Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul: the Case of Victor Cousin

Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul: The Case of Victor Cousin

Delphine Antoine-Mahut ENS de Lyon, IHRIM, CNRS UMR

5317, LABEX “COMOD” Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021

Spiritualism designates a philosophy that lays claim to the separation of mind and body and the ontological and epistemological primacy of the former. In France, it is associated with the names of Victor Cousin and René Descartes, or more precisely with what Cousin made of Descartes as the founding father of a brittle rational psychology, closed off from the positive sciences, and as a critic in respect to the empiricist legacy of the idéologues. Moreover, by con- sidering merely the end result, severed from its polemical genesis, we are prevented from understanding how the category of experience constituted a crucial question for spiritualism itself. Through returning to the origin of these discussions in the 1826 preface to Cousin’s Fragments philosophiques, this essay pursues a threefold path: to show (1) that the public birth of Cousinian spiritualism coincides with the afﬁrmation of applying the experimental method, issuing from Bacon, to the study of facts of consciousness; (2) that Cousin’s later evolution follows a process of radicalization—that is, in this context, of ontologization and of reduction; and (3) that by recovering this genesis, we can distinguish many forms of spiritualisms committed to the experimental method, both in alliance with the early Cousin and against the later Cousin. In this way, we can rediscover the interwoven philosophical links, lost in the process of institutionalization, between metaphysical demands and empiricist concerns, or between “French” philosophy and the legacy of Condillac.

This contribution was translated by Daniel Whistler. I am also grateful to him for his remarks on a ﬁrst draft. Finally, I want to thank Giuseppe Bianco, Vincent Guillin, Gary Hatﬁeld, Silvia Manzo and Samuel Lézé for their very helpful suggestions.

680 Perspectives on Science 681

1. Introduction with a little bit of attention, will and practice, one will succeed in internal observation as in external observation. Though it is indeed more difficult than physics, by its nature psychology is in the end, like [physics], a science of observation, and thus it has the same right to the rank and title of genuine science. (Cousin [1828] 1861, Fourth Lecture, p. 82) Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Analyses of Victor Cousin’s(1792–1867) political ascension during the close of the 1830s in France are generally accompanied by an affirmation of his philosophical failure. When the latter is analysed, it is attributed to his instrumentalisation of the history of philosophy in the name of imposing a liberal, even reactionary ideology, and thus to the absence of any philosophy proper. Yet, the birth of Cousinian eclecticism coincides with a very clear philosophical demand: to surpass the sensualism of his predeces- sors out of the very principles of sensualism—that is, by acquiring for the new psychology the rights to an experimental method that had until then been reserved for the study of the natural sciences alone. In the central text, the 1826 preface to Fragments philosophiques, this demand is expressed in two ways. On the one hand, Cousin adopts the framework of the philosophy of experience such as it had been theorised by Bacon for the natural sciences and bequeathed to the idéologues via Locke and Condillac. On the other hand, he expands it, via a reference to Descartes, into a distinct domain of facts capable of being illuminated by a genuinely experimental method—that is, into facts of consciousness (sensible facts, but also rational and volitional ones). In later versions of the same text, however, Cousin’s evolution has come to be identified as a movement of either purification or falsification. By describing it here as a hierarchization, I will show how Cousin progressively rationalizes and ontologizes the psychology that he presented in 1826 as experimental. Such an interpretation opens the way to a philosophical understanding of Cousin’s philosophical failure in terms of a loss of the very essence of the French spiritualist project that links Maine de Biran to Bergson: the patient reform of empiricism that integrates its gains so as to ground a new science of man. Up until now, a threefold perspective on the variant of French spiritualism institutionally represented by Cousin has impeded any conception of the possibility of an authentic dialogue between it and the experimental sciences, notably psychology,1 for the purposes of grounding a new science of man.

1. In this way, a blockage has prevented the contribution of this spiritualism to the advent of modern anthropology from being seen. Consider Janicaud 1969, pp. 2, 4; Gusdorf 1974, Part V, chap. V, pp. 425–36. 682 Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul

1/ In order to reveal the nexus connecting Cousinian politics and philosophy in terms of the “occultation,”“instrumentalization,” or even “falsiﬁcation”2 of all forms of intellectual alterity in his work, some readings—often very powerful ones—have established an impenetrable boundary between Cousin’s rational spiritualism and the work of the medical physiologists. Because he identiﬁed the science of man with psychology and excluded physiology from

his philosophical project, Cousin and, through him, French spiri- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 tualism became extremely distanced from the methods and conclu- sions of physiology.3 2/ The recurrence—found in studies on Cousin and his “regiment”4— of this never-ending struggle between Gods and Giants has thus obscured the idea that the battlefield, as well as the stakes of the battle, could be shared by the different factions. In this case, it has obscured the idea that, in the quest for this Holy Grail of the science of man, spiritualism, like those that it identifies as sensualists, could have desired the same level of scientificity and could have demanded, on its own account and with genuine earnestness, the implementation in physiology of a more rigorous and more fruitful experimental method than physiologists had been able to lay claim to since the Baconian revolution. 3/ The third cause of drawing a strict boundary between Cousin’s psychological method and the physiological method of the doctors of the Paris and Montpellier schools5 is the frequent identification of Cousin with the explicit theses of his later texts, without any consideration for the possibilities opened up by his first courses and publications, which may subsequently have been abandoned or closed off in his later works.6 The absence of a genetic perspective thereby glides over what is, in reality, a series of adjustments and corrections that occurred in a polemical context arising from Cousin’s coronation as the king of French philosophy, like Louis

2. See Bloch 1979 and 1997; Vermeren 1995; Daled 2005; Rey 2012. 3. One must underline that this theoretical choice renders unthinkable the category of spiritualist physiologist, even though this is precisely how those like Jacques Lordat (1773– 1870), principal representative of the Montpellier School and the duo-dynamist thesis, or even those like Claude-François-Hermann Pidoux (1802–1882), who demanded an “organic spiritualism,” deﬁned themselves. 4. Consider Jules Simon (1814–1896), 1886. 5. See Raynaud 1998; Andrault 2013 and 2016. 6. The edition by Sylvain Matton, Renzo Ragghianti, and Patrice Vermeren of the 1820 course happily now ﬁlls this lacuna (Matton, Ragghianti and Vermeren 2019). Perspectives on Science 683

Philippe had been made king of the French7—that is, in a context in which Cousin, above all, sought to retain his crown. The most radical formulations of his maturity and old age are then taken as representatives of his entire project and, in this sense, as a constant of his philosophical failure. In contrast, by focusing on two major texts by Cousin—the 1826 and 1833 prefaces to Fragments philosophiques8 (the latter supplemented by the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 1834 preface to Nouvelles considérations sur les rapports du physique et du moral de l’ homme, ouvrage posthume de Maine de Biran),9—I wish to show: 1/ that the theoretical and methodological framework Cousin establishes to ground the new psychology is a framework that he shares with his adversaries. This framework is that of a philosophy of experience; 2/ that Cousin’s evolution pushed him to an extreme rational spiritualism that was not necessitated by his first texts. But more than just an aberration that is difficult to reconcile with the more powerful aspirations of his first writings, this evolution takes the form of a hierarchialization resulting from the necessity he felt to specify his eclecticism as a spiritualism distinguished from both empiricism10 and idealism.11

7. “The 1830 revolution that made Louis Philippe king of the French also made Cousin king of the philosophers. But Louis Philippe was only a constitutional king. Cousin was an absolute king” (Jules Simon 1887, p. 123). 8. The announcement for the 1838 edition is devoted to responding to accusations of pantheism and explaining the theoretical proximities and divergences between Cousin and Schelling. On this point, see Daniel Whistler’s contribution to this volume and Whistler, 2020. 9. Cousin, 1834. 10. In reviewing the continuation of the first edition of Joseph-Marie Degérando’s Histoire comparée des systèmes de philosophie, relativement aux principes des connaissances humaines (Paris, Heinrichs, 1804, 4 tomes), Cousin identifies empiricism as an excessive version of the philosophy of experience. It is why ”empiricism is not of all philosophical systems that which is the most concerned with experience” (Cousin 1866, p. 129). On the Degerandian conception of experience and empiricism, see Manzo 2016 and the joint contribution to this volume. On the Degerandian framework of Cousinian method, see Antoine-Mahut, forthcoming 2019b. On Degérando’s comparative method, see Lézé 2019. 11. See, for example, Philosophie de Locke, fifth lecture, pp. 125–6: “Experience, put in its right place, is the condition, not the principle of knowledge. Go further and claim that it constitutes all knowledge—this is nothing more than a system and an incomplete, ex- clusive and vicious system; it is empiricism, or the opposite of idealism, which is, in its turn, the exaggeration of the proper power of reason, reason’s usurpation of experience, the destruction or forgetting of the chronological and experimental conditions of knowledge, owing to excessive preoccupation with its logical and rational principles.” 684 Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul

This has a major consequence for the interpretation of Cousin’s philosophical contribution to what is called “French spiritualism:” the “Cousinians” are to be understood both as exploiting the possibilities offered by his ﬁrst texts in trying to establish an empirical psychology and also as thereby dissociating themselves from Cousin’s later evolution towards a more abstract position.12 In other words: Cousin fails philosophically, but equally note the philosophical possibilities Cousin opens up to others for establishing a spiritualism capable of taking the lead in the new science of man. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021

2. The Status of the 1826 Preface to Fragments philosophiques The publication of the 1826 preface, in the wake of Cousin’s loss of aca- demic position in 1821 (he would not regain his Chair until 1828) and his imprisonment in Prussia (1824–1825) because of his liberal ideas, plays a very particular role in his intellectual trajectory.13 It is the manifesto of a resistance figure, unjustly reprimanded for his ideas, even though a good number of university students supported his philosophical cause.14 According to Cousin himself, this text has the aim of unifying in one whole what had, until then, been presented only piecemeal, dispersed in unpublished courses, or published in a variety of journals ( Journal des Savants, Le Courrier, Le Censeur Européen, Le Journal Général de France, Archives philosophiques) over several years (between 1816 and 1819) without including anything from the courses after 1819.15 Since then, moreover, Cousin claims that he has evolved to the point of “condemning to oblivion” certain former production that “lagged too far behind the point we have reached.” He adds, “I would even have to beg for mercy for other connected fragments which are even more inferior, if they had been printed before now and if to reproduce them was not to definitively bury them” (Cousin 1826, p. 47). Ultimately, the unifying criterion which allows for the immediate evaluation of past productions (those of other philosophers but also, of course, of Cousin) is that of the definition of a method: the method

12. Adolphe Félix Gatien-Arnoult (1800–1886) proposes in this sense a very interest- ing analysis of “Cousinians” as so many “phases” or “reflections” of the protoform and var- iable “spirit” of the “master” (Gatien-Arnoult 1867, p. 26). 13. On this point, see the excellent synthesis by Renzo Ragghianti and Patrice Vermeren in their introduction (Ragghianti and Vermeren 2019, pp. 13–15). 14. Testimonies of indignation and support from his students are numerous from 1821, when his resignation and that of all the other teachers who demanded to teach at this period what Cousin had taught them was asked for. It is notably the subject of Théodore Jouffroy’s (1796–1842) first letter to Cousin, in the collection of 14 letters conserved in the Fonds Cousin of the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne. 15. This point is recalled by Paul Dubois (Dubois 1902, p. 72). Perspectives on Science 685 of the new psychology, which in its turn entails eclecticism and certain specific relations to past philosophies. On the side of his students, this preface was very much received as the official birth-certificate of the new philosophy, even as a “manifesto” putting an end to the long years of sensualism’sdomination.“Monsieur Cousin” here “arrivesatmaturity;”16 he designates for the first time this new philosophy as an “eclecticism”17 and establishes a clear roadmap for it. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 However, after the second edition of the preface (1833) and the new introduction (1838) of the Fragments philosophiques, Cousin’s students identify a “purification” in their leader, often experienced as a mutilation. In his Cousin, Jouffroy, Damiron. Souvenirs, Paul Dubois repeats what Cousin’sentou- rage thought of this evolution: “[…] I permit myself some regret that love of art and the successive purification of ideas led Cousin, in the editions he himself made, to efface all these initial traits, all these audacities, all these fantasies of a youthful and loyal vigour” (Dubois 1902, p. 37). For Cousin’s adversaries, the 1826 preface is a pale substitute for the missing official text (a “treatise” for example) in which Cousin would truly and openly present his philosophy.18 The later reworkings, moreover, reveal a process of “falsification,”19 by Cousin himself, of his own texts. Spe- cifically, the successive rewritings of this preface need to be assessed in light of the relation between the 1826 text and its later versions: the latter do not just correct, but even invalidate the former. Accordingly, Cousin goes back on himself; his philosophical production is reduced to perma- nent reaction, with eclecticism as a deceptively scientific name for a fickle and inconsistent body of thought. Finally, however, for Cousin’s partisans as for his adversaries, there is no question of “condemning to oblivion” or “definitively burying” the teach- ings in this preface. On the contrary: 1826 remains an ineffaceable trace of the potential of Cousin’s philosophy and as proof of his later disavowal, even abandonment, of this potential.

16. Dubois 1902, p. 73. 17. This is underlined above all by Adolphe-Félix Gatien-Arnoult 1867, p. 14: “Prior to 1828 […] he had already spoken the word eclecticism. If I am not mistaken, it occurred for the ﬁrst time in 1826, or at least it was then that he spoke it loudly enough for the public to pay attention.” (the author refers to the 1826 preface in a note). 18. This absence of a “treatise” is, according to Joseph Ferrari (1811–1876), the most obvious testimony of the “artiﬁce” of Cousinian eclecticism. So that Cousin “never shows his face” (Ferrari 1983, chap. IV, p. 93). 19. This is the word used by Ferrari 1983, p. 95. We will come back to it at the end of this contribution. 686 Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul

My aim is both to specify the philosophical content of the 1826 preface20 and to assess its evolutions, including its designation as either a “puriﬁcation” or “falsiﬁcation”. These two processes are not necessarily opposed: carefully screening or purifying, by leaving to one side, the moult or impurities, produces another brew, by another mixture, but from the same material.

3. The Philosophical Content of the 1826 Preface: the Primacy of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 Psychological Method in the Experimental Science of Man The first essential claim in this preface is of an anthropological nature: the primacy of observation and experience in scientific knowledge “is linked to the general laws of the human species” (Cousin 1826, p. 3). What does this mean and, above all, what does justify such an assertion? For Cousin, it is a matter of acknowledging the indisputable reign of Locke’s and Condillac’s philosophy in England and France in the eighteenth century— thus of avoiding any superficial critique—so as to lay claim to an explanatory procedure that allows him to immediately reinstate all philosophy—spiritualist philosophy included—within this unique experimental framework: it is always observation, always experience. Travel round Europe and the world, everywhere this same spirit, everywhere the same method: this is what really constitutes the unity of the century, since this unity is found at the heart of the most serious divergences. (Cousin 1826, pp. 5–6) It is worth noticing that the very general qualification of this method: “always observation, always experience,” does not give the reader a very clear idea of what kind of genuine experiment can be involved in this process. More- over, the grounding of this method in human nature seems to empty it from any concrete and individualised content. Such a qualification is particularly helpful for the explicit Cousinian project of putting new wine into old wineskins. The experimental method presented in such a general way, can become the unifying thread common to all philosophical systems. It transcends their diversity and different conjectures. Therefore, it is by means of its propensity to rigorously implement such a method that one can evaluate the contribution each philosophy makes to the knowledge of human nature.

20. I am here concentrating on what Cousin understands by experimental science in the case of psychological science or the science of man. For a more general presentation of his text and a precise critique of its limits, see the summary in thirteen theses proposed by Paul Janet 1893, pp. 166–179, and Denise Vincenti’s contribution to this volume. Perspectives on Science 687

By situating himself in some continuity with his previous works,21 Cousin can then interrogate both the supposed failings of Cartesianism (meaning not Descartes’ own philosophy but that of his successors) in keeping sensualism “in shackles,” and also the “extraordinary” character of sensualism’s (this “sad philosophy”) success: In the eighteenth century, the general condition for understanding and for believing was to have observed; from then on, all philosophy Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 which aspired to be inﬂuential had to be grounded on observation. Moreover, Cartesianism—particularly what Malebranche, Spinoza, Leibniz and Wolf made of it—the Cartesianism which, from its second step, abandoned observation and lost itself in ontological hypotheses and scholastic formulae—could not lay claim to the name of experimental philosophy. Another philosophy presented itself under this name and was accepted as such. Here is the explanation for the fall of Cartesianism and the extraordinary fortune of Locke and Condillac” (Cousin 1826, pp. 4–5). By qualifying experimental philosophy as empirically grounded or grounded on observation, Cousin summarises a common thread in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century thinkers. There results from this a primary and also pertinent lexical and conceptual distinction between “observation,” the study of “facts,”“phenomena,” or the genuine “experimental method,” on the one hand, and the recourse to “hypotheses”—augmented in the passage into “ontological” hypotheses—on the other. In post-Lockean and Newtonian contexts, particularly as these converge in Condillac’s writings, the language of hypotheses refers to the ontological claims of classical metaphysics and their delusions about the powers of the human spirit.22 Cousin thus integrates into

21. Notably in the Discours d’ouverture of 7 December 1815, in which Cousin had shown that Condillac was on the same path as Descartes and Locke but had gone further (Cousin 1816, p. 10). One can, moreover, recall that Cousin’s thesis, written in Latin: De Methodo sive de Analysi (1813), was devoted to Condillac. 22. This distinction between two kinds of metaphysics notably opens Condillac’s Essai sur l”origine des connaissances humaines (1746): “We must distinguish two sorts of metaphysics. One has the ambition of solving all mysteries; nature, the essence of all beings, the most hidden causes, those are the things that embellish it and that it promises to open up. The other is more modest and adjusts its inquiries to the weakness of the human mind, and being as unconcerned about what must lie beyond its grasp as it is avid to seize what lies within it, this sort of metaphysics is content to stay within the bounds that are marked out for it. The first turns all nature into a kind of enchantment that vanishes with it; the second, seeking to see things only as they really are, is as simple as truth itself. With the former, errors multiply endlessly and the mind is satisfied with vague notions and words without meaning; with the latter, we gain little knowledge, but avoid error, as the mind gains accuracy and always forms clear ideas” (Condillac [1746] 2001, pp. 3–4). Condillac 688 Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul his argumentation the critique of Cartesianism as abstruse metaphysics. But he then subverts it from within: by denouncing the distancing of the experimental method from its Baconian inspiration, so as thereby to requalify as facts what this very same method had too hastily let slip into the category of hypotheses. I take up these two points in turn. If “the spirit of the revolution” was well and truly “blinded” by walking in the footprints of sensation as interpreted by Condillac, it is in fact because Bacon Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 traced the rules and procedures of experimental method within the walls of the physical sciences and not beyond, and because he first led method astray onto a systematic path by limiting it to the exterior world and to sensibility. (Cousin 1826, p. 9). The language of simplification, incompletion, lacuna, exclusion, enclosure, fixed system and partiality describes a snowball effect of perpetual deviation as well as the contemporary necessity of returning to the same principles while extending their field of application. Through correcting Bacon and the sensualists by their own method, the impartial psychological renewal of the science of man can arise: We must return to Bacon and plug the evil at its source, we must borrow from Bacon his experimental method, but not corrupt observation by imposing a system. We must employ only the method of observation, but apply it to all the facts, whatever they are, so long as they exist: its exactitude consists in its impartiality and impartiality is only to be found in extensity. (Cousin 1826, p. 9). Note here the skill of the argument: whereas the Baconian reception in the eighteenth-century charges Descartes and his successors with various kinds of abstract systematicism—fully opposed to scientificity—Cousin turns the charge back onto this reception. At the same time, “impartiality” and “extensity” become the new characteristics for the study of all psychological facts themselves. What then are the facts that Bacon excluded but should have begun from? They are precisely this “crowd of phenomena that it is impossible to confuse with that of sensibility” (Cousin 1826, p. 12)—that is, volitional facts and rational facts. Psychology is thus defined by the observation of goes on to put forward a critique of Malebranche, Descartes et Leibniz (Pariente and Pécharman 2014, pp. 59–60). Later references to and discussions of this distinction are numerous at the time Cousin is made Chair, for example in Antoine-Louis-Claude Destutt de Tracy (1754– 1836), who sees in Condillac both the promoter of the “new metaphysics” and the still in- sufficiently-radical critic of classical metaphysics (Destutt de Tracy 1817, chap. XI, p. 214). It is exactly this path that Cousin, in his turn, will follow. Perspectives on Science 689 three sorts of facts of consciousness and not just one.23 Its scientificvalueis grounded on this integrative perspective. Up until this point, the separation of classical and modern metaphysics is preserved. Cousin has only undertaken the enlargement of the limits of the human spirit that are constitutive of the latter, so as to include what was previously left out of the order of phenomena. But he immediately makes an additional step that tears up this distinction. For if ontology cannot be presupposed by the experimental method, or if Condillac and his Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 followers are right to affirm that “no substantial existence falls under observation” (Cousin 1826, p. 15), it is still the case that the salutary enlargement of observation’s domain of application permits the rediscovery of ontology. Ontology is thus not so much abolished as adjourned.24 It is by borrowing the path of observation that one progresses along what seems, in appearance, to be most opposed to it, but what ultimately can strengthen observation itself.25 What was disqualified in the new metaphysics as pertaining to hypothesis is thus found to qualify as fact. Every fact of consciousness is thus “both psychological and ontological” (Cousin 1826, p. 39). The reader could qualify this new argument as a magic trick. Cousin would here just turn back to the old metaphysics, erasing Condillac and his heirs form the blackboard of the French philosophers. This interpretation is particularly convincing if we consider Cousin’s later evolution. However, in the context of this preface, Cousin is far more indeterminate because he is very much concerned with not being perceived as a cleaving personality. Furthermore, he wants to distinguish himself, both from sensualist influence and from the idealist turn which has just occured in Germany with the philosophy of Kant. So dis-equilibrium in one sense is re-equilibrium in another. These precautions are very much reflected in the complex rhetoric of this text. What then is the ontologico-metaphysical gain of such rigorous observation of rational and volitional facts? It is the illumination of two laws of subjectivity: substance and causality. By rediscovering these two laws by observation, they are rescued from that state of subjectivity in which Kant had left them26 and this consequently shows up the contradictory character

23. “The observation of [this new sphere of phenomena] draws back the clouds which ordinarily envelop it, establishes it on an unshakeable basis of consciousness and gives to the phenomena that it contains the same authority as to all phenomena of which consciousness is the theatre” (Cousin 1826, p. 14). 24. On this point, see Moreau 2013. 25. “A method which attains speculation by observation, ontology by psychology, so as to thus strengthen observation by speculation, psychology by ontology” (Cousin 1826, p. 41). 26. This point was already the subject of the 1818 course. 690 Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul of any absolute I such as Fichte’s. Specifically, by working on volitional facts,27 one gets at the very heart of the action of the will on itself, instead of looking, as Maine de Biran had done, for the notion of cause in the action of the will on muscles.28 Ontology is thus rediscovered without idealism, since the point of departure remains observation. But observation is more precisely delimited, first, in terms of what in every fact of consciousness pertains precisely to consciousness, and, second, in terms of what, in every fact of consciousness, can be shared by another consciousness. The Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 adjournment of ontology is thereby achieved by means of a gain in distinction in knowledge. But the gain in distinction, or the path to ontology, is also a potential loss: the loss of what, in these psychological facts, would be radically empirical, i.e., grounded on genuine experiments, in which some- thing is manipulated and results observed. The focus on the link between observation and laws enables Cousin to definitively turn the sensualist project against itself. Not only are the physical sciences not materialist (which would have constituted an argument that was both run of the mill and critically ineffective), but they are, in reality, spiritualist without knowing it. This is another way to say that they are empirical in a bad way, in contrast to which a good way is possible. The alliance of the metaphysical and physical sciences is thus achieved by a complete subordination of the latter to the former: Physics, whether it knows it or not, is not materialist, and it became spiritualist the day it rejected all other method but observation and induction, which can only ever lead to forces and laws; but is there material in forces and in laws? Hence, the physical sciences themselves entered onto the long road of spiritualism properly understood; they have now only to walk along it with a firm step and to deepen more and more the forces and their laws, so as to generalise them more. (Cousin 1826, pp. 36–7) The 1826 text proposes a scholarly mix between, on the one hand, a discourse of opening up, enlargement and conciliation and, on the other, a procedure of reorientation and subordination, illuminating the metaphysical knot common to classical and modern philosophy.29

27. Biran died in 1824. 28. “That which no paralysis can prevent is the action of the will on itself” (Cousin 1826, p. 27). 29. We can see here a comparable procedure to that which Descartes mobilises in his letters of May and June 1643 to Princess Elisabeth concerning the “force that the soul has of moving the body.” If its projection in the physical universe remains a constant of the false physics of the Scholastics, this means that the proof of this force is to be valued as its proof in all man. The true metaphysical knot of false physics is thus preserved here: it is common Perspectives on Science 691

All that was now needed, in the wake of this committed, but formally restrained text, were some unfavourable public reactions to prepare both ground and form for a new polemical register. The 1833 preface—completed by the 1834 preface to the ﬁrst posthumous edition of Biran—achieved this transformation, by displaying the Cousinian options in a more clear-cut manner. Out of a relative spirit of conciliation there would emerge more pronounced hierarchializations and exclusions. And they concern once more the question of experience. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021

4. The 1833 Preface to Fragments philosophiques and the 1834 Preface to Nouvelles considérations sur les rapports du physique et du moral de l’homme, Ouvrage posthume de M. Maine de Biran as Radicalisations of Cousin’sProject Reactions to the 1826 preface were numerous and often trenchant, as much from Cousin’s adversaries as his own camp.30 Motivated, on the one hand, by the critiques aimed at “this new species of experimenters who close their eyes and ears to hear themselves think”31 and, on the other, by the call to action from a generation who were impatient to “do” the science of man and not remain at a merely declarative level,32 Cousin had to position himself both internally and externally as the head of these experimental psychologists. That is,hehadtoprovetothosewhosaw in eclecticism merely a “blind syncretism”33 that he really had his own philosophy.

to both the latter and to the new anthropology that reserves the completely rational soul to man alone. 30. Whereas Braunstein’s (1986) book on Broussais’s materialism remains a reference, in the conclusion of his article published in 2012 the author misses this internal dimension to the psychologism. I leave aside here the accusations of pantheism made against Cousin at this period to focus on what these critiques identify as the missed demand by Cousin in his ﬁrst preface: “to raise up spiritualism by grounding it on the basis of experience” (Cousin 1833, p. 27). I will return, however, to theological questions in the conclusion. On Cousin and pantheism, see Ragghianti 2001. On Spinoza’s place in this quarrel, see Moreau 1985. 31. This is the expression chosen by Adolphe Franck (1810–1893) in his article “Psy- chologie” for the Dictionnaire des sciences philosophiques, to describe the feeling of those who “considered the spirit as absolutely incapable of observing itself […] A famous physiologist of this century and one of the most ardent enemies of psychology, Broussais, has above all been struck by this difﬁculty. He could not understand, he said, these new species of experimenters who closed their eyes and ears to hear themselves think.” (p. 1422). 32. In his Essai sur l’histoire de la la philosophie en France au XIXe siècle, Jean-Philibert Damiron (1794–1802) gives this task more to Jouffroy than to Cousin. 33. Cousin notably repeats this criticisms at the end of his preface (Cousin 1833, pp. LIV–LV ). 692 Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul

A first passage, dated from August 1828, on the “Examen du Traité de Broussais sur L’Irritation” by Auguste Comte (1798–1857) will allow us to specify further the stakes of the 1833 text. Comte was very careful to the critics of the “Kanto-Platonism” of the Cousinan School by the materialist physician François Broussais (1772–1838). For Broussais, the spiritualist method was a come back to the old and abstract metaphysics of substantial forms. A new philosophy was urgently required to educate the new gen- erations of physicians, in order to treat patients and to advance medicine. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 But from Comte’s point of view, the critic was not radical enough. There- fore Comte shows how Broussais was fooled by the sleight of hand of the 1826 preface. If Broussais did not succeed in definitively putting to death Cousin’s psychology or ontology, it was because he did not refer to what this psychology claimed to have conserved of idéologie. The absence of a radical critique of eighteenth-century metaphysics is thus what compro- mises what Comte himself calls the project of founding a thoroughly physiological science of man: A graver act of negligence committed by Broussais consists in the fact that he did not very explicitly signal the immense difference separating the physiological doctrine of intellectual and moral man from the metaphysical theories of the last century which see in our intelligence only the action of external senses by leaving aside any predispositions within the internal cerebral organs. […] Broussais will be quick no doubt to remove this unique resource from psychology, or from what he so judiciously calls ontology. I am pointing out to him this important amelioration for his second edition, of which a work such as his cannot but have the honour very soon. The act of negligence that I am pointing out pertains, I am sure, merely to the evident haste with which his work has been composed; for the psychologists will not be able to say that [Broussais] has anywhere shown himself a formal partisan of eighteenth-century metaphysics. (Comte 1828, p. 221) If Cousinian spiritualism is left standing merely because of the fundamental relation it establishes between psychology and all attempts at knowledge of intellectual and moral man, then the physiologist doctrine must—so as to affirm its superiority—repudiate all forms of metaphysics, including that of sensualism. The experimental science of man must be thoroughly physiological or not at all. No kind of introspection can have a place in this science. A second passage, borrowed this time from the works of the spiritualist Théodore Jouffroy (1842), reveals one of the possible outcomes of the 1826 preface. It consists in taking seriously its conciliatory dimension and thus Perspectives on Science 693 its claim for the necessity of constructing spiritualism in constant interac- tion with physiology. Far from repudiating its physiological “sister,” psychology must thus, on the contrary, be permanently modified on contact, and vice versa. The one without the other is “incomplete”: Both of them, in fact, deal with certain phenomena which are not usually attributed to them, physiology with psychological phenomena and psychology with physiological phenomena; but what Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 matters is that the two lives are linked, such that each implies certain of the other’s phenomena; and what matters is that these are precisely the phenomena that each of the two sciences will study in the other’s domain, and precisely in virtue of this do they deal with [all phenomena]. And it is good that each does so, otherwise it would be incomplete; for it is neither the psychological life nor the physiological life, such as they would be developed if they were isolated, that the two sciences have as their object of knowledge, but each of these two lives, as manifest in man, depends on the other, is modified by the other, is sometimes mutilated, perhaps enlarged by the other. It is in this sense that one must understand the object of each of these two sciences and its limits; and it is why these two sciences must not remain, and have never been, foreign to each other. They must ask for mutual assistance and, if they were a reproach to make of them, it is of not having been until now as sisterly as it is necessary for each to be. (Jouffroy 1842, p. 250)34 We are here faced with two solutions—each of which Cousin refuses, and so which the 1833 and 1834 prefaces attempt to avoid: a physiologism dismissive of all forms of metaphysics, or a psychology both distinct from physiology and incomplete without it in its study of man. For Cousin, it is therefore necessary to rework the concept of experience by simultaneously reinjecting into it an experimental dimension and hardening its metaphysical dimension, in a strongly ontological sense. How does Cousin claim to achieve this impossible mission? The first lines of the 1833 preface are clearly a response to Comte’s followers. Cousin notes the insufficiency of observational procedure or a pas- sive listening to the soul. If psychology intends to be “the science of man,” it must proceed to experiment on the soul: It is not enough to listen to nature, one must interrogate it, it is not enough to observe, one must experiment. Experience has the same

34. The “mémoire” dates from 1838 but it is in this regard a faithful summary of the theses already defended by Jouffroy in his courses given in 1820 and 1830. 694 Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul

conditions and the same rules, no matter what object it is applied to; and it is by following these rules that one attains, in the science of man as in the science of nature, exact classifications. Here, Cousin clearly distinguishes “experiment” from mere observation or experience, by making clear that “experiment” involves interrogation, hence manipulation and observing the result. But he gives no example of such psychological experiments: by doing so, he opens the way to an Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 interpretation of these experiments in terms of introspection, but without engaging himself explicitly in this way. Secondly, Cousin persists in affirming his investment in the metaphysical potential of “the old French philosophy of the eighteenth century” (Cousin 1833, p. XII). But he does so by re-evaluating much more precisely than in the 1826 preface Descartes’ place in this legacy. In the 1826 text, the core of Cartesian metaphysics was neither specified nor directly rehabilitated. Cousin was content to not discredit Descartes himself, by attributing the abstract derivations combatted by sensualism to the excesses of second-generation Cartesians. But in the 1833 text, what can be preserved of the eighteenth century becomes very clearly what the eighteenth century has in turn conserved of Descartes. The new metaphysics, more Lockean than Baconian, is therefore valuable only in what it shares with the older form: its experimental character. And it is precisely this experimental character which saves it from the excesses of what Broussais had designated as a “Kanto-Platonism”: If psychology is not the limit of philosophy, it is its basis; and it is owing to this principle which encompasses so many others that my philosophical enterprise in its most general character is profoundly imprinted with the spirit of modern philosophy, which, since Descartes and Locke, admits no other method than experience and places the science of human nature at the head of philosophical science; it is very closely linked to eighteenth-century philosophy, which it perpetuates through modifying it, and is separated from the opposite in the new German philosophy. (Cousin 1833, p. X)35 The preface next proposes a new distinction that responds to a Comtean adversary by denouncing two types of spiritualist excess: that which, giving too much to ontology—understood as the science of beings, of God, of the world and of man—“dogmatises in metaphysics” without having

35. It is this transition from Bacon to Descartes, consummated in the Fragments de philosophie cartésienne published in 1845 by Hachette, that Ferrari deﬁned as a “falsiﬁcation” that tries to achieve an impossible reconciliation. Consider Ferrari 1983, p. 96. Perspectives on Science 695

“traversed psychology”; and that which, beginning from psychology but stopping there, cannot avoid “the most absolute scepticism”: Hypothesis and scepticism—here are the two consequences that reasoning forces in turn upon my various adversaries, and thus I give them the choice. For me, I accept neither of them. (Cousin 1833, p. XVIII)

Faced with those who hypostasise entities and those who, taking the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 method they share with the physiologists too seriously, no longer dare to venture beyond phenomena in the knowledge of human nature, one must thus return to “the French spirit par excellence” (Cousin 1833, p. XXXII) and particularly to that thinker who rehabilitated the “I” such that it is given “under the concept of cause, of force”: Maine de Biran. By “untangling […] in all our knowledge and even in the simplest facts of consciousness, the role of volitional activity” (Cousin 1833, p. XXXV), Biran showed how each subject could both experiment on himself, thereby accessing his I or his personality via this active observation, and also rediscover, from this force, the category of cause. This concentration on Maine de Biran’s last philosophical decision, the primacy of will in the facts of consciousness, permits Cousin to tie up the loose ends leading from the demand for the necessity of experimentation in psychology to a rediscovered ontology. Volitional facts become characteristic of personality or the I as a whole. They overcome the alternative between Fichte’s absolute I and the sceptics’ fragmented I. Thus far, however, nothing allows us to distinguish Cousin from Biran. Worse, Cousin risks appearing as no more than the pale descendent, even plagiarist, of what Biran theorised well before him36 and which continues to inspire the young generation of “Cousinians”, notably Jouffroy. The 1834 preface will nullify this risk in three ways. The ﬁrst consists in a new hierarchization. After the elegies required in a posthumous edition, Cousin shows that by enlarging the domain of facts of consciousness to that of volitional facts, Biran has left a “massive lacuna” (Cousin 1833, p. 26): that of rational experiences understood generally. And it is not a matter of one lacuna among others, but of that without which no observation is possible in consciousness. The category of cause is thus to be supplanted by that of substance and volitional fact grounded by rational fact. That is, the contribution of Cousinian spiritualism, in relation to Biranian spiritualism, resides in the predominant role accorded by

36. On this point and Pierre Leroux’s reaction to the belated and “mutilated” publication of Biran’s posthumous works by Cousin, see Antoine-Mahut 2016, pp. 33–46. I take up and develop here only what concerns the philosophy of experience. 696 Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul the former—and missing or subordinated in the latter—to the rationality and substantiality of the I. But at the same time, the activity which, in the Biranian personality, grounded the self’s experimentation on itself is found to be reducible to an original passivity that is correlative of the incapacity of a mechanised body to be its own mover. The second shift concerns the historiography of systems of modern philosophy (Cousin 1833, p. 15)—in this case, the respective places that he decides to accord, no longer to Bacon (who is not mentioned), but to Leibniz Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 and Descartes. The reference to Germany, particularly the monadology, and to the fate of Descartes in the eighteenth century rightly inspired Biran because of their dynamic potential.37 The rationalist Descartes of the cogito is thus to be valued as the thoroughly French counterpoint to an insufﬁciently theorised concept of voluntary effort and the lack of substrate. Finally, the complete exclusion in the 1833 and 1834 prefaces of physiology and vital force, or the resistance correlative to the both Biranian and spiritualist content, ends up supplanting the Biranian homo duplex with a human subject reduced to impersonal reason.38 After having justiﬁed forms of enlargement and alliance in 1826, Cousin thus hides behind an abstraction. The risk of losing the human subject itself through this abstraction thus became immense.

5. Conclusion To experiment while rationalizing, separating and ontologizing: the 1833 and 1834 versions of the preface, taken together, provide a clearer and more polemical sense of Cousin’s position than the 1826 preface and also close off certain possibilities left open by the latter. Such a radicalization is produced, notably, by a complete disjunct between the French eighteenth- century and metaphysics39 and by an identiﬁcation of all of philosophy, the model for which is Cartesianism, with “the knowledge of beings which— to be meaningful—fully exist—that is, the soul and God” (Cousin [1844] 1991, pp. 88–89). This abstract and ontological about-face is announced in the 1833 and 1834 prefaces and it was to be denounced by Cousin’s positivist adversaries as much as by the young Spiritualists anxious to rehabilitate the Biranian

37. On this point, see the special issue of the British Journal for the History of Philosophy (Dunham and Phemister 2015). On Mme de Staël, Cousin, Leroux, Ravaisson, Leibniz et Biran, see Vermeren 1987, pp. 147–168. 38. On the discussions of the materialist potential of Cartesian mechanism in Cousin, Renouvier and Damiron, see Antoine-Mahut 2018. 39. See for example, Cousin, [1845] 1852, Avant-Propos: “Let us dare to speak the truth: the eighteenth century in France, so rich in great men, did not produce one in philosophy, if at any rate by philosophy one means metaphysics.” Perspectives on Science 697 legacy. This abstract about-face indeed signals the divorce between institutionally dominant spiritualism and physiological research on man. Finally, this abstract about-face allows one to advance explanations for Cousin’s philosophical failure, as well as for the suppression, by contemporary scholarship, of the possible contribution of spiritualism to the advent of modern anthropology. In this regard, however, Cousin’s evolution calls for three remarks re- garding the project of constituting a new science of man:

The first concerns the place of theology in this battle. It is now well- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 known that in the wake of accusations of pantheism formulated against him, and which are addressed in the 1838 introduction (a kind of third preface) to Fragments philosophiques, Cousin makes a shift that is simultaneously Cartesian, anti-Spinozist and anti-Leibnizian.40 But in order to be completely understood, this turn must be placed alongside the contro- versy between Cousin and those who Jean-Philibert Damiron’s Essai sur l’histoire de la philosophie en France au XIXe siècle designates as “spiritualist theologians.” This battle won renown notably in the Discours de 1844 à la Chambre des Pairs in which Cousin defended the secular teaching of the history of philosophy against those who criticised the deleterious effects of Cartesian doubt on young minds. The Descartes of the proofs of the existence of God thus became the metaphysical paragon in the struggle for such secularity. From the point of view of the science of man, this meant that the fight, on the left, against the materialists in all their forms, required supplementation by, on the right, a struggle against those who, by laying claim to metaphysics themselves, reduced the official spiritualism to an avatar of such materialism. Cousin’s insistence on the rational fact and his increasing mistrust of all forms of dynamism work to separate his psychology from both materialist physiology and this theology. Scepticism, like hypothesis in the 1833 preface, is applied equally to those, like Félicité Robert de Lammenais (1782–1854) or Louis-Gabriel-Ambroise de Bonald (1754–1840), who call into question the capacities of man’s natural reason to gain certainty, and to those, like Père Gioacchino Ventura de Raulica (1792–1861), who tyrannically collapse the orders of this human reason into supernatural revelation. In the face of the theologians, the science of man—which in the 1833 preface became the science “of human nature”—is now reconceived as “human science,”41 both capable of certainty and conscious of its limits.

40. On this point, consider Moreau 2014. 41. On this point, see Cousin [1853] 2015, p. 16. In this very polemical text, Cousin returns to Ventura’s ﬁrst writings, but above all he contextualizes them by what he then designated as the quarrel with vitalism—that is, by the accusations of materialism brought by Ventura against the vitalism of the Montpellier School. This text is thus a privileged vantage point to understand and articulate the physiological and theological stakes of the Cousinian redeﬁnition of metaphysics. 698 Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul

The second remark concerns more precisely the status of physiology in this debate. As Damiron nicely underscores in his analyses of Cartesian physics,42 it is not a question of a natural philosophy that is more metaphysical than physiology. For it is on the explanation of life that both positivism and theology stumble. The former because it lacks the ﬁnalist dimension and the latter because it presupposes what it is meant to explain. In Damiron’s text, the rehabilitation of facts and experimentation, via a reference to Bacon reviled by the latter group, thus leads to a larger interrogation of the modalities and Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 stakes of the integration of experimentation into Cartesianism itself. To better ground rational spiritualism, it must be grafted onto empiricism, by taking care to not conceive metaphysical things on the model of physical things. The third remark leads us back to the status of experience in the debate. If Cousin incontestably consummates the rupture between psychology and physiology, he has nonetheless had some immediate effect on the latter, because his constant demand for the experimental character of his method required it to be distinguished from theology.43 At the same time, Cousin’s experimental method did not merely become a foil for the positivist physiologists. This is because it went on to be a reference-point for those, among the physiologists, who wanted to reinforce this spiritualism by responding to the attacks of the Paris school. It is here one is to locate, above all, Jacques Lordat.44 Attacked in turn by Père Ventura, who accused the Montpellerian vital force of putting into question the immateriality of the human soul and, in so doing, opposed to the concept of vital force the orthodoxy of an animism such as Georg Ernst Stahl’s (1659–1734), Lordat was forced to specify publicly just what he understood by metaphysics: We seemed to be on the point of understanding each other in acknowledging that we must have recourse to Metaphysics.My

42. “I thus leave out Descartes’ cosmogony, astronomy, chemistry—that is, everything which, in his conception, no longer touches on questions of proper philosophy, questions of God and the soul, and I pass straight to the physiology, which on the contrary is particularly connected to them” (Damiron 1846, vol. I, p. 279). 43. It is the ﬁrst point that Cousin underlines in his summary of Ventura’s critique and that he retrospectively links to the 1826 preface (Cousin [1853] 2015, p. 8). 44. Lordat and Cousin came into contact on many occasions, most publicly in Lordat’s Lettre à M. Victor Cousin on the subject of the necessity of creating, in each faculty of medicine, a Chair of natural philosophy (Lordat 1845) but also in private. The Fonds Cousin of the Bibliothèque de la Sorbonne contains two letters from Lordat to Cousin, dated respec- tively from 31 August 1833 (when Lordat sent Cousin his Essai sur l’Iconologie médicale, ou sur le rapport qui existe entre l’Art du dessin et l’étude de la médecine) and the 6 August 1846, in which he points out a “lacuna in medical teaching.” This lacuna is, in his opinion, the “omission of the exposition of the science of human dynamism.” It is to ﬁll it that he proposes teaching students “inductive natural philosophy, whose principal precepts are to be found in Bacon’s Novum Organum.” Perspectives on Science 699

adversary proposed this and I accepted it, but soon I perceived that the name of Metaphysics was quite equivocal and that we had used it according to very different acceptations. For him, metaphysics was a part of the Scholasticism of the Middle Ages, deﬁned as follows in Trévoux’s Dictionary: ‘Science which considers spirits and immaterial beings; ultimate part of philosophy, in which the spirit raises itself above created and corporeal beings, turns to the

contemplation of God, angels and spiritual things, and judges the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/posc/article-pdf/27/5/680/1790805/posc_a_00321.pdf by guest on 28 September 2021 principles of science by abstraction and by detaching them from material things’. It is not this science that I was after to arrive at ﬁrm knowledge of the constitution of man. For about sixty years, I have employed the word Metaphysics in Bacon’s sense. General metaphysics is the same thing as ontology or ﬁrst science, and particular metaphysics is the inquiry into causes which act according to ends; intellectual powers and vital powers, although very different by their nature, merit to be placed in the same category, owing to their tendency to Finality. It is from this point of view that this metaphysics, a genuinely experimental science—indispensable for us—seemed to me to be able to be a good means to reunite us in this discussion; but I did not remain long in this error. We have kept the same mental inclinations in these different understandings as we had at our meeting. My adversary’s metaphysics cannot be suited to a Faculty where students attached to diverse cults come together, and mine, which is natural, experimental, empirical, must be in his eyes a madness beyond all criticism. (Lordat 1854, pp. C–CI) In Lordat’s clarification, we can see one of the effects of Cousin’s philosophical choice on the history of the physiological sciences themselves. New attempts at distinguishing animism and vitalism, which characterise the second half of the century, thus bear, even without reference to Cousin, the indelible mark of such a choice.

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