Council of Five Hundred, Quaestor to the Chamber, etc.).

Biranian philosophy presents itself as an itinerary of personal meditation that finds its most significant expression in the "Diary" (Journal intime): beginning with the scientific schemas of ideology (v.), it concludes in a spiritualistic style and with a religious landing in the effort to recover, against the tendencies of ideologism, within the psychological I the consistent I and a principle adequate for its metaphysical deepening. Such a principle is the senso intimo (inner sense), an immediate and direct form of contact and presence of the I to itself. The primary constitutive fact of the inner sense is effort, or the 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 it. In effort, in fact, the existent becomes conscious of itself not as formal thought, but, concretely, as an active tension that applies itself to a passive resistance. In this way, starting from a critical instance analogous to that of Kant, M. de B. tends, more than to admit the partial truth of empiricism and rationalism, to find in the inner sense and in effort a third measure, after external sensible experience and pure rationality, for human knowledge, such that it permits the subsistence of a metaphysical knowledge. Effort, in fact, potentially furnishes, with 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 render human knowledge possible in general, and which constitute in particular the terms of validity of metaphysics. Such ideas are nothing but a translation of the primitive belief implicit in the inner sense, which thus becomes, par excellence, the faculty of absolute principles, or, as M. de B. expresses it, the faculty of beliefs. The primary ideas, apprehended in the concrete of their reference to the I, present themselves thus as objective and absolute (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. Such a distinction permits M. de B. to conceive the faculty of belief as directly open to the metaphysical knowledge of God. Apprehending itself as form and as activity, the I presupposes contained in this concrete knowledge of itself the notion of activity or absolute force, not in an abstract or general sense but, proportionally to the very nature of the I, as absolute Subject, free acting Cause: the idea of God, furnished by the faculty of belief, is therefore objective, absolutely necessary, and designates not a generic principle, but a personal Subject, the same specific Subject of religious faith, God. M. de B. tends to recompose on this basis the framework of a complete anthropology: human life, which is fundamentally a tendency toward an elementary and animal psychic equilibrium, whose epicenter is already effort, but still as biological conatus (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 effort seen as spiritual consciousness of itself and aimed at making the I master of itself (second life, or properly human life). In the late M. de B. (1815-24), embarked on religious as well as intellectual conversion to Christianity, a third form of life equilibrium takes shape: the Christian one, centered on the operative presence of an element that transcends the soul (third life, life of the spirit or of Grace). The co-presence of the three lives, assumed with a not psychological but metaphysical value, describes an anthropology with an ascending and unitary vision, which is the conclusive creation of Biranism.

The refined sensibility for spiritual autobiography and a keen introspective disposition place M. de B. in the tradition of the great French "moralists" and "essayists." But the principal merit of Biranian speculation is the capacity to conglobulate in the interior probing of man, profoundly and personally lived, the salient philosophical questions of the modern world, first of all the critical problem. M. de B. is a theoretician and a metaphysician, as well as a great intimist, for having denounced the absolute necessity of a joint solution of the critical problem and the metaphysical problem, and for having glimpsed the possibility of realizing such a conjunction along the line of a deepening of the modern conception of self-consciousness, removed from Cartesian abstractionism, and rendered capable at the same time of accounting for the synthetic apriorism of knowing, illustrated by Kant as the condition of critical knowledge, and for the objectivity and concreteness of the inner sense and the original knowledge of the I, discovered by Augustine as the basis and place of metaphysical knowledge. The limits of M. de B.'s philosophy are many: the persistence of an analytical curiosity, learned in the school of the ideologues, hinders the coherent and concrete comprehension of the third life and renders the speculation fragmentary, just as the intimistic taste often tends to confuse life with speculation about it. Hence the opposing accusations, and not exact nevertheless, even if justifiable, of autobiographical psychologism or abstract scientism, leveled by criticism. Very important is the influence of Biranism on the subsequent French tradition (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).

Maria Teresa Antonelli