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.

Top 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.

• 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.

• 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.

• 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.

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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.

• 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.

• Part III, chapter on Merleau-Ponty

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