CHAPTER TWO

VICTOR COUSIN

Victor Cousin is probably the most important figure in French philosophy of the nineteenth century. He founded a school of philosophy and effected its wide dissemination; rekindled a respect for the philosophy of ancient times and the middle ages; promoted the study of recent and contemporary German philosophers from Kant through Hegel; and set standards for exegetical thoroughness in his many translations and editions that subsequent generations can only strive to equal. That Cousin came by an education at all was apparently the result of one of life's bizarre contingencies. The story has it that one day, as a youth, he sprang to the defense of another boy who was being tormented in the streets by a band of bullies. Out of gratitude for such a spontaneous and noble act, the boy's parents insisted on paying Cousin's way through school. By 1815, some years and an armful of academic awards later, Cousin found himself, at the ripe age of 23, lecturing in philosophy at the Ecole normale. A spellbind• ing orator, he rapidly achieved a large audience for his philosophical views and preferences. After only five years of teaching, however, he was officially silenced, as the political situation tightened and his views were judged to be too liberal for public consumption. But when Cousin was restored to his chair eight years later (in 1828), during a brief period of political detente while Martignac headed Charles X's cabinet, there erupted a great flurry of excitement in the Latin quarter and beyond. Each lecture was eagerly awaited, and immediately upon its delivery a transcription would be whisked off, printed and dispatched throughout France. Philosophy had been awakened from its sommeil dogmatique; and it was all Cousin's doing. As a professor, Cousin's philosophical doctrine, combined with his personal charisma, enabled him to develop a considerable following over the years. As Director of Public Instruction, a position he held for a number of years until political matters—this time the revolution of 1848—once again caused him to step down, he was well situated to place select individuals in key positions 60 CHAPTER TWO throughout the country (as well as to keep representatives of "repellant" philosophical views, such as Auguste Comte, out of such positions). As a result, the character of the philosophical education one received in France bore his imprint directly for at least a generation, and indirectly for longer yet. The philosophy Cousin promulgated, while it contained doctrinal elements, was characterized rather in terms of its method. "Eclecti• cism" is the name he gave to it, and it embodied the conviction that all philosophical systems contain something of the truth, commingled with certain false elements. The true philosophy would be the one which gathered the truths attained by various systems throughout the ages, and pared away from them whatever false beliefs they had been associated with. I shall say more about eclecticism shortly; for the moment let us just note that the very nature of the doctrine draws its adherents into a consideration of the whole history of philosophy. It is not a system of beliefs which could be reached through reflections carried out in isolation, for how, under such circumstances, would one come to know what truths had been unearthed by previous philosophers? Eclecticism thus required a serious critical examination of the results attained by philosophers across the centuries. When French philosophy had been brought to a crossroads two centuries earlier by Descartes, it was done so in quite the opposite spirit: the teachings of the elders were to be distrusted generally, systematically, in order that a new foundation might be laid, upon which an individual thinker—one such as Descartes—could profitably build, outfitted with but a few rules to direct his mind. It is a telling point of contrast that while Descartes boasted of the scantiness of his own library, Cousin was a bibliophile extraordinaire. Closer to Cousin's time, Cabanis and Destutt de Tracy—the Idéologues—showed likewise a Cartesian disdain for historical studies, and they had been in the ascendancy for quite some time. They believed themselves in possession of an empirical method for the study and interpretation of phenomena, both internal and external, which rendered obsolete all previous explorations into these areas. And why bother to study that which is obsolete? Thus France's greatest philosopher and its latest philosophy either counseled or practiced a certain indifference to the history of philosophy. Cousin, on the other hand, brought forward translations of Plato and Proclus, collected and edited the works of Descartes,