A History of Philosophy, Vol. IX: Maine de Biran to Sartre

Summary

Maine de Biran to Sartre appeared in 1975 as the ninth volume of Frederick Copleston's History of Philosophy and the last in his original plan; Continuum reissued it in 2003 as 19th and 20th Century French Philosophy. Earlier volumes had been organised by period across Europe. This one keeps to a single nation, France, and follows its philosophy from the aftermath of the Revolution to the postwar generation of Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Part I begins with the reaction against the Revolution. Joseph de Maistre, Louis de Bonald and Lamennais argued that society and even language rest on divine institution and tradition rather than on the reasoning of individuals. Against them stood the Ideologists, heirs of Condillac such as Destutt de Tracy and the physician Cabanis, who sought to explain ideas from sensation and physiology. Maine de Biran, who began among the Ideologists, broke with them by attending to the felt effort of the will meeting resistance, and Copleston treats him as the source of a long French tradition of reflective psychology. The part continues with Victor Cousin's eclecticism, the social schemes of Saint-Simon, Fourier and Proudhon, and Auguste Comte's law of three stages, classification of the sciences and late religion of humanity. Part II follows positivism through Littré, Taine and Renan, the neo-critical philosophy of Renouvier, and the spiritualist line of Ravaisson, Lachelier and Boutroux, who argued that the laws of nature leave room for contingency and freedom. Two chapters on Henri Bergson trace his argument from duration and free will through Matter and Memory and Creative Evolution to The Two Sources of Morality and Religion. Part III moves from Bergson to the mid-twentieth century. It covers Catholic apologists such as Maurice Blondel and his philosophy of action, the Thomist revival led by Jacques Maritain and Étienne Gilson, philosophers of science such as Henri Poincaré and Pierre Duhem, philosophies of value and Emmanuel Mounier's personalism, and two religious thinkers, Teilhard de Chardin and Gabriel Marcel. Two chapters expound Jean-Paul Sartre, from Being and Nothingness to the Critique of Dialectical Reason, and a chapter on Maurice Merleau-Ponty closes the main survey, with brief remarks on Camus and on the rise of structuralism. Copleston's organising question is how French thinkers kept returning to the human subject, its freedom and its relation to the body, to society and to God. He shows how positivism and the human sciences pressed in one direction while the Biranian and Bergsonian current pressed in another, and how Catholic thought responded to both. His sympathies show most in the chapters on Marcel and Blondel, and his critical remarks on Sartre's account of freedom are set apart from a careful exposition of it. For high school students the most useful chapters are those on Comte, Bergson, Marcel and Sartre, read alongside Pascal's Pensées and the plays and novels of Sartre and Camus already in this library.

Plot or Argument

• Throne, altar and tradition after 1789

  De Maistre, de Bonald and Lamennais answer the Revolution by grounding social order, language and certainty in divine institution and the common consent of mankind.

• Sensation, physiology and the willing self

  The Ideologists explain thought from sensation and bodily organisation; Maine de Biran finds in the experience of voluntary effort a primitive fact that sensationism could not account for, and later turns toward a life of the spirit.

• Eclectics, reformers and Comte

  Cousin's eclectic spiritualism as the philosophy of the July Monarchy, utopian social theorists, and Comte's positive philosophy, sociology and cult of humanity.

• Positivists, neo-critics and the spiritualist current

  Littré, Taine and Renan carry positivism into history and criticism; Renouvier revises Kant; Ravaisson, Lachelier and Boutroux defend freedom and finality against mechanism.

• Bergson's philosophy of duration

  Lived time as distinct from spatialised clock time, memory as irreducible to brain traces, the vital impulse of Creative Evolution, and the contrast of closed and open morality and religion.

• Catholic philosophy between Bergson and the war

  Blondel's philosophy of action, the controversy over Modernism, the Thomism of Maritain and Gilson, and the personalism of Mounier.

• Science, values and two religious thinkers

  Poincaré's conventionalism and Duhem's history of physics, philosophies of value, Teilhard's evolutionary vision and Marcel's distinction between problem and mystery.

• Sartre and Merleau-Ponty

  Sartre's being-for-itself and being-in-itself, radical freedom and bad faith, his later turn to Marxism, and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the embodied subject.

Characters

• Frederick Copleston, author

  Jesuit historian who closes his nine-volume plan with a single national tradition.

• Maine de Biran, subject

  Philosopher of the will's felt effort, from whom Copleston dates a French tradition of reflective psychology.

• Joseph de Maistre, subject

  Savoyard critic of the Revolution and defender of papal authority.

• Auguste Comte, subject

  Founder of positivism and of a proposed religion of humanity.

• Henri Bergson, subject

  Philosopher of duration, memory and creative evolution, given two chapters.

• Maurice Blondel, subject

  Catholic philosopher of action who argued that human willing opens onto the supernatural.

• Gabriel Marcel, subject

  Catholic dramatist and philosopher of mystery, fidelity and hope.

• Jean-Paul Sartre, subject

  Atheist existentialist whose account of freedom receives two chapters.

• Maurice Merleau-Ponty, subject

  Phenomenologist of perception and the lived body.

Lessons

• The self known in effort

  Maine de Biran argued that we know ourselves as causes when we will a movement and feel the body's resistance. Copleston uses him to show that attention to inner experience can answer a philosophy that reduces the mind to sensations.

  • What does the experience of trying to lift something heavy teach about the self, according to Biran?
  • Why did Biran's later journal turn from psychology toward prayer and grace?

• Can society replace God?

  Comte proposed a religion of humanity with its own calendar of saints, while de Maistre held that no society survives without divine authority. Copleston sets these two answers to the Revolution side by side so students can weigh them.

  • Why did Comte think a scientific age still needed worship?
  • What does de Maistre's view of tradition assume about human reason?
  • Is a religion without God a religion at all?

• Clock time and lived time

  Bergson distinguished measured time from the duration we live, and argued that free acts express the whole person rather than the outcome of a calculation. Copleston expounds the argument and asks whether it secures freedom or only describes it.

  • How does Bergson's example of lived duration differ from minutes on a clock?
  • Does Bergson's account of freedom leave room for moral responsibility?

• Problem and mystery

  Marcel separated problems, which can be solved from outside, from mysteries such as love, fidelity and death, in which the questioner is involved. Copleston's chapter on Marcel, beside his chapters on Sartre, shows two very different French answers to the same postwar questions.

  • Give an example of a question that becomes a mystery when it concerns you personally.
  • How does Marcel's idea of fidelity answer Sartre's emphasis on choice?

Context

French philosophy between 1789 and 1960 was shaped by recurring political upheaval, the conflict between Church and anticlerical Republic, the prestige of the natural and social sciences, and the shock of two world wars. Copleston's volume is organised around these pressures as they bore on philosophy.

Composition

Copleston completed the volume in 1975, nine years after the eighth, while serving as Principal of Heythrop College after its move into the University of London. Image Books later published it in two parts, and Continuum reissued it in 2003 as Volume IX under the title 19th and 20th Century French Philosophy.

Reception

At its appearance it was among the few English-language surveys of nineteenth-century French thought, a field then little read in British and American universities. Its coverage thins as it nears its own decade: structuralism and the thinkers who followed Merleau-Ponty receive only brief notice, a consequence of ending the survey near the date of writing.

Comparisons

• Pensees

  Pascal's reasons of the heart stand behind the French concern with the inner life that Copleston follows from Biran to Blondel.

• Discourse on Method

  Descartes's turn to the thinking subject is the inheritance Biran revises by putting the willing, embodied self in place of pure thought.

• Reflections on the Revolution in France

  Burke's defence of inherited order parallels the French traditionalists who open Part I, though de Maistre grounds tradition more directly in Providence.

• An Introduction to Metaphysics

  Bergson's short essay on intuition and analysis is a primary text for the method Copleston expounds in his two Bergson chapters.

• No Exit and Three Other Plays

  The plays dramatise the freedom, the look of the other and the bad faith that Copleston sets out from Being and Nothingness.

• The Plague

  Camus receives only brief notice in the volume; his novel shows a moral seriousness without God that readers can compare with Sartre and Marcel.

• A History of Philosophy, Vol. VIII: Bentham to Russell

  Volume VIII covers British empiricism and idealism in the same century, a useful contrast to French positivism and spiritualism.

• A History of Philosophy, Vol. XI: Logical Positivism and Existentialism

  Copleston's earlier essays on existentialism give his first assessment of Marcel and Sartre, which this volume expands and revises.

Quotes

For Students

A reading companion for classical Christian high school students. See the student guide.

Reading Guide

Watch for

• How each thinker answers the Revolution's question of what holds a society together.
• The line Copleston draws from Maine de Biran through Ravaisson to Bergson.
• How Catholic philosophers responded both to positivism and to Bergson.
• Where Copleston's exposition of Sartre ends and his criticism begins.

Key terms and names

Traditionalism

The view of de Bonald and Lamennais that basic truths reach us through language and tradition received ultimately from God, not through unaided individual reason.

Ideology

Destutt de Tracy's word for the science of ideas, meant to trace all thought to sensation.

Law of three stages

Comte's thesis that human thought passes from theological to metaphysical to positive, scientific explanation.

Durée

Bergson's term for lived, qualitative duration as distinct from measured, spatialised time.

Problem and mystery

Marcel's contrast between questions solvable by detached technique and realities in which the questioner is personally engaged.

Bad faith

Sartre's name for the self-deception by which a person denies his own freedom or his own situation.

Seminar Questions

1. Comprehension What did Maine de Biran find in the experience of effort that the Ideologists had overlooked?
2. Comprehension What are Comte's three stages, and what place did he leave for religion?
3. Interpretation Why does Copleston give Bergson two chapters and treat him as a turning point in the volume?
4. Interpretation How does Blondel's philosophy of action try to lead from human willing toward the supernatural?
5. Interpretation What does Sartre mean by saying existence precedes essence, and how does Copleston test the claim?
6. Big Question Is human freedom best understood as creating our own values or as faithfully responding to a good we did not invent?
7. Big Question Can the sciences of society explain the person, or does the person always exceed them?

Faith Connections

• Psalm 139:13-14 (Scripture)

  The psalmist's praise for being fearfully and wonderfully made can be read beside the French debate, from Cabanis to Merleau-Ponty, over whether mind can be explained by the body's organisation.

• Galatians 5:1, 13 (Scripture)

  Paul's freedom for which Christ has set us free, to be used in serving one another, offers a contrast to Sartre's freedom without a given human nature.

• Blaise Pascal, Pensées (Great Conversation)

  Pascal's wager and his reasons of the heart anticipate Blondel's and Marcel's arguments that the whole person, not reason alone, is engaged in the question of God.

Logic and Rhetoric

Central argument: Copleston argues that French philosophy after the Revolution kept returning to the human subject: traditionalists placed it under inherited authority, Ideologists and positivists explained it through sensation and social science, and a reflective current from Maine de Biran through Bergson defended its inner freedom; in the twentieth century Catholic thinkers and the existentialists continued that inquiry in opposite directions, with Sartre making freedom absolute and Marcel locating it within fidelity to others and to God.

Rhetorical device: genealogy of a tradition. Copleston presents Maine de Biran as the starting point of a French spiritualist line and measures later figures, from Ravaisson to Bergson, by their relation to it.

Debate: Resolved: Marcel gives a truer account of human freedom than Sartre.

Writing Prompts

Essay: Using Copleston's chapters on Comte and on Bergson, explain why each thinker believed the sciences could or could not give a complete account of human life, and argue which view better fits ordinary moral experience.

Comparison with No Exit and Three Other Plays: Read No Exit beside Copleston's account of Sartre's being-for-others and argue whether the play shows freedom defeated by the look of others or freedom refusing responsibility.

Medical Lens

Of interest to the history of psychology and medicine because several of the philosophers treated worked at the border of physiology and mind. The Ideologist Pierre-Jean-Georges Cabanis was a physician who wrote on the relations of the physical and the moral in man; Maine de Biran's early memoir on habit and his account of willed effort engaged that physiological psychology; Bergson's Matter and Memory drew on the clinical literature of aphasia to argue that memory is not simply stored in the brain; and Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of the body made use of neurological case studies. These are background facts about the philosophers; how far Copleston's chapters discuss the medical sources should be checked in the volume.

• Part I, chapter on the Ideologists and Maine de Biran

  Exposition of the sensationist and physiological psychology of the Ideologists, including Cabanis, and Biran's break with it through the fact of voluntary effort.

  Mind Body Physicians Doctors
• Part II, chapters on Bergson

  Account of Matter and Memory and Bergson's distinction between habit-memory and pure memory in relation to the brain.

  Mind Body Dementia Memory
• Part III, chapter on Merleau-Ponty

  Exposition of the lived body and perception as the ground of consciousness's relation to the world.

  Mind Body

Creative Prompts

• Dialogue

  Write a conversation in a Paris café about 1945 between Gabriel Marcel and Jean-Paul Sartre on whether a promise can bind the person who made it, keeping each position close to Copleston's exposition.

• Classroom

  Build a timeline of French regimes from 1789 to 1958 and place each philosopher in Copleston's volume on it; then discuss which ideas answer which political crisis.

• Essay

  Compare Comte's religion of humanity with Christian worship as Pascal describes it, and argue what Comte kept and what he could not keep.

Further Reading

• Time and Free Will, Henri Bergson

• Being and Having, Gabriel Marcel

• Existentialism Is a Humanism, Jean-Paul Sartre

• Pensées, Blaise Pascal

• Modern French Philosophy, Vincent Descombes