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

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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” 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 pre- vented from understanding how the category of experience constituted a crucial question for spiritualism itself. Through returning to the origin of these dis- cussions 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 ex- perimental 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 re- marks 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. Perspectives on Science 2019, vol. 27, no. 5 © 2019 by The Massachusetts Institute of Technology https://doi.org/10.1162/posc_a_00321 680 Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc_a_00321 by guest on 25 September 2021 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) 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 impos- ing a liberal, even reactionary ideology, and thus to the absence of any phi- losophy 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 philos- ophy 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 do- main 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 pre- sented 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 spiritu- alism 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. Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc_a_00321 by guest on 25 September 2021 682 Experimental Method and the Spiritualist Soul 1/ In order to reveal the nexus connecting Cousinian politics and phi- losophy 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- 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 sensual- ists, 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 perspec- tive 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). Downloaded from http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/posc_a_00321 by guest on 25 September 2021 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 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 estab- lishes 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 spiri- tualism 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.
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