August/September 2019 ●Philosophy Now 39makes a number of allusions to some of the core principles of
Bentham’s utilitarianism, and Biran’s philosophy is based on a
partial rejection of the empiricist premises on which that doc-
trine is founded. Bentham wrote that “nature has placed
mankind under the governance of two sovereign masters, pain
and pleasure” (An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Leg-
islation , 1789), and he advocated a moral system directed to the
maximisation of the latter. In doing so he was merely taking the
core empiricist and sensualist premises to their natural conclu-
sions: sensations were the only experiential reality the role of
which everyone could agree on. The new moral order would be
all about collective happiness understood as the generalisation of
the individual search for pleasure, and it did not matter which
pleasure, as long as it did not interfere too obviously with other
individual pursuits of the same kind.
However, for Biran, utilitarian morals were mistaken in that
the empiricist premises on which they were founded were only
partly true. There had to be more to life than pleasure and pain,
if only because the idea of free will (which even Bentham’s
system relied on) means more than being a mere weathervane
blown about by ever-changing sensations. Yet Biran was acutely
aware that for all its wrong assumptions, utilitarian morality
could become a self-fulfilling prophecy, given that there’s always
a “concordance between speculative systems and practical
morals” (Journal, II). With pleasure and pain becoming the car-
dinal points of moral science, people were free to blindly follow
their own impulses to the detriment of others and of their own
fulfilment. This could only lead to stagnant existences, and
unbridled selfishness:
“Those who think that everything in man is founded on feelings of
pleasure and pain, must believe too that the individual is the be all and
end all of his existence: duty is then a word devoid of any meaning, and so
is the idea of the absolute: everything is forever likely to change, along
with place, time and sensitive dispositions.” (Journal, II)Biran thought that as a result of empiricism and utilitarianism,
his was a time “where generous sentiments [were] practically
extinct in all souls, and where human actions [were] only consid-
ered through the prism of utility or material advantages” ( Journal,
I). This was to heap a lot of blame upon those philosophies; but
perhaps he understood utilitarianism as the theoretical justifica-
tion for the nascent capitalism. Biran’s suggested cure for these
ills – moral firmness and established values – may appear rather
conservative to us; but it should be remembered that his basis for
these values was quite original. The immediate apperception of
the self through self-willing effort was where Biran found both
individual moral strength and a reason to respect others, as free
agents engaged in their very own intimate struggle with incessant
natural and social stimuli. His conception of will was thus less an
accompaniment to triumphant economic liberalism than a warn-
ing of and potential tool against some of its most manifest perils.
God and the ‘Third Life’
Biran’s values were initially founded on a generalisation of his
introspective psychology, and as such did not rely on any tran-
scendental truth. Even his monarchism could be said, if not to
originate, then at least to be consolidated by his belief that the
state, like the individual, needed to organise itself around princi-
ples of unity and permanence.
Still, as the vicissitudes of life started to take their toll, Biran
became increasingly aware that his ‘firm ground’ of the self-will-
ing self was not enough to yield a peaceful and rewarding life.
Free will was not a given, but needed to be constantly reaffirmed
in the face of countless physical ailments and social disappoint-
ments. There is no end to this balancing act. This led Biran to
seek peace and contentment in an experience in the inner self
coming from a higher source, and for Biran there was no mistak-
ing that this higher source was God. But here again, Biran was
intent on accounting for the phenomenon in a philosophical way:“Until now, I have tried to establish a metaphysical theory by consult-
ing my intimate sense and paying close attention... to all conse-
quences derived from the facts of this intimate sense... If I find God
and the true laws of the moral order, it will be pure happiness, and I
shall be more credible than those who, starting from prejudices, only try
and establish the latter through their theories.” (Journal, I)Biran’s last decade was to be dedicated to ‘finding God’, both
personally and metaphysically. By the end of his life, he had dis-
covered that beyond the ‘first’ and the ‘second’ lives of man (the
animal/sensitive and the human/rational aspects respectively),
was a third life, characterised by a calm and contentment which
could only be the act of a higher power.The Afterlife of the Self-Willed Self
Maine de Biran was both a man of the eighteenth century in his
attempt to organise his thought in a systematic and transparent
way, and a man of the nineteenth century in his subversion of clas-
sical empiricism through an acknowledgment of the most funda-
mental human experience. While his ideas were coloured by an
undeniable traditionalism when it came to morals and politics, he
cleared the way for the emergence of modern philosophies such
as French Eclecticism (Victor Cousin’s attempt to bridge the gap
between Cartesian rationalism and empiricism), French Spiritu-
alism (culminating in Henri Bergson’s philosophy of mind and
creativity), and last but not least, French existentialism.
When he died in 1824 after years of ill-health, Biran was hailed
as ‘our mentor’ by Pierre Paul Royer-Collard, and even ‘our
Kant’ by Jules Lachelier. But some hundred and fifty years later,
F.C.T. Moore remarked that “Maine de Biran is an author almost
without critics, indeed, almost without readers in the English
philosophical tradition” (The Psychology of Maine de Biran , 1970).
The situation does not seem to have changed much. It may pri-
marily be down to the fact that there are only a few available
English translations of Biran’s writings (his work on The Relation-
ship between the Physical and the Moral in Man was translated and
published by Bloomsbury Academic in 2016). But even in France,
although a handful of academics have devoted their careers to
editing and analysing his works, Biran remains largely unknown –
as though notoriety, just like freedom, was bound to escape him.
© DR BENJAMIN BÂCLE 2019
Benjamin Bâcle is Senior Teaching Fellow in French at University
College London.Brief Lives