OLLÉ-LAPRUNE, LÉON. - Philosopher, b. in Paris on 25 July 1839, d. there on 13 Feb. 1898. A pupil of the École normale supérieure, he began his teaching at the Lycée of Nice, moving in 1864 to the Lycée of Douai. In that same year he obtained the agrégation in philosophy.
He then moved to Versailles and in 1871 to the Lycée Henri IV in Paris, which he left to take up teaching at the École normale supérieure (1875). From this period date the notable study La philosophie de Malebranche (Paris 1870) and the works for his doctorate, De la certitude morale (ibid. 1880), De Aristoteleae ethices fundamento (ibid. 1880). At the École normale, where he had as a disciple, among others, M. Blondel, he remained for the rest of his life, elaborating his other works: Essai sur la morale d'Aristote (ibid. 1881); La philosophie et le temps présent (ibid. 1890); Les sources de la paix intellectuelle (ibid. 1892); Le prix de la vie (ibid. 1894, Italian trans. by A. Codignola, Florence 1924); Ce qu'on va chercher à Rome (Paris 1895); La raison et le rationalisme (posthumous, ibid. 1906). For having adopted an attitude of protest at the time of the expulsion of the religious, he was suspended from teaching for a year (1880). In 1897 he was called to succeed Vacherot at the Institute.
The thought of O.-L. links up directly with the spiritualist current of Cousin through his master E. Caro. But from it, while remaining faithful to the introspective method and to its metaphysical positions, he distinguishes himself, placing himself in the line of that Christian philosophy illustrated at the time by Gratry. From this thinker O.-L. then draws not a few motifs, first among them the one that one must go to the truth "with one's whole being," developing them with a clear personal stamp. The philosophy of O.-L. does not in fact arise from a crisis - he never had to doubt his faith - but from a need for deeper investigation and clarification of the fundamental human truths. Propria communia dicere is the philosopher's task, and to do this one need not start from doubt. "To examine is not to doubt," but to deepen the data of common sense and to grasp in consciousness the certainties of the existence of the self, of the world, of God, as cause and reason of the universe within which we move. And God is particularly a loving Providence that assists and guides: against the Jansenistic concept of a Providence with iron laws, such as Malebranche would have it (and this is one of the criticisms on which O.-L. insists most in La philosophie de Malebranche).
The living awareness of God's love for man and therefore of man's value is characteristic of O.-L. For this reason his investigations, even in their scientific rigor, turn to subjects apt to enlighten minds and open them to Christian truth. A purpose of rigorous clarification is accompanied by a demand for the affirmation and diffusion of his own faith, which does not close off but stimulates and crowns research, though without invading its field. Along this line unfolds the study on the conditions of "moral certainty," intended to bring to light the place that belongs to reason and to the will in the knowledge of moral truths.
Far from rationalism but also conceding nothing to fideism, O.-L. specifies how the will does not posit the truth but helps one to see it through a presence that begins with attention in order to culminate in adherence to the truth; without this act the moral truths are not known in their nature and in their value. "In the order of moral truths, the adherence of the will is required as a condition of the complete and definitive assent of the spirit; complete certainty is personal. To recognize moral truth in its own proper way, one must be in some manner similar to one's object, according to the definition of the ancient philosophers; one must do the truth, according to the admirable word of the Gospel" (De la certitude morale, ed. cit., p. 79): even if one must admit that "the motives for affirming, the duty to affirm exist for all and are visible to all, once certain preliminary conditions have been satisfied, and therefore the affirmation itself has a principle objectively sufficient and valid for anyone endowed with reason" (ibid., p. 345). This sound voluntaristic motif is taken up again in La philosophie et le temps présent. Philosophy can be born and can avoid the degenerations of aestheticism and positivism only where a high and full life broadens the knowledge of the real acquired through science and sustains thought.
But philosophy cannot give everything. Man seeks not knowledge alone but the possession of truth. "Could what lives be enlightened, guided, restrained, overturned by what does not live? That is not admissible. Life alone gives the final word to life. Let love be posited and then everything comes alive without any wrong being done to the ideal" (Il valore della vita, ed. cit., p. 162). And whoever says love says person, a relationship of persons, in a word says Christianity. Only in this doctrine, awaited by one's whole being and guaranteed by solid historical proofs (classical apologetics, even if greater insistence is placed on interior dispositions, is by no means denied by O.-L.), does man find the word and the means that save, finds the value of life. Whoever has not reached this certainty wears himself out in vain (as O.-L. shows in the essay on Th. Jouffroy) in the attempt to find a substitute for it. Only the Church - and this is one of the fundamental thoughts repeated by O.-L. in his writings and affirmed in his teaching - has the word of true life, even for modern minds, and possesses the light and the strength to illuminate and resolve all of man's problems, from the interior ones to the social ones.