Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology

ISSN: 0007-1773 (Print) 2332-0486 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rbsp20

Maine de Biran and Phenomenology

Ian W. Alexander

To cite this article: Ian W. Alexander (1970) Maine de Biran and Phenomenology, Journal of the
British Society for Phenomenology, 1:1, 24-37, DOI: 10.1080/00071773.1970.11006096

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MAINE DE BIRAN AND PHENOMENOLOGY
BY IAN W. ALE~ANIDER

One of the striking features in the development of philosophy in France in recent years has
been the revival of interest in her late eighteenth and early nineteenth-century philosopher, Maine
de Biran. This interest, dating from the 'thirties and culminating in the publication after the war
of several key studies of his thought together with new editions of his works, is contemporaneous
with the development of phenomenology and existentialism in France. Nor is it surprising that
this should be so, since, as it is the aim of this paper to show, Maine de Biran may justifiably
be claimed as an early promoter of a phenomenological type of thinking.
As a young man Biran belonged to the group of Ideologues, inheritors of eighteenth-century
empiricism, and, on his emergence from ideologie as its principal critic. he became the leading
figure in the "Societe Philosophique ", the nucleus of the future "Ecole spiritualiste ", a some-
what localised group of philosophers, including Royer-Collard, Jouflroy and Victor Cousin, of
now well-nigh only historical interest. His influence, however, was to be widespread as the founder
of the " philosophy of consciousness " which presents an uninterrupted line of development
through Lachelier and Lagneau to Bergson and, indeed, to Lavelle and Le Senne in our own day.
And, it is hoped to show, his philosophy, too often interpreted in idealistic or covertly idealistic
terms, has legitimate claims to consideration as a realism of the phenomenological type. Although
he published comparatively little during his life-time (his Memoire sur I' habitude appeared in
1802, the Examen des lerons de M. Laromiguere in 1807. and the Exposition de Ia doctrine philo-
sophique de Leibniz in the Biographie Universelle in 1819), he wrote a great deal, often in the
form of Memoirs, several for submission to various European Academies. The total of his pub-
lished works now numbers some fourteen volumes.
Biran has frequently been referred to as a precursor of existentialism. And certainly he is
so by the fact that the philosophical problem is largely determined by the problems of his per-
sonal existence. The author of a remarkable Journal, he belongs to that category of thinkers,
such as Pascal, Rousseau and Kierkegaard, who combine a capacity for systematic thought with
a compelling introspective bent, who are distrustful of abstract speculation and a priori reasoning
and whose demand is above all for concreteness. If all are in search of an absolute, it is an
absolute which can be approached only through the person, by way of a personal reflection con-
ducted by the existing subject upon the modes of his existence, a reflection moreover which
takes the form of moral and intellectual confession as much as speculative inquiry.
No one is more sensitive than Biran to the fluctuations of conscious experience, of what
he calls "the inner man" or "feeling of existence". His Journal is a revealing document
which records these variations from day to day. As it shows clearly, the mobile of all his think-
ing lies in an inner duality he experiences as betw~n those rare moments when, master of
his moods and in possession of his active powers, he enjoys a "full existence", and those
much more frequent moments when the unity of his selfhood dissolves and he falls a prey to
"affectivity", to those passive elements that flood his consciousness under the stimulat~on of
his hypersensitive nervous system---'Sensations, moods, emotions, all that appertains to what he
calls the "organic life". In those latter moments the will is in abeyance and the mind, reduced
to the state of passive recipient of impressions, is at the mercy of external conditions acting
upon the body. Particularly sensitive is Biran to climatic changes, and the Journal is full of
references to their all-pervasive influence. As Sainte-Beuve wittily put it, "he notes the atmos-
24
pheric variations of his soul".' In general, unable to concentrate his attention or exercise
willed control, he responds passively to every fleeting and disruptive impression. " Every-
thing escapes my restless thought. I am being changeable, variable and without consistency".'
"I am as inconstant as time, but I have scarcely anything but short moments of serenity, of lucidity
if ideas, of that moral force which constitutes man".'

It is from this consciousness of inner duality, as between activity and passivity, will and
affectivity, mind and body, that Biran derives the fundamental theme of his philosophical
reflection.

Historically, Biran's philosophy has its starting-point in eighteenth-century thought and in

its prolongation in the Ideological school, which represented the dominant philosophical current
in France at the turn of the century. His first masters were Condillac and Locke together with
the two major Ideologists, Cabanis and De Tracy. In a certain sense he carries on their study
of the mind. His is a positive inquiry. Ravaisson was to call it a "spiritualist realism or positi-
vism", and Philip Hallie is not wrong in entitling his recent book "Maine de Biran. Reformer
of Empiricism": He subscribes indeed to the basic principle of empiricism according to
which philosophy must be firmly grounded in the description of the facts or phenomena of con-
sciousness. But the description he offers of these phenomena is such as completely to overturn
its epistemology and to initiate a revolution in the science of mind as a whole.

As he comes to believe, the empiricists' description is ultimately distorting by reason of

their false approach to the study of the mind and its operations. The eighteenth century lay
under the spell of the physical sciences and their achievements and looked to them for their
models. It is this that led the empiricists into methodological error, to treat the mind itself as
if it were an object in the physical universe and to apply to its study the method of analysis
appropriate to the study of the object. Not surprisingly, the sole positive content of mind was
found to consist of sense data considered as so many discrete psychological atoms Which, by
simple combination and association, generate general and abstract ideas and thus, it was claimed,
the entire complex range of knowledge.
On the contrary, Biran argues, the mind is not an object open to this sort .of objective
inspection and analysis. Its study therefore demands a method sui generis, appropriate to its own
specific nature. The mind is essentially an activity or operational force, distinguishable from
its objective, sensational or affective content, as that whereby this content is structured. To grasp
this internal, structuring power of mind there is required a " subjective " method which Biran
terms reflection or "reflexive analysis" and which is capable of grasping the mind as process,
in its concrete acts and operations. Failure to see this has led empiricists and sensationalists
to exclude from their description what is most positive of all in the mind, namely the mind itself
in its specific essence as a " spiritual " activity or causal force, without which one may account
for sensations and for the general and abstract ideas compounded therefrom but not, as Biran
will argue, for the "universal and necessary motions", which provide the "inherent forms of
the understanding ,. that ground and validate knowledge.

Biran has sometimes been called the French Kant, and indeed he is confronted by the same
problem of dealing with the legacy of empiricism. Both are concerned with grounding and
justifying those universal and necessary factors in knowledge which empiricism, by reducing all
knowledge to sensation, cannot adequately account for. Whereas Kant, however, has recourse to
a priori forms and categories imposing themselves upon sense experience and as such logically

25
prior to experience, Biran will seek their ground within experience itself. Moreover there is in
Biran an ontological concern that is absent from Kant or, to say the least, takes a very different
form. It will be one of the aims of this paper precisely to suggest that Biran is seeking a way
to reconcile the phenomenological and the ontological.
However, that may be, suffice to say at present that one must not be led astray by the
terms " spiritualiste " and " spiritualisme " applied to his philosophy. Biran is concerned from
the outset with •• being-in-the-world". Consciousness is conceived by him as necessarily in
relation with being and the " phenomena " of consciousness as acts or projects directed towards
the grasping of this being and of the various senses it discloses or manifests within the appro-
priate structures or modes of consciousness.

There are three distinct periods or stages in the development of Biran's philosophy. First.
a preliminary stage where he develops ideologie and subjects it to a sustained critique; second,
his central doctrine, the philosophy of consciousness or philosophy of effort, often referred to
simply as " le biranisme "; third and last, the philosophy of religious experience. But, however
distinct these may be, they represent together stages in the development of one " anthropology ",
as he will come to term it, aimed at describing the content of the self's experience as the centre
of feeling, as cognising and moral agent, and as religious subject.
It was not long before Biran had doubts about the adequacy of the ideological, and
generally eighteenth-century, account of mental operations. In one of his earliest writings he
criticises the physiological explanation proposed by Cabanis which, he states, may account for
" the springs of the machine " but leaves out " the motive power."" More especially does
Condillac's Traite des sensations come in for criticism. How, he asks in his first Journal or
Cahier-Journal, can the higher faculties-those of the understanding, such as memory, judgment
and reasoning-and those of the affective-volitional life-such as desire and passion-be simply
" transformations " of sensation which, by Con dillac's own definition, is a mere capacity to
receive impressions ? Surely, he declares, there is experienced in their exercise " a true action
of the mind". "Do I not feel, by the effort that it costs me, the lassitude that follows it?
Here are two very different states of the mind; in the one it is merely a spectator, in the other
it is active. We cannot in good faith confuse these two states. There appears therefore to be in
us besides the faculty of sensing an active powe which orders or can order our perception."'
A similar objection is made apropos of Locke's and Condillac's theory of language. While
accepting their thesis that sensations are transformed into ideas through signs, he finds it impos-
sible to conceive how the complex analytical process involved in tlie attribution of linguistic
signs can be understood unless there be, prior to language, an original activity of thought inde-
pendent of sense. "If there were nothing voluntary in the operations of the understanding before
the institution of signs, how can they have been created? Does not the first invention suppose
in the inventors the power to dispose of their imaginations ? "'
These various criticisms come to a head in his first major work the Memoir on Habit,
where he formulates a distinction between sensation and perception. • Condillac and the
Ideologists had in some sort set the stage. Cabanis, for example, in his Rapports du physique
et du moral de rhomme had called attention to a category of phenomena neglected or mis-
understood by Condillac, namely those of the " internal sensibility " as distinct from the
" external sensibility " or sense experience. There is, he pointed out, an organic, psychosomatic
life (impressions associated, for example, with the digestive organs) which escapes control of
the will and of which the subject is only occasionally conscious or fully conscious. This con-
26
ception of an " organic life " as one of the poles of experience will play a large part in Biran's
later descriptions, but already it inclines him to the view that consciousness exhibits a dual struc-
ture as between its passively received content and its active, consciously directed powers,
between affectivity and activity, the "organic" and the "hyperorganic ". This clear distinction
Cabanis himself could not make by reason of his resolve, in conformity with his eighteenth-
century bias, to derive all mental phenomena from one single principle designated "sensibility ".'•

· At the same time Destutt de Tracy had been led to recognise an activity of mind, indepen-
dent of sense, in the development of the passions, if only because passion, far from being a mere
passive state of feeling, "lives on preference"." Most important of all, however, was his treat-
ment of the origin of the judgment of externality. Condillac had himself come up against this
problem, formidable indeed for sensationalism, and by way of its solution had attributed the
origin of this judgment to touch as being unique among the sense organs in procuring a double
impression, one element of which, peculiar to touch and inseparable from it, is the sensation of
resistance. De Tracy pushed the analysis further by showing how, for this sensation of resis-
tance to be possible, there is required the experience of voluntary effort." To this distinctive
factor in experience he gave the name "motilite ", but he continued most confusingly to equate
it with the sensibility, referring to it as a "sixth sense ".

What Biran now proposes is a radical distinction between the impressions of sense and
the internal experience of willed effort. In his Memoir on Habit he notes that sense data them-
selves vary in clarity, those of sight and hearing for example having greater clarity than those
of taste and smell, and that their degree of clarity appears to depend on the degree in which the
sense organs are active in their production. But when we consider perception proper, we have
to go further than this and recognise that it involves a process of mental appropriation and
structuring of sense impressions, which carries with it a sense of voluntary effon as of a causal
activity of mind meeting with, appropriating and organising into perceptual schemes, the pas-
sive elements of sense experienced as a term of resistance. But for this causal activity of mind
applied to, and distinguishable from, the passive, resistant term, there could be no conscious-
ness of self-hood, no distinction possible between self and non-self. Nor can there be perception
proper without apperception.

It is therefore possible to classify perceptions according to the degree in which, by reason

of the mental effort involved, they possess an "apperceptive character". Indeed, as he will
argue more forcibly in a later work, only tactile and auditory perceptions have this apperceptive
character, since only they bring fully into play the mind's appropriating activity and are "dupli-
cated in consciousness ", whereas the other senses offer only " heterogeneous passive
impression " and " remain confused in sense as immediate affections "."

It is from this activity of mind and its apperception that Biran derives the faculties. Judg-
ing and reasoning, for instance, far from being, as Condillac would have it, reducible to the
mere observation and comparison of resemblances and differences between sense impressions,
involve a complex process of organisation and interpretation of sense data. Memory, far from
being a simple reviviscence of impressions, involves their recognition, location and integration
in a mental field."

The study of habit is a counter-proof of this distinctiOI\ between sensation and percep-
tion, affectivity and activity. For Biran goes on to demonstrate that ·habit enfeebles the passive.
affective elements and fortifies the· active ones· endowed with apperceptive quality.

27
 Maine de Biran's central doctrine-on which indeed the whole structure of his phenomeno-
logy depends-is represented by four major works : the two Memoirs, De Ia Decomposition de
Ia pensee and De l'Aperception immediate, the Essai sur les fondements de Ia pychologie and
the essay Des Rapports des sciences naturelles avec Ia psychologie.

Biran's basic assertion is that philosophical inquiry must start from a "fact". He criticises
both rationalists such as Descartes and his followers and empiricists such as Locke, Hume and
Condillac on the score that they start equally from an abstraction. The former-" the point of
view of pure reason "-start from an absolute, the a priori concept of a thought substance fully
furnished with innate ideas. The latter, in spite of their empirical claim, fall into a similar
abstractness. They proceed from a mind limited to sense impressions or "adventitious modifica-
tions " induced by external causes. But this causality of theirs is itself a " highly elaborated
notion," indeed an abstract term designating a group of phenomena observable in the physical
universe and unrelated to anything known to the actuality of the experiencing self."
What is required is a " primitive fact " of concrete, existential experience. And this fact
can be revealed only to a reflective act of mind capable of grasping the mind in its inner struc-
ture. Such a reflexive analysis distinguishes two distinct but related terms, one passive and vari-
able, the other active and constant, sensations .and affectivity on the one hand, will and causal
force on the other: the first "organic", intimately connected with the bodily mechanism, the
second "hyperorganic" or "spiritual". All cognitive, perceptual and moral experience involves
the apperception of the self in its essence as a causal force or voluntary effort meeting with,
and acting upon, an organic resistance-a "force" in conjunction with an "inertia".

One might say that Descartes and Leibniz meet and correct each other in Biran's starting-
point, for it is a version of the cogito where a " force " is substituted for a thought substance.
"If Descartes thought to posit the first principle of all knowledge, the first self-evident truth,
in stating: I think, therefore, I am a thinking thing or substance,-we shall state rather, and in
a more determined manner, with the irrecusable evidence of inner experience: I act, I will, or I
think in myself action, therefore I know myself as cause, therefore, I am or exist really as cause
or force."" Against this " subjective causality " Hume's criticisms are of no avail. When Hume
reduces causality to the felt expectation that associations of phenomena will continue to repeat
themselves, he confuses the law of succession of impressions with real, efficient causation such
as we experience subjectively in every act of thought. This is to " put the whole intellectual
system into images and destroy the principle link that unites all the parts"." And when he
makes a main plank of his critique the argument that we do not know how a cause produces
an effect, he fails to recognise that in the experience of subjective causality, although we may
not know the how, we have a concrete instance of efficient causation as a fact, as certain and
as immediately known to the reflecting self as his own existence."

It is from the experience of subjective causality, Biran now goes on to argue, that are
derived the "universal notions" governing knowledge: causality, force, being, substance, space,
time, identity." It is important at this point to understand the nature of Biran's problem, which
is that of grounding the universal notions. He has to answer two questions : how aro they
derived ? and what is their logical status ? The problem is acute for a phenomenologically
based philosophy such as his. For how can such notions be derived from what is by definition
an individual and relative experience ? And, if derivable, what constitutes their validity as
notions of universal applicability, giving them the right to play a commanding role in the pro-
duction of knowledge? "The great problem of philosophy", he declares, is the passage, "from
the primitive fact to the notion, from the relative to the absolute ".••
28
 What is given in experience is the primitive fact, composed of two terms, a willed effort
and an organic resistance: "a single fact composed of two elements. a single relation between
two terms. of which one cannot be isolated from the other without changing its nature or with-
out passing from the concrete to the abstract, from the relative to the absolute"." The primi-
tive fact is relational : and only where there is relation can one speak of knowledge. The arbi-
trary separation of the two terms leads indeed to the abstractions of rationalism on the one
hand and of materialism on the other. "All the difficulties of science come from our desire to
conceive in the abstract what is given primitively and necessarily in relation"." This is the
error of " abstract metaphysics ", whether of the a priori type or of the a posteriori type: " the
very problem disappears and in place of the required relation there remains only a unity, either
material which eliminates or corporalises the soul and self of man, or spiritual which eliminates
or idealises or phenomenalises the living organic body"."

Nevertheless, Biran does not deny the existence of absolutes or noumena as he sometimes
calls them, using Kant's terminology." The causal, spiritual force experienced, he states, has
its "necessary principle" in an "absolute activity" (substance soul or spirit), the organic resis-
tance in an "absolute resistance or inertia" (substance body or matter), which we are convinced
"remain when all effort and resistance vanish with the self"." Elsewhere he speaks of the
"absolute force which is, without manifesting itself"." These absolutes are not, however.
experienced qua absolutes. "The absolute itself becomes relative as soon as it is felt or thought.""

Biran is not denying that the absolutes are experienced, but asserting that they
are experienced only as related and relative terms." But, since knowledge is necessarily
relational, qua absolutes they cannot be objects of knowledge nor in themselves generate posi-
tive knowledge or ideas. They are objects of "belief". The absolute, he states, is "an object
of belief indeterminate by its nature and which enters as an elementary principle into all know-
ledge, real or factual, without by itself constituting that knowledge"." All knowledge has a
" character of relation " and there is in mind an invincible tendency " to believe or suppose . . .
some absolute which is the first term or necessary foundation of the relation", but this abso-
lute as such is a " belief without idea " and " could not be the pure origin of any knowledge
or idea .. _..

Nevertheless, if their logical status is that of beliefs, not knowledge, the absolutes found
Lhe universal notions governing knowledge, into which the absolutes enter as " elementary prin-
ciples". Both knowledge and belief have a common root in the primitive fact. "I regard as a
certain truth that both knowledge and belief have their necessary basis and point d'appui in the
consciousness of self or of the causal activity that constitutes it"." By entering into the
primitive fact as related terms the absolutes, themselves beliefs, constitute the ground of know-
ledge and of its "universal notions". These find their type or model in the primitive fact and
are derived therefrom by what Biran calls " primary induction " or " reflexive abstraction ".

Such universal notions, says Biran, must not be confused with general or abstract ideas,
nor primary induction with ordinary induction. The distinction he makes here is similar to the
one made by Berkeley."' Universal or necessary notions or "reflexive abstractions" are
grounded and, as he says, "found" in experience or the primitive fact of subjective causality.
We do not create them, for " we make nothing out of what is, and what we make or create is
not"." They are moreover implicit in each and every such experience, being simple and
irreducible in form. General and abstract ideas, on the contrary, are "artificial", "pure signs",

29
obtained by comparison of instances.,. They have their originals in sense impressions and are
formed by comparison of sensed qualities, and ordinary induction is this process of generali-
sation from secondary qualities.'" Whereas therefore general ideas, being "formed by the com-
parison of such sensible qualities or modifications", are necessarily collective and, "founded
in large part on linguistic conventions", are "logical abstractions" with a •• purely nominal
value", in that their validity depends on their satisfying the formal requirements of linguistic
convention," reflexive abstractions are "universal and simple", grasped immediately as con-
stants of experience. The primary induction or abstraction is a species of reflexive recuperation
whereby they are grasped, not as objects nor as ideas nor as mere virtualities, but as funda-
mental structures of experience which, although in themselves " independent of every applica-
tion to external things"," furnish the understanding with its "inherent forms" and are
rendered capable of objective application.'•

We have therefore to conclude that the absolutes or "principles", objects of belief and not
of knowledge, are embodied in experience, providing experience with its structures and the
understanding with its forms and so furnishing knowledge with an absolute ground founded
experientially.

One cannot but be struck by the similarity between Biran's procedure and that of contem-
porary phenomenology. The aim of both is to establish the ground of perception and cognition
in concrete experience and to show how the principal notions governing knowledge, before becom-
ing categories or laws of the understanding, are first "lived" or "acted" and have to be under-
stood in terms of projects of the self directed towards the world as the telos of its inner drive
to objectification. Biran's notions, like Husserl's ''ideas" or "essences", are structures, embody-
ing the fundamental intentional structure which relates the self to the non-self as the resistant
term of its activity, these structures being the means whereby the world is constituted for
consciousness, endowed with and brought to reveal its senses and meanings.'" Further, Biran's
notions, like the essences of phenomenology, are given to the awareness of the experiencing self
in a reflexive mode not unlike Husserl's intuition or "vision of essences", that is to say directly
in each single instance, and not by comparison of, and generalisation from, a number of
instances.

Historically, of course, there is a link beween Biran and Kant. The former's notions, des-
cribed by him as " inherent forms of the understanding ", correspond to the latter's categories,
while his designation of the absolutes which enter into experience in a " phenomenological
manner .... as objects of belief suggests a comparison with Kant's postulates of the practical
reason. There is however a quite fundamental difference. Biran's notions are " found " in
experience and are not a priori concepts obtained by a transcendental deduction. Whereas for Kant
the laws of thought are prior to thought and existence and provide thought with its a priori
framework, for Biran existence is prior and the laws of thought are derived from the self's
reflection on his existence. As Henri Gouhier puts it, " the self of effort posits the forms and
categories by reflection on what constitutes it a self; to analyse the laws of thought is to des-
cribe its existence "." Thus the self knows itself directly as a cause projecting itself in time
because it is a cause projecting itself in a temporal mode, and not because it experiences itself
through categories of causality and time imposed by a transcendental subject. "The primitive
self must necessarily perceive itself without the interposition of the laws of cognition, since it
is this immediate apperception which is the origin or the principle on which these laws depend
and it depends on none of them . . . the self is neither in time, nor outside time; it is its first
link."..

30
 The life of self-consciousness, based on the relation between the two terms will .and affec-
tivity, is the· field of knowledge. It is also the field of moral activity. Influenced strongly by
Stoicism in this middle period, Biran finds the mainspring of moral action in the exercise of
the will directed towards mastery over the "organic "-sensation and mood-and maintenance
of the self in a "state of effort". These considerations bring us back to Biran's personal prob-
lems, for it is his reflections on his moral and spiritual anxieties that force him to add a new
dimension to his thought by the discovery of a new "fact", displayed in religious experience;
and •. with that, to recast his phenomenology or, at least, to present it in a new and fuller pers-
pective, notably in his last work composed in 1823 and 1824, the Nouveaux essais d'anthropologie.
There are intimations of his new preoccupations in his Journal from 1813, but more
specifically from about 1817 he came to recognise the inadequacy for him personally of a moral
Stoicism. Not only does he doubt the capacity of the will to dominate the affections but also
whether, even if achieved, such a tension of the will secures happiness. This leads him to con-
sider anew the modes of consciousness. As he has described it, self-consciousness exhibits a
dual structure relating two terms, one active, spiritual and hyperorganic, the other passive,
physical and organic, the degree of self-consciousness varying qualitatively according to the
degree in which the active, causal factor is dominant. Biran concentrates his attention on one
pole, where the will is virtually in abeyance and the mind abandoned to affectivity, almost to
the point of complete loss of personal identity. He himself has known such coenesthetic states
where the mind, wholly passive, seems to be absorbed into the flux of psycho-somatic feeling.
And he noted that, if such states are sometimes melancholic and depressive, at other times they
are delicious, calm and exquisite. " To procure these delicious feelings, this peace of soul, this
inner calm which I experience fitfully, I feel that I can do nothing, my activity is nil, I am
absolutely passive in my feelings."" May one not therefore conceive a similar state, he now
asks himself, but on a higher plane, at the other pole of consciousness, the spiritual or hyper-
organic one ?
On this basis Biran develops the doctrine of the "three lives". To understand its impli-
cations one must bear in mind what has been asserted. In the life of effort and se1f-conscious-
ness two terms are presented to the mind, one a causal, spiritual force and the other a passive
matter or affectivity. These two terms are the modes in which the absolutes (substance soul
or spirit, substance body or matter) manifest themselves "in a phenomenological manner".
They are given however only as related terms in experience and are not therefore experienced
or known qua absolutes. But Biran now looks at the two poles of experience and he finds that
there are in fact types of experience where we can claim to have something more than this
relative acquaintance with substances, experiences where, one of the terms being virtually sup-
pressed, participation in the absolute substances is immediate and direct. Hence the phenomen-
ology of the "three lives", in which the Platonic influence or what Gouhier calls "the point of
view of the separate soul "" replaces, or rather is added to, those of Descartes and Leibniz
operative in the middle philosophy.
First, there is "animal life". This is coenesthetic experience, where the self "is absorbed in
the affections and organic movements " and, the active term in abeyance, consciousness is un-
accompanied by self-consciousness or "by any apperception or specific sensation to which one
can attach any knowledge properly called, external or internal, subjective or objective.".. In
such experienCe there is direct participation in the body. "By virtue of its sensitive or animal
nature, the soul tends by its appetites to merge and to identify itself with bodies, an<J with its
own.".. And, at the limit, through absorption in its body, the self may participate directly in
" nature " or substance matter, for '' is not our body intimately linked ·with parts of the solar
system other than the globe · to which it is attached ? ,.,

31
 In his treatment of animal or organic life Biran not only describes what the Romantics
call the " cosmic sentiment " but anticipates contemporary phenomenology in its descriptions of
bodily experience (the body-subject, "my body", or the corps-propre), of concrete or "lived"
space and of the "ante-predicative "." Wliat he is describing is the en-soi of Sartre and,
generally, the "brute existence" of phenomenology, the experience of as yet undifferentiated
being prior to the introduction of relation by the emergence of the active cognising subject.
This is particularly evident in his remarkable phenomenology of spatial experience where he
describes the concrete origin of spatial relation. The latter, he writes, is "already in the con-
fused sentiment of existence before distinct personality. It is enclosed in the intentions and
affections that are prior to the self. But this relation is known distinctly only after the birth of
the self and consequently after the relation of causality. Hence at the moment when we exist
for ourselves, as cause, the notion of extended substance presents itself to our mind, not as
something new which begins to exist, but as some thing which pre-exists our knowledge and
which was already there in the confused intentions of the sensibility and instinct itself.'"'

This pre-cognitive and infra-relational sense of space is that of an "organic" or "uniform

and continuous resistance " corresponding to " a sort of vague and unlimited extension belong-
ing to the body-subject (le corps propre).""' An "internal space", continuous with the sense
of body or bodily identity, it is the locus of "merely affective modifications", containing no more
than vague senses of direction,-an undifferentiated and unlimited spatial continuum in short,
with which the subject is merged and from which it ~annot clearl)'i distinguish itself. It is the
intrusion of the self's causal activity, exercising itself through the separate organs and channels
of the nervous system, that makes possible the .perception of external space by introducing
relation into the undifferentiated or vaguely differentiated resistant spatial continuum and. by
marking the self off from the non-self. allows the self to constitute a world " for itself " of
externally related and justaposed points in an objective space. " Each individual effort, or each
particular act of the same will, will thus localise one of the immediate terms of its application,
and mark a point of division in the resistant continuum . . . personal existence becomes stronger
and develops. the motory subject individualises itself more completely in the apperception of the
relation of its own unity to the plurality of the mobile terms : by placing itself outside each, it
can learn to place them externally to one another.''11
To sum up, "animal life" may properly be described as infra-relational: the plane of the
antepredicative as understood by the phenomenologists, the immediacy of sensation and feeling
prior to perception and knowledge and, primarily, the immediate experience of body and sub-
stance matter.
The second life is "Ia vie humaine ", namely the life of self-consciousness as previously des-
cribed, where mind and body are in conjunction and experienced together as related terms, one
the causal force, the other the organic resistance to which it is applied and which it structures.
This is the plane of perception, morality and knowledge, relation and predication. "In the
ordinary state of man, possessing the conscium and the compos sui, the impressions of the vital
sense are necessarily conjoined with all the ideas, all the operations and all the active combi-
nations of the thinking being."'"
The third life is " the life of spirit ", namely religious or spiritual experience. Here it is the
bodily. organic term that is annulled, and the self participates directly in the soul's essence and
through the soul in the absolute of spirit. the will submitting to the Divine Will. The soul is
"united and as it were identified by love with the higher spirit from which it emanates", being
"no longer subject to the influence of the organism" ... Freed from the "envelopes of matter",
it "exercises all its faculties without organic obstacle","' and by this liberation from the body,

32
since the consciousness of self depends on the presence of a resistant term, it loses the " very
sense of the self together with its liberty"," and is united with its pure spiritual force,
experiencing those " feelings of sublimity " and that serenity which accompany the submission
of its own power to that of grace. At this higher level of experience there appears then a new
immediacy, one that may properly be termed supra-relational.

The terms " infra-relational " and " supra-relational " have indeed been used advisedly in
order to emphasise the dialectic that seems to underlie Biran's conception of the three lives.
They require, however, more precise definition. not least by reason of the often confused and
confusing presentation of his argument in his later writings. Man, he states, .stands midway
between God and nature, spirit and matter. As a perceiving, cognising and moral agent, he is
at the junction of both. But he can move towards either of the two poles of being. " Man is
intermediary between God and nature. He is linked with God by his mind and to nature by his
senses. He can identify himself with the latter, by allowing his self, his personality, his liberty
to be absorbed therein, and by abandoning himself to all the appetites, to all the impulses of
the flesh. He can also, up to a certain point, identify himself with God, by absorbing his self
through the exercise of a higher faculty which the school of Aristotle completely failed to
recognise, which Platonism discerned and characterised, and whicl1 Christianity perfected by
recalling it to its true type."••
At the lowest level man enjoys the immediacy of sensation and feeling. As has been sug-
gested, it is not simply relationless. Biran's descriptions tally with those of modern phenomen-
ology in pointing to a subliminal region of consciousness. of shifting presences, indeterminate
movements, tentative shapes and forms, constantly dissolving into an anonymous background.
Although then this immediacy is more accurately described as infra-relational, it is certainly not
yet knowledge or relation, which emerge only with the separation of mind from body and their
recomposition as terms of the relation embodied in the dual structure of self-conscious experience.
At the highest level we have another immediacy but of a different type. The subject-object
relation of self-conscious experience is undoubtedly transcended but, although Biran speaks of
"absorption" when describing the spiritual experience and even of loss of self, he does not
mean a total merging in the spiritual absolute or Godhead. Indeed he rejects the " mystical
point of view" which denies activity to the experiencing subject or "puts it all in God"."
For, whereas in the lower immediacy there is invasion of, and absorption in, the organic and
matter substance, in this higher immediacy there is both identity and difference and therefore
relation. It may be noted, for example, that, in the passage quoted on man's intermediate
position between God and nature, while man identifies himself with nature, he identifies him-
self with God only "up to a certain point". What Biran indeed is seeking to describe is a new
sort of relation or " super-relation " similar to what phenomenologists and existentialists like
Martin Buber and Gabriel Marcel term the " I-Thou " relation of participation. characterised
by complementarity and reciprocity of the related terms.

The three lives or types of experience are then seen to compose a dialectic, not unlike that
of the later Bradley : an infra-relational immediacy; relation; a supra-relational immediacy
which combines and reconciles the first two modes. since it may be shown to involve a relation
within immediacy itself and is both feeling and knowledge. This super-relation, defined by Biran
in traditional theological terms as love or charity. presents the characteristics of immediacy or
feeling. First. it is a participation in the absolute qua absolute or. as Gouhier wen expresses it,
"a relation which introduces no relativity".'' Second, it is feeling and affectivity, which have
for principal characteristic direct. immediate participation in the " object " experienced. " Our

33
affective faculties proceed in an inverse manner to that of the cognitive faculties. As the self
is the pivot and the pole of the latter, the non-self or absorption of the self in the pure objec-
tive is the first condition and the highest degree of the former."•• At the same time, the supra-
relation has the essential characteristic of knowledge, precisely because it is a relation, although
of a special sort. Although there is distinction, as required in a relation purposing to provide
knowledge, there is complementarity and reciprocity of action as between the two terms, or what
Marcel calls a relationship of "call" and "response". For, while on the one hand the soul is
in participation with the absolute and the recipient of its power, on the other it responds actively,
absorbing and incorporating this power into its own existence and activity " as an addition to
its own life .. ,..

Appropriation of the absolute, affectivity and activity, feeling and knowledge, the supra-
relation of religious experience constitutes a " sort of intuitive knowledge " in which " love and
knowledge are identified"."'

It is important to note the difference between the status of the spiritual absolute on this
higher plane and that given to it on the plane of cognition proper as described in the phase of
biranisme. In cognition proper the absolute is present in experience only as a related and
relative term. It is neither experienced nor known q.ua absolute and can therefore simply be
posited as an object of belief. As such, it has no more than a logical status, very different from
the existential role it is now given as a transcendant power actualised in experience and pre-
sented to the experiencing and reflecting subject as both fact and object of knowledge. This does
not mean, however, that the doctrine of belief is discarded, but simply that it is now restricted
in its relevance to the plane of cognition proper. where it remains valid, to what Biran calls the
order of reason or logos:' which has its basis in self-conscious experience with its related
and relative terms of a causal force acting upon an organic resistance for the production of
perceptions and ideas.
By the discovery of this new type of relation or supra-relation Biran is able with consider-
able success to reconcile his phenomenological method with his ontological preoccupation. He
does not renounce his earlier criticism of abstract, a priori metaphysics and remains faithful to
his phenomenological approach. "Metaphysics," he asserts, "must be founded on psychology
... on the facts of inner experience ", " without whose interpolation the mind of man loses
itself in ontological excursions towards the absolute"." Not that he rejects metaphysics or a
properly conceived ontology, only the a priori type of metaphysics or ontologism which, like
that of Leibniz, places itself " ex abrupto in the region of possibilities in order to derive
therefrom actual existences "."' Metaphysics or ontology remains an " abstract science. revolv-
ing necessarily on its own definitions or its conventional hypotheses ... if, starting from general
principles, it seeks to create or constitute itself as a science outside all given existence". It can
become a " real and positive science " provided it bases itself on the facts of consciousness
"which it is a question of recording and not of explaining or analysing"."'

Ontology (as opposed to ontologism) can establish its validity only on the basis of pheno-
menological description. In the phase of biranisme this appeared to be excluded, since in the
life of self-consciousness there is no experience of the absolute qua absolute but only as a rela-
tive term within the mind-body relation of perception and cognition. But now it is seen ·that
the mind can have such a simple, direct experience of the absolute, as a power infused into the
soul as " an addition to its own life ". once the self has disengaged itself from body and " the
flesh has been absorbed by the spirit .. ,.. Ontology can therefore be justified phenomenologi-
cally. Can it, however, be justified as a "science of being", which is the second requirement of

34
a fully constituted ontology ? This requirement would appear also to be satisfied, since we have
an experience of the absolute that is also knowledge. Experience and knowledge are reconciled
and with them the phenomenological description and the ontological reflection. The philosophy
of being is founded experientially and the basis laid of a phenomenological ontology which
avoids the twin pitfalls of ontologism on the one hand and mysticism on the other."'

The sense of Biran's philosophy as a whole lies in this fidelity to concrete experience, and
the dialectic which it involves is itself founded on an existential dialectic, proceeding from the
experience of body through self-consciousness to experience of the Godhead. Thus he writes,
referring to the last two stages : " It is first of all necessary that the self should constitute itself
a centre in order to know things and to know itself as distinct from all the rest; but when
knowledge is acquired, there appears the idea of a higher end than what is known by the mind
and to which the self refers itself with all that it knows or thinks."•' To each successive stage
in the dialectic of experience there belongs a specific "sense" or mode of awareness, coenes-
thetic, apperceptive, intuitive. And, as an interesting note on the doctrine of palingenesis would
suggest, the higher sense may be "enveloped" in the lower, as the organic may be enveloped
in matter, mind in the organic and spirit in m:nd."'

To record and describe the content of each of these specific modes of experience and the
" being of Being " which each reveals is the task of an ontologically orientiated (but not onto-
logising) phenomenology.

In Maine de Biran we find an early attempt to establish philosophy on a phenomeno-

logical basis. His method is neither ontological in the traditional sense, deducing existents from
a priori concepts, nor is it psychological, although he often applies this adjective to it, for it is
not concerned with mere states of mind and their analysis and causes. He is concerned rather, as
in modern phenomenology, with the "science of meanings", that is the description of the
various modes in which being " appears to " consciousness and " for " consciousness : both the
various senses and meanings that being discloses of itself to the experiencing and reflecting self
and the various modes of the self's existence, its structures, intentions and projects through
which being effects these disclosures of its meanings. At the centre of his thinking is a realism
which places the self in the world, in contrast with being, as a sense-giving and sense-revealing
activity. To this new "science" Biran gives the name of "anthropology", a term that indicates.
in a manner acceptable to the contemporary phenomenologist, his concern with man as a whole.
mind and body, and with the whole range of senses and values and the whole range of
experiences in which they are disclosed-sensational, emotional, perceptual, cognitive, moral and
religious--each characterised in its specificity, but all brought back to their concrete origin and
ground in the fundamental existential relation of a self orientated towards Being and a Being
presented to self.
University College of North Wales.

1. Causeries du lundi, Paris. 4th edition, Vol. XIII, p.306. Translations are throughout the present writer's.
2. Journal intime, May 5, 1815, ed. Valette-Monbrun, Paris. Vol. I (1927), p.149. This edition will be
referred to as V.
3. Journal, March 15th, 1819, ed. H. Gouhier, Neuchatel, Vol. II (1955), p.217. This edition will be referred
to as G.
4. Harvard University Press, 1959.
5. Reponses aux arguments contre l'aperception immediate (Reponse a Stapfer), Oeuvres, ed. Tisserand,
Paris, Vol. XI (1939), pp.427-8. This edition will be referred to as T.
6. Meditation sur la mort, T.I ( 1920), p.6.
7. Cahier Journal, T.I. pp.l49-50.

35
 8. Notes sur !'influence des signes, T.l, p.283.
9. Although Biran had some acquaintance with the Scottish school. his distinction differs from theirs.
Reid's common sense philosophy, he observes, could equally be called a "philosophy of habit" (Reid,
Condillac, De Tracy, T.XI, p.199). For Biran perception involves the exercise of the mind's essence as a
causal force, for Reid (and ev-en more for Dugald Stewart) the application of built in dispositional fac-
tors.
10. Rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme, Oeuvres philosophiques, ed. C. Lehec et J. Cazeneuve
(Corpus general des philosophes francais, Paris, 1956, Vol. XLIV, 1), Preface, pp.109-15.
11. De !'Amour, ed. G. Chinard, Paris, 1926, pp.2-3.
12. See Memoire sur Ia faculte de penser (Memoires de l'lnstitut National des Sciences et des Arts pour !'An
IV de Ia Republique, Sciences morales et politiques, Vol. 1).
13. De l'Aperception immediate, ed. J. Echeverria, Paris, 1963. pp.200-1.
14. Influence de !'habitude sur Ia faculte de penser, T.II (1922), pp.307-8. By extension, Biran argues that
"no affection is imitable strictly speaking" and that therefore there is no "true" (or "representative")
memory except of perceptions, since they alone bring the mind's causal activity into play and are accom-
panied by an apperception of the self as a causal activity. For this reason "the hand and the voice alone
joined with hearing are sole imitative senses par excellence, they alone too communicate the form of
apperception and reminiscence to all the sensations or intuitions with which they may be associated."
(De I'Aperception immediate, p.201).
15. Reponse a Stapfer, T.XI, pp.404-5: Des Rapports des sciences naturelles avec Ia psychologie, T.X (1937),
pp.93-4.
16. Nouveaux essais d'anthropologie, Oeuvres inedites, ed. Naville, Paris, Vol. III (1859), pp.409-10. (This
edition will be referred to as N.) Cf. Exposition de Ia doctrine philosophique de Leibniz, T.XI, p.489).
17. De I'Aperception immediate, p.146.
18. "The self is as immediately aware of its causal power as it is of its existence." (Reponse a Stapfer, T.XI,
p.426).
19. Rapports des sciences naturelles, T.X, p.100.
20. Reponse a Stapfer, T.XI, p.423.
21. Ibid, p.410.
22. Quoted by J. Wahl, Tableau de Ia philosophie francaise, Paris, 194, p.102.
23. Journal, October, 1823, G.II, p.409. Biran also notes that this tendency to hypostatise one or other of
the two terms results from the customary forms of language which " lead us to realise abstractions."
(Influence de !'habitude, T.II, p.309).
24. Reponse a Stapfer, T.XI, p.423.
25. Rapports des sciences naturelles, T.X, pp.97-8.
26. Nouveaux essais. N.III, p.541.
27. Ibid, p.432. Cf. Note sur l'ecrit de M. Royer-Collard, T.X, pp.312-13.
28. He distinctly states that the absolute is present in the relation of experience, even if it is as a term of the
relation. The distinction he makes between phenomenon and noumenon is designed to further the dis-
tinction he goes on to make between knowledge and belief and not, as might be said of the Kantian
distinction, to cut the cognising subject off from being. "The phenomenon and the reality, being and
appearance coincide .•• in the consciousness of the self, identical with the immediate experience of the
force, or of the cause acting through the will." (Nouveaux essais, N.III, p.412).
29. Rapports des sciences naturelles, T.X, p.125.
30. Ibid., p.102.
31. Reponse a Stapfer, T.XI, p.423.
32. Biran recognises that Kant makes a similar distinction (Essai sur les fondements de Ia psychologie,
T.VIII, 1932, p.271). He appears to refer here to Kant's Latin dissertation of 1770, (De Mundi sensibilis
atque intelligibilis forma et principiis).
33. Reponse a Stapfer, T.XI, p.428.
34. Ibid., p.427.
35. Ibid., p.428.
36. Essai sur les fondements de Ia psychologie, T.VIII, pp.267-9.
37. Ibid., p.269.
38. Reponse a Stapfer, T.XI, p.427.
39. For a further development of this phenomenological view see the writer's Bergson (Bowes and Bowes,
1957), Chap. VI "Meanings and Intentions": also, with particular reference to Husser!, his essay "The
Phenomenological Philosophy in France" in Currents of Thought in French Literature, Blackwell, 1965,
pp.328-30.
40. Note sur I'ecrit de M. Royer-Collard, T.X, p.312.
41. Les Conversions de Maine de Biran, Paris, 1948, p.285.
42. Notes sur Ia philosophie de Kant, T.XI, p.279.
43. Journal, V.I. p.40.
44. Op. cit., p.353.
45. Nouveaux essais, N.III, p.467.
46. Ibid., p.521.
47. Journal, March 13, 1822, G.II, p.354.
48. For an extended analysis of these concepts see the writer's previously mentioned paper on "The Pheno-
menological Philosophy in France."

36
49. Commentaire sur les Meditations Metaphysiques de Descartes, T.XI, p.l46. My italics.
50. De l'Aperception immediate, ed. Echeverria, p.153.
51. Ibid., pp.155-66.
52. Nouveaux essais. N.III, p.521.
53. Ibid., p.522.
54. Journal, 1811-12, G.III, pp.32-3.
55. Nouveaux essais, N.III, p.521.
56. Ibid., p.515.
57. Journal, June, 1820, G.II, p.279. See also his criticism of Malebranche on this score, Notes sur Male-
branche, T.XI, pp.160-1; Journal, January 2, 1819, G.II, p.200. Cf. also Notes sur l'Evangile de Saint
Jean, N.III, p.303.
58. Op. cit., p.351.
59. Nouveaux essais, N.III, pp.529-30.
60. Ibid., p.541.
61. Ibid., p.548.
62. Ibid., p.541.
63. Journal, January, 1819, G.II, p.200: Nouveaux essais, N.III, p.541.
64. Essai sur Ies fondements de Ia psychologie, T.VIII, p.293.
65. Ibid., p.270.
66. Nouveaux essais, N.III, p.524.
67. Cf. P. Fessard, La Methode de reftexion chez Maine de Biran. Paris, 1938, pp.120-1.
68. Nouveaux essais, N.III, p.529; cf. Ibid., p.525.
69. Ibid., p.477, note 1. The reference is to Charles Bonnet, La Palingenesie philosophique, Geneva, 1769.

37