36 Philosophy Now ●August/September 2019times rewarded by prestigious institutions such as the newly
founded ‘Institut Francais’ in 1802, and the academies of Berlin
(in 1807) and Copenhagen (in 1811).New, Internal Kinds of Facts
As a child of the eighteenth century, Biran was a firm empiricist.
Influenced by the work of Étienne Bonnot de Condillac (1714-
1780), he initially believed that ideas are the product of sensory
impressions, and that as a result the mind is mostly passive in its
acquisition of knowledge, both of the outside world and of its
own contents. In the 1790s Biran became acquainted with the
Idéologues, a collective headed by Antoine Destutt de Tracy and
Pierre Jean Georges Cabanis. The ambition of the Idéologues
was to map out the birth, life and death of ideas in a way which
would help promote the educative and regenerative work of the
Revolution. Understanding ideas as objects, and minds as mere
receptacles, implied that all of France’s future citizens could be
shaped into a prescribed mould of thought.
Biran was eager to play his part in the cultural aspects of the
revolution, although he had reservations about the regime
change, as he was convinced that legitimacy rested with the King.
In 1802 he published a study of L’influence de l’habitude sur la fac-
ulté de penser (The Influence of Habit on the Faculty of Thinking ). In
it he observed that habit had a paradoxical effect on intellectual
operations, making them simultaneously more focused and accu-
rate, and more spontaneous and unconscious.
Biran’s account of the influence of habit on thinking hinted at
the behind-the-scenes work of an active faculty akin to the will,
but he fell short of explaining what this faculty might be or how
it might work. There was a good reason for this. Condillac and
the Idéologues’ empiricist premises could not harbour the notion
of a spontaneously creative will. In a world ruled by physical and
mental cause and effect, nothing can be its own cause – which is
precisely what the will would be if it is to be at all. This dogma
became increasingly frustrating for Biran, who wanted to find a
firm ground for his philosophy – some place where self-con-
sciousness could be originated and chosen by the will instead of
being the mere accidental consequence of mechanically deter-
mined phenomena. This firm ground he eventually found in
himself, in what he called the ‘primitive fact of the intimate
sense’. In short, it was the intimate sense of the effort of will
which made one conscious of oneself.
As an empiricist, Biran was keen to stick to facts. But he soon
came to realise that this did not mean that facts could only be
externally verifiable. Looking inward, he found that what created
the spark of self-consciousness was the confrontation of his own
hyper-organic force (a vital force whose origin was impossible to
ascertain) with the resistance of his own (organic) body or of an
external object. Self-consciousness could only exist if it was being
resisted at the very same time of its occurrence – by the body, or
by an external object: “as soon as the effort unfolds, there is a sub-
ject and an object, each constituted in relation to each other...I
f you come across any French person and ask them about
René Descartes, Jean-Jacques Rousseau or Jean Paul
Sartre, the chances are they’ll say the name rings a bell. If
you ask them about Maine de Biran, first they’ll say
‘Pardon?’, and upon you repeating the three odd words, they’ll
go blank – unless they belong to the chosen few who happen to
have been schooled at the Lycée Maine de Biran in Bergerac. But
you’d have to be pretty lucky to stumble upon them; and, indeed,
to be in a situation where the name ‘Maine de Biran’ would be
likely to occur at all.
The truth is, Biran is not your average bestselling philoso-
pher. Having published very little in his lifetime (29 November
1766–20 July 1824), he rose to only relative philosophical
prominence in the nineteenth century thanks to the posthumous
publication of his extensive manuscripts. In addition, he can be
said to only ever have had one idea, which shapes all of his philo-
sophical considerations in a way that may seem rather repetitive.
But this idea was arguably one of the first dents in the Enlighten-
ment consensus on the need to objectify, categorise and classify
all things on what Michel Foucault referred to as the ‘flat space
of [a] spreadsheet’ ( The Order of Things, 1966). Biran forces us to
rethink what we understand by ‘observation’ and ‘facts.’A Political Life
François-Pierre-Gontier de Biran, known as Maine, was born
into a family of Bergerac notables in 1766. He was to be a close
witness to, and occasionally even an actor in, some of the defining
events of the Revolution of 1789 and its immediate aftermath.
Biran spent most of the Terror in his family property of
Grateloup. He was a member of the Royal Guard from 1785 to
its dissolution in 1792. After the demise of Robespierre in 1794,
Biran was made administrator of the Dordogne by the Conven-
tion. Then after a brief spell as an elected representative in the
Directory in 1797, he again disappeared from the public sphere
until 1802, when he got another chance to make his mark on
local politics in his native Dordogne and Bergerac, mainly in the
latter’s prefectural services. As part of Napoléon Bonaparte’s
imperial Legislative Body from 1812 to the Restoration of the
monarchy in 1814, he made his name by joining a commission
demanding peace, an end to Napoléon’s politics of expansion,
and the respect of individual and political rights. A monarchist
by nurture and by nature, he welcomed the end of Napoléon’s
rule and the return of Louis XVIII (younger brother of Louis
XVI) in 1814, seeing it as a promise of stability. He went on to
represent the Dordogne in the Chamber of Deputies almost
without interruption until his death in 1824.
A keen student of epistemology (theory of knowledge) from
an early age, Biran never ceased to write and debate with his
friends, mentors and protégés throughout his sometimes high-
profile career. Although his perfectionism meant that he could
not bring himself to publish what he often regarded as incom-
plete reflections on the subject, his work was noted and some-Brief Lives
Benjamin Bâcle finds Maine de Biran’s idea of the self-willing self to be underrated.
Maine de Biran (1766-1824)