38 Philosophy Now ●August/September 2019Without this effort everything is passive and absolute... With it,
everything refers to a person who wants and acts” ( Mémoire sur la
décomposition de la pensée, 1805).
So for Biran, self-consciousness was above all the result of an
act of will: an act which he thought could not be accounted for in
the same way as, say, gravity, or the action of one billiard ball on
another. Here Biran managed to still respond to the empiricist
demand that facts be based on experience while undermining the
Enlightenment claim that everything worth knowing was objec-
tifiable, quantifiable, and comparable. The incommunicable
nature of the sense of effort, and the idea, implied in the neces-
sary interdependence of resistance and effort, that self-con-
sciousness is inseparable from otherness, soared beyond the tra-
ditional empiricism favoured by the likes of Condillac, Cabanis,
and Destutt de Tracy.
But Biran went further, arguing that all of our basic ideas of
how the world is regulated – of causality, force, unity, identity,
and permanence, among others – were derived from the primi-
tive fact of the act of self-consciousness. For instance, our gen-
eral idea of causality was abstracted from our sense of being the
cause of an effort when acting. Our ideas of unity, identity, and
permanence were the intellectualised expression of the unity,
identity, and permanence of a self which in its willed effort
recognised itself in the midst of an infinite stream of ever-chang-
ing sensations. The same logic applied to ‘normal’ ideas – of a
tree, a cloud, or a cat, for example. To become easily identifiable
among other sensations as a distinct idea, a sensory impression
had to be actively received by the willing self. Biran’s account of
what regulates our perception was as far removed from
Immanuel Kant’s a prioricategories of thought as it was from
David Hume’s argument for the impossibility of proving causal
links. Instead, it was firmly grounded in creative willing.Mind versus Body in Thought and Life
With the primitive fact of the inner sense, Biran had found his
fulcrum, his point d’appui. He had also salvaged the mind’s active
nature from the passivity implied by Condillac’s empiricism. But
he had also re-established dualism, by erecting an insurmount-
able barrier between the active self and its ‘passive’ counterpart,
the organic body. In spite of their interdependence, and of the
appropriation of sensations through willed effort, in Biran’s
theory mind and body remain constantly at war. The body con-
stantly threatens to swallow the mind, which in turn only exists
in affirmation against its organic counterpart. This tension
reflects the tension between our social and our personal lives.
Although it started almost accidentally, Biran’s career as a
statesman survived a revolution, an empire, and the restoration
of the monarchy. Behind this apparently successful career, how-
ever, was a man forever torn between his desire to please in the
public sphere, and his hankering after solitude in nature.
Biran’s Journalis an enlightening record of his complex emo-
tional response to public and social life. Throughout its pages he
appears painfully aware that no mark of approval or affection
could ever quench his desperate need for recognition; and yet he
readily acknowledges that he cannot help but act upon that need:
“thisis the source of all my sorrows and disappointments in life.
I have always wanted, I still want, to seem what I am not, andkeep on neglecting what I could be” (Journal, III). This craving
he saw as a mode of the body’s proneness to sensual gratification- a tendency which inevitably leads one to seek society and to
play all sorts of roles and games, thereby damaging one’s moral
integrity: “Natural passions have their source in organic life and
belong to the animal side of man... Social passions always com-
bine with natural passions and complicate them” (Journal, II).
The Journalalso shows how Biran continuously exhorted him-
self to fight off his social passions, to recollect his thoughts and
reunify his self, and how this was helped by the seclusion and
contemplation afforded by his family residence. There the
thinker’s efforts could unfold properly, at last.
This is perhaps one of the most interesting features of Biran’s
will. Nowadays willpower is more often than not associated with
the determination to succeed according to externally established
standards. Biran’s will, by contrast, expressed itself most power-
fully by his shutting the world away and turning inwards.
The Utilitarian Threat
Biran’s emphasis on the conflict between the self and the senses
reflects his temperament and attitude. But rooting his real-life
tensions in a universal physiological and psychological divide
shows that he saw this divide and these tensions as essential to
human experience. This made for fertile ground when it came to
criticising the excesses of a certain kind of empiricism and its moral
applications – so much so that Biran can be credited for providing
us with one of the first philosophical critiques of utilitarianism.
Although no explicit mention of Jeremy Bentham’s (1748-
1832) works is to be found in Biran’s writings, in his Journal heBrief Lives
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