Maine de Biran

Maine de Biran

François-Pierre-Gonthier Maine de Biran (born November 29, 1766 in Bergerac , France , † July 20 (?) 1824 in Paris ), usually known under the name Maine de Biran, was a French philosopher .

biography

Maine de Biran was born in Bergerac. He took the name Maine some time before 1787 from a country estate called Le Maine near Mouleydier on the Dordogne . After studying in Périgueux , which he graduated with honors, he joined the bodyguard of King Louis XVI. from France and was present at the events of October 1789 at Versailles . After the dissolution of the royal guard, he retired to his legacy Grateloup near Bergerac and was spared the turmoil of the French Revolution .

It was during this period that he came, in his own words, “pro saltum from frivolity to philosophy ”. He started with psychology, which became his life. After the reign of terror, Maine de Biran turned to politics. Excluded from the Council of Five Hundred on suspicion of allegiance to the king , he and his friend Joseph Lainé took part in the commission of 1813, which was the first to oppose Emperor Napoleon directly . After the restoration of the monarchy, he became treasurer of the Chamber of Deputies . During the parliamentary break in autumn, he went to study in his home country. The exact date of his death is uncertain.

In 1812 he was accepted as a corresponding member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences .

Works

Maine de Biran's reputation as a philosopher has suffered from the fact that only some of his most atypical writings, written in an obscure and difficult-to-read style, were published during his lifetime. These included the essay on habit ("Sur l'influence de l'habitude", 1803), a critical review of the lectures by Pierre Laromiguière (1817), and the philosophical part of the article "Leibnitz" in the "Biographie universelle" ( 1819). A treatise on the analysis of thought (Sur la décomposition de la pensée) was never printed. In 1834 these writings were published together with the essay “Nouvelles considérations sur les rapports du physique et du moral de l'homme” by Victor Cousin , who in the 1841 edition added three volumes under the title “Œuvres philosophiques de Maine de Biran ”extended. It was not until Ernest Naville's 1859 publication of the “Œuvres inédites de Maine de Biran” in three volumes (with manuscripts that had been made available by Biran's son) that a comprehensive view of the philosophical development of Maine de Biran was possible.

First a sensualist , like Étienne Bonnot de Condillac and John Locke , next an intellectualist , he eventually became a mystical theosophist . The "Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie" represents the second stage of his philosophical development, the fragments of the "Nouveaux essais d'anthropologie" the third stage. Maine de Biran's early essays in philosophy were written from the perspective of Locke and Condillac, but they already showed signs of his later interests. While studying the formation of the habit, he was forced to realize that passive impressions cannot provide a complete or adequate explanation. With Laromiguière he differentiates attention as an active effort, which is no less important than the passive receptivity of the senses, and with Joseph Butler he distinguishes passively formed customs from active habits. He concluded that Condillac's concept of passive receptivity as the sole source of conscious experience was a methodological flaw - in short, the mechanical way of viewing consciousness as a product of outside influence was deceptive and misleading. Instead, he used the genetic method, according to which conscious human experience is conceived as growing or developing from the fundamental basis in contact with the environment. He found the fundamental basis in real consciousness, which itself is an actively striving force, and the stages of its development, corresponding to what one might call the relative importance of external influences and the reflective clarity of self-consciousness, he characterized as the affective, that Perceptual and the reflexive. In this context, Biran considered most of the unsolved problems that arise in explaining conscious experience, such as the method by which organisms are recognized, the method by which organisms are distinguished from non-organic objects, and the nature of such general ideas, according to which the relationships between objects are perceived by us (cause, force, effect etc.).

In the last stage of his philosophy, Biran distinguished the existence of animals from that of humans. Here, both the above-mentioned three forms as well as animal and human existence were classified from the point of view of spiritual life, whereby the human being is brought into connection with the higher consciousness, the divine system of things. This stage remained unfinished. Overall, Biran's work is a remarkable example of deep metaphysical thinking guided by a predilection for the psychological aspects of experience.

According to Ernst Behler , "the best introduction to the world of thought and idiosyncrasies" of Maine de Birans is his two-volume diary (Paris 1927/1931).

literature

• Bruce Bégout : Maine de Biran. La Vérité intérieure (Choix de textes et commentaires) , Éditions Payot, Paris 1995.
• Gerhard Funke: Maine de Biran. Philosophical and political thinking between the ancien régime and the bourgeois kingship in France , H. Bouvier, Bonn 1947.

See also

• Philipp Albert Stapfer | James Mark Baldwin

Individual evidence

1. ^ Members of the previous academies. François-Pierre-Gonthier Maine de Biran. Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities , accessed on May 2, 2015 . 
2. ↑ Ernst Behler: Die Leitidee Maine de Birans, in: Philosophisches Jahrbuch 62 (1953) 291–306, here 302.

Web links

• Literature by and about Maine de Biran in the catalog of the German National Library