MAINE DE BIRAN, François-Pierre. – Philosopher and political figure, born in Bergerac on 29 November 1776, died in Paris on 22 July 1824. A nobleman, anti-revolutionary but not reactionary, he held significant political offices during the Empire and the Restoration (member of the Council of Five Hundred, Quaestor of the Chamber, etc.).
Biran’s philosophy presents itself as a journey of personal reflection whose most significant expression is found in his *Diary* (*Journal intime*). Beginning with the scientistic schemas of ideology (v.), it culminates in a spiritualist style and a religious conclusion in the effort to recover, against the tendencies of ideologism, within the psychological self the consistent self and a principle adequate for its metaphysical deepening. This principle is the intimate sense, the immediate and direct form of contact and presence of the self to itself. The first fact constituted by the intimate sense is *effort*, or the tendency toward being, the starting point of self-consciousness, and thus the primary condition of the psychic mechanism and at the same time the criterion for the knowledge of its metaphysical reality: an element equivalent, in this sense, to the Cartesian *cogito*, but entirely different from II. In *effort*, indeed, the existent gains self-knowledge not as formal thought, but concretely as an active tension applied to a passive resistance. From this starting point, and following a critical stance analogous to Kant’s, Maine de Biran seeks, more than to admit the partial truth of empiricism and rationalism, to find in the intimate sense and in *effort* a third measure—after external sensible experience and pure rationality—for human knowledge, one that allows for the subsistence of metaphysical knowledge. *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 render human knowledge possible in general and which in particular constitute terms of validity for metaphysics. These ideas are nothing but a translation of the primitive belief implicit in the intimate sense, which thus becomes, preeminently, the faculty of absolute principles, or, as Maine de Biran expresses it, the faculty of beliefs. The first ideas, grasped in the concreteness of their reference to the self, present themselves as objective and absolute (system of absolute principles pertinent to metaphysics) and are at the same time dynamic and formal in the sense that they condition the system of acquired notions pertinent to science. This distinction allows Maine de Biran to conceive the faculty of belief as directly open to the metaphysical knowledge of God. By grasping itself as form and activity, the self presupposes contained within this concrete knowledge of itself the notion of absolute activity or force—not in an abstract or general sense but, proportionally to the very nature of the self, as the Absolute Subject, the 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 very Subject specific to the religious sphere, God.
Maine de Biran seeks to reconstruct 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*, though 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 *effort* seen as spiritual self-consciousness and aimed at making the self dominant over itself (second life, or properly human life). In the final period of Maine de Biran (1815–24), as he moved toward religious, as well as intellectual, conversion to Christianity, a third form of life equilibrium emerges: 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 understanding of these three lives, assumed with not merely psychological but metaphysical value, describes an ascending and unitary anthropology, which is the culminating creation of Biranian thought.
His refined sensitivity to spiritual autobiography and his acute introspective disposition place Maine de Biran within the tradition of the great French “moralists” and essayists. But the principal merit of Biranian speculation is its capacity to encompass within the interior probing of man—deeply and personally lived—the salient philosophical questions of the modern world, above all the critical problem. Maine de Biran is a theorist and metaphysician as well as a great intimate writer, for having recognized the absolute necessity of a joint solution to the critical problem and the metaphysical problem, and for having 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 rendered capable at once of accounting for the synthetic a priori of knowledge, as illustrated by Kant as a condition of critical knowledge, and for the objectivity and concreteness of the intimate sense and the original knowledge of the self, discovered by Augustine as the basis and locus of metaphysical knowledge.
The limits of Maine de Biran’s philosophy are manifold: the persistence of an analytical curiosity, learned from the school of the Ideologues, hinders the coherent and concrete understanding of the third life and renders his speculation fragmentary, just as his taste for the intimate often tends to confuse life with speculation about II. Hence the opposing, though not entirely accurate (even if justifiable) accusations of autobiographical psychologism or abstract scientism leveled by critics. Of great importance is the influence of Biranian thought on the subsequent French tradition (Ollé-Laprune, Blondel, Le Senne, etc.).
Major works, almost all published posthumously: *Journal intime* (1792–96; 1813–24); *Nouveaux essais d'anthropologie* (1823–24; reproducing the *Journal*, especially 1818–19). Other essential texts: *Premier* and *Second mémoire sur l'habitude* (1800, 1801–1802); *Mémoire sur la décomposition de la pensée* (1805–1807); *Mémoire sur les rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme* (1811); *Essais sur les fondements de la psychologie* (1812); *Des rapports des sciences naturelles avec la psychologie* (1813); *Fragments relatifs aux fondements de la morale et de la religion* (1818); *Nouvelles considérations sur les rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme* (1820); *Considérations sur les principes d'une division des faits psychologiques et physiologiques* (1822).