The

INCARNATE SUBJECT

Also available in Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sciences

Series Editors: HughJ. Silverman and Graeme Nicholson

Before Ethics Adriaan Peperzak Beyond Metaphysics John Llewelyn The Deconstruction of Time David Wood Dialectic and Difference: Modern Thought and the Sense of Human Limits Jacques Taminiaux Elucidations of Holderlin's Poetry Martin Heidegger Translated by Keith Hoeller God and Being: Heidegger's Relation to Theology

Jeff Owen Prudhomme Heidegger and the Question of Time Francoise Dastur Translated by Francois Raffoul and David Pettigrew Heidegger and the Subject Francois Raffoul Translated by David Pettigrew and Gregory Recco History of Hermeneutics Maurizio Ferraris Illustrations of Being: Drawing upon Heidegger and upon Metaphysics Graeme Nicholson In the Presence of the Sensuous: Essays in Aesthetics Mikel Dufrenne Edited by Mark S. Roberts and Dennis Gallagher

The Language of Difference, Charles E. Scott Language and the Unconscious Jacques Lacan's Hermeneutics of Psychoanalysis Hermann Lang Martin Heidegger's Path of Thinking Otto Poggeler Michel Foucault's Force of Flight: Toward an Ethics for Thought James W Bernauer The Paths of Heidegger's Life and Thought Otto Poggeler Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics Bernard Flynn The Question of Language in Heidegger's History of Being Robert Bemasconi Rationalities, Historicities Dominique Janicaud Translated by Nina Belmonte Sensation: Intelligibility Is Sensibility Alphonso Lingis Structuralism: A Philosophy for the Human Sciences Peter Caws Texts and Dialogues Maurice Merleau-Ponty Utopics: The Semiological Play of Textual Spaces Louis Marin

CONTEMPORARY STUDIES IN PHILOSOPHY AND THE HUMAN SCIENCES

The

INCARNATE SUBJECT

Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul

MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY

Preface by Jacques Taminiaux Translation by Paul B. Milan

Edited by Andrew G. Bjelland Jr. and Patrick Burke

an imprint of Prometheus Books 59 John Glenn Drive, M e r i t , New York 14228-2197

Originally published in French as Maurice Merleau-Ponty, L Union de I'&me et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson, Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin, 1968. Collected and edited by Jean Deprun. © 1968 by Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin.

English Translation © 2001 by Paul B. Milan.

Published 2001 by Humanity Books, an imprint of Prometheus Books

The Incarnate Subject: Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson on the Union of Body and Soul All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, digital, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise or conveyed via the Internet or a Web site without prior written permission of the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

Inquiries should be addressed to Humanity Books

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Merleau-Ponty, Maurice, 1908-1961. [Union de l'ame et du corps chez Malebranche, Biran et Bergson. English] The incarnate subject: Malebranche, Maine de Biran, and Bergson on the

union of body and soul / Maurice Merleau-Ponty ; English translation by Paul B. Milan ; edited by Andrew G. Bjelland Jr. and Patrick Burke ; preface by Jacques Taminiaux.

p. cm. — (Contemporary studies in philosophy and the human sciences) Includes bibliographical references (p. ) and indexes. ISBN 1-57392-915-8 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Malebranche, Nicolas, 1638-1715. 2. Maine de Biran, Pierre, 1766-1824.

3. Bergson, Henri, 1859-1941. 4. Mind and body. 5. Monism. I. Bjelland, Andrew G. II. Burke, Patrick. III. Title. IV Series.

B2430.M379U513 2001 128—dc21 2001-0039210

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper

CONTENTS

Acknowledgments

Preface to the English Translation Jacques Taminiaux

Introduction Patrick Burke 15

French Editor's Foreword Jean Deprun 27

First Lecture: Note on the History of Philosophy in Relation to Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson 29

Second Lecture: The Union of the Soul and the Body in Descartes 33

Third Lecture: Consciousness of Self in Malebranche 37 Fourth Lecture: Natural Judgments and Perception 43 Fifth Lecture: Perceptible Extension and

Intelligible Extension 49 Sixth Lecture: Causality in the Relationships between

the Soul and the Body 53 Seventh Lecture: Theology and the Union of the

Soul and the Body 55

5

6 CONTENTS

Eighth Lecture: Ninth Lecture: Tenth Lecture:

Eleventh Lecture:

Twelfth Lecture:

Thirteenth Lecture: Fourteenth Lecture:

Fifteenth Lecture:

Sixteenth Lecture:

From Malebranche to Maine de Biran 61 Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito 73 Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito (Conclusion) 79 Matter and Memory: The New and the Positive in the Analysis of the First Chapter 87 The Second Chapter of Matter and Memory 93 Commentary on Text: The Unconscious 97 Commentary on Text: The Definition of Existence 103 Commentary on Text: "Seek Experience at Its Source" 107 The Relationships between Intuition and Construction in Bergson's Metaphysics 113

Complementary Note Jean Deprun

Chapter Notes

Bibliography

Index of Authors Cited by Maurice Merleau-Ponty

Subject Index

119 125 137 139 141

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

T ie original idea for this project came from Mr. Andrew G. Bjelland Jr. while studying Merleau-Ponty in a philosophy seminar conducted by Professor Patrick Burke at Seattle University. From the outset we

were convinced of the significance of L union de I'dme et du corps chez Malebrancbe, Biran et Bergson to the study of the overall development of Merleau-Ponty's thought and of the value of making this work available in English to Merleau-Ponty scholars. The project of producing a quality trans­lation has, from the outset, been a collaborative endeavor.

We would like to express our thanks to the Librairie philosophique J. Vrin, the original French publisher, for its kind permission to publish this translation. We are particularly grateful to Professor Hugh Silverman, Series Editor, Humanity Books Contemporary Studies in Philosophy and the Human Sciences Series, who showed initial interest in and encouragement for this project, and who has patiently followed it through to its completion. Gestures of profound thanks are extended to Professor Jacques Taminiaux for lending his name and support for this project by writing the preface. A special debt of gratitude is owed to Professor R. Maxime Marinoni, Pro­fessor of French at Seattle University, whose careful reading of the manu­script provided many suggestions which enhanced the quality of the trans­lation. We must also acknowledge the translators of the various standard English editions to which we have referred throughout this text; their fine work definitely made our task much easier.

Finally, we also wish to express our thanks to Seattle University for its

7

8 ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

institutional support of this project, and in particular to Ms. JoAnne Heron, Ms. Kate Reynolds, and Ms. Zan Deery for their assistance in preparing the manuscript.

Andrew G. Bjellandjr. Patrick Burke Paul B. Milan

PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION

Since the beginning of the nineteenth century, there have been a number of European philosophers who have published in book form notes from certain of their lecture courses. Such was the case notably

for Hegel's famous Philosophy of Law, and more recently, for several of Hei­degger's major works such as the Introduction to Metaphysics, What Is a Thing? and What Is Thinking? And if the complete works of these thinkers, posthumous by definition, attach such great significance to the lectures they gave, even when the latter, in the absence of the author's manuscript, are reconstituted only on the basis of the participants' notes, this can be readily explained. These philosophers' oral teaching was normally not only based on a completely written text avoiding improvisation, but also presented clearly the state of their most cogent thought in regards to a question which they had deliberately undertaken to examine and which called them to respond at a given moment along their philosophical itinerary. This is why, for example, the study of Hegel cannot dispense with his Lectures on Esthetics or on the Philosophy of History, and the study of Heidegger can no longer avoid dealing with lectures such as The Fundamental Problems of Phenomenology or Plato's The Sophist.

We should not expect from the Merleau-Ponty lectures translated in this volume what we legitimately expect from the German lectures cited above. For one who has read and meditated on the books which Merleau-Ponty had already published by this time in his career, it cannot be said that the 1947-48 series of lectures devoted to Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson con­stitute a decisive and indispensable contribution to the study of what was at

9

10 PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION

that time the innovative thought of the French philosopher, taken in the dynamic context of his research. This can be explained by the fact that these lectures stem from a well-defined genre which has no equivalent, either in the German tradition or in the Anglo-Saxon tradition, namely the explication of texts from authors who are part of the annual program for the competi­tive examination for the agregation in philosophy The very fact that such a program of studies, differing from year to year, is imposed administratively at the national level for future lycee professors requires that those respon­sible for preparing the candidates for this competitive examination accept obvious constraints. These limitations essentially force the lecturer to stress pedagogy rather than personal research and to emphasize the study of these required authors over the study of works which might otherwise stimulate original thought. No academic program of studies ever required Hegel to teach the philosophy of history: he invented it. No university program of studies ever required Husserl to present the idea of phenomenology: he dis­covered it. On the contrary, Merleau-Ponty had to deal with a required pro­gram of studies when, having been recently promoted to docteur d'Etat, he undertook, at the Faculte des Lettres in Lyon and at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris, to give a series of lectures for the agregation devoted to three of the great names in the French philosophical tradition, with all these lectures centering around a classic problem: the union of the soul and the body. Undoubtedly, it is because this required structure seemed to Mer­leau-Ponty to confer on these lectures the appearance of an obligatory pro­fessional duty that he neglected to keep his notes. In a more general sense, it is because this situation, at the stage where his research had developed, seemed to him to be an impediment, indeed to be a rigid constraint, that he submitted several years later to the tedious tasks which were going to assure him a chair at the College de France, thus allowing him finally to bring together, in complete freedom, his teaching and research.

Unfortunately these lectures delivered at the College de France remain unpublished, and at this point in time, we have only resumes of them. We can only hope that one day someone will undertake to reconstitute them even if they are based only on listeners' notes, since Merleau-Ponty, whose gifts of oratory and improvisation were remarkable, based his lectures on schematic notes, relying on the spoken word to give them life.*

Despite their limitations, we should not underestimate the importance and value of the 1947-48 lectures. In the years preceding these lectures,

*Professor Taminiaux submitted this preface prior to the publication of notes from these courses. These publications include: Maurice Merleau-Ponty, La Nature. Notes. Cours du College de France, ed. D. Seglard (Paris: Seuil, 1995); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes du cours au College de France 1958-1959 et 1960-1961, ed. S. Menase (Paris: Gallimard, 1996); Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Notes de cours sur I'origine de la g6om£trie de Husserl, in Recherches sur la phe-nomeyiologie de Merleau-Ponty, ed. R. Barbaras (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1998).

Preface to the English Translation 11

Merleau-Ponty published two books which attracted critical attention: The Structure of Behavior (1941) and Phenomenology of Perception (1945). With the same standing as Sartre, he had gained recognition because of these works as the major representative figure of a way of philosophizing unknown in France until that time, namely phenomenology, made famous in Germany by Husserl and later by Heidegger. According to Merleau-Ponty, this kind of philosophical investigation deals with a privileged field of inquiry which is perception, or more precisely, the incarnated belonging to the perceived world. The recognition of the fundamental nature of this field leads to important philosophical consequences: the very ones he outlined in essence for his colleagues in 1946 at a meeting of the French Philosoph­ical Society in a work published at the beginning of the 1947-48 academic year: "The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences." These consequences, which Merleau-Ponty had summed up on this occa­sion for his peers, are going to be emphasized by him during the course of this same academic year; the various developments of these ideas will appear in a collection of essays aimed at a well-educated audience: Sense and Non-Sense. It is these same philosophical consequences from the pri­macy of perception which provide the thread for the 1947-48 lectures which we shall review briefly. The perceived is a synthesis of the visible and the invisible which transcends the theoretical distinction between pure sen­sory experience and representation in ideas. This spontaneous synthesis gives me meanings which are not of the conceptual order and which I do not have to conjecture, infer, or deduce mediately on the basis of certain signs. It is not an intellectual synthesis which would impose from the out­side on a pure diverse matter the unity of an ideal form, but rather as Husserl said, it is a "synthesis of transition" or better yet a "synthesis of horizon" which clouds the classic alternative of immanence—presence to myself—and transcendence—that which is beyond my sphere of presence. Because perception makes these seeming antitheses encroach on one another, there is in perception a paradox of immanence and transcendence, in the sense that the perceived is present to me and that it is, however, always beyond what is currently given to me, a presence mixed with absence. The same kind of paradox characterizes the relationship that my perceived experience continually develops with others' perceived experi­ence. My perceptions are neither strictly private experiences nor intellec­tual inspections of ideal entities in theory identical for everyone. Right away the perceived imposes itself on me as real, not for every intelligence, but for all those who share my incarnated situation.

This description, according to Merleau-Ponty, contains nothing secto-rial; it is not limited to the small realm of experience which concerns psy­chology. It possesses rather a general ontological significance. Otherwise stated, the constitutive paradoxes of perception are in no way subjective

12 PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION

appearances which would dissipate as obscurities and confusion in the view of the objective world of science. On the contrary, they define the very con­dition of consciousness, the initial and constant status from which it cannot extricate itself.

Such are the themes which underpin Merleau-Ponty's reading of French philosophical texts which, from Descartes on, dealt with the relationship between the soul and the body. If this relationship is intrinsically paradox­ical, we can generally state, Merleau-Ponty seems to say, that the philoso­phers who wrote these texts could not avoid stumbling on this paradox and recognizing it, at least obliquely, perhaps even in opposition to their stated theses. It is not a question, then, in these lectures to reduce each corpus of texts to be considered to the consistency of a logical common denominator supposed to define the fundamental thesis of the philosopher in question. But rather quite the opposite, the purpose is to play these texts off one against the other, to uncover the underlying tensions they conceal, and in so doing, to contrast the implicit with the explicit. As I have already stated above, this is in no way a research course. We cannot claim here that Mer­leau-Ponty is searching for his own thought in the midst of inherited texts, in the same way that Heidegger was searching for himself while debating an Aristotle, a Plato, a Kant, and later a Nietzsche. Merleau-Ponty's philosoph­ical itinerary had been traced much earlier; he had conquered it in The Struc­ture of Behavior and solidified it in the Phenomenology of Perception. What was important for him, faced with a demanding and particularly well-informed audience, was to show the richness of this line of thought in the history of philosophy. To show, in other words, as he suggests from the very first lecture, that there is no better way to understand a system than to inter­rogate it philosophically, as he says, "to ask of it the questions with which we ourselves are concerned" (31).*

The fact that these lectures exploit, at every step of the way, a line of reasoning that had already been traced did not escape the French editor, who was himself an attentive listener to these lectures. Jean Deprun was fully aware of this, and this is why his "Complementary Note" multiplies, very appropriately, the references to a certain number of pages from The Structure of Behavior and from the Phenomenology of Perception. The readers of the English translation of these lectures will benefit greatly by referring to these texts.

However, this path, even though Merleau-Ponty was certain of its sig­nificance, was indeed a path of thought arrived at by innovative philosoph­ical inquiry. So that despite the fact that these lectures were limited in a sense to applying, in a manner of speaking, a philosophy that is already mature, these lectures, precisely because they emanate from a philosopher,

"Unless otherwise indicated, all page numbers in parentheses refer to the present volume.

Preface to the English Translation 13

also introduced a breath of fresh air into this scholarly and highly codified genre that is in France the "explication of texts." Merleau-Ponty taught, after all, that this genre could not be abandoned only to the erudition of histo­rians of philosophy. It is this breath of fresh air that impressed the small group of students in this course. It is this breath of fresh air which explains why they kept notes which had been taken fleetingly. In this regard, I hope the reader will allow me a personal remembrance. Having been admitted to the Ecole Normale as a foreign student in 1950, I was preparing my doctoral thesis for my alma mater, the University of Louvain. This thesis was to be a critical rereading of Bergson in the light of phenomenology, and more pre­cisely, in light of the version set forth by Merleau-Ponty. I shared my project with a friend on the same floor who was older than I and who was studying for the agregation in philosophy. He told me that he had attended, three years earlier, this course on Maiebranche, Biran, and Bergson, and that he had been very impressed by the course which he said had a direct relation to my project. As his notes were imprecise and not very legible, he strongly recommended I consult those meticulously taken by another student at the Ecole Normale who was also studying for the agregation in philosophy. The student in question was none other than Michel Foucault whom I sought out and who very graciously loaned me his notebook of lecture notes which were indeed very clear and detailed. I read them and reread them for sev­eral months without, unfortunately, taking the time to recopy them. They helped me immensely in my critical study of Matter and Memory, I came to realize how important and inspiring these lectures were for him when, at the end of the academic year, the young Foucault, already an archivist and archeologist of knowledge, made it a point to come himself to retrieve his notes, and I would not swear that I was not harboring a secret desire to keep them for myself.

We can see, then, that there are many good reasons to be thankful to the current editors and to the translator of these lectures.

Jacques Taminiaux Translated by Paul Milan

INTRODUCTION

During the academic year 1947-48, Maurice Merleau-Ponty offered at the Ecole Normale Superieure in Paris and at the University of Lyon a series of lectures to prepare students for the qualifying examina­

tion for the agregation in philosophy From among the classics included in the required curriculum, Merleau-Ponty focused his lectures on selected works of Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson relative to the problem of the union of the soul and the body, a problem to which he had already devoted considerable attention in his first two major works and which would con­cern him even to his last writings. Jean Deprun, wfto attended the Paris course, collated, edited, and published in 1968 the students'notes of these lectures, which are now presented here for the first time in English.

In his preface to this translation, Professor Taminiaux describes the con­straints placed upon Merleau-Ponty by the program for the agregation which required explication of texts rather than a fresh and provocative reading. The impression that Merleau-Ponty's own creative voice is absent from these lectures is evidenced by the often repeated claim (as reported to me by Hugh J. Silverman) that James M. Edie, editor of the Northwestern University Press distinguished "Studies in Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy" and devoted scholar of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, could not justify publishing a translation of Deprun's volume due to the less than explicit Merleau-Pontean style of the work. Yet Taminiaux writes a promis­sory note to the readers of this edition when he points out that Merleau-Ponty, because he was a philosopher, could not but help to introduce a

15

16 INTRODUCTION

"breath of fresh air" into these lectures, air fresh enough that his students, including Michel Foucault, wanted to keep their notes.

This "breath of fresh air" becomes evident early on in the lecture course when Merleau-Ponty reveals how he reads the history of philosophy and his own method as a historian of philosophy. He calls into question the "purely objective method" which, lacking a principle of selection, would produce no more than a catalogue or concatenation of theories or points of view, a mere chronicle but not a real history. In a highly subtle manner, he is hereby calling into question the very program of the agr^gation. For Merleau-Ponty "the objec­tivity of the history of philosophy is only found in the practice of subjectivity" (31). His principle of selection, he tells us, is a question or a problem with which he is personally concerned relative to which the classical texts reveal themselves by differentiation, by their respective manner of posing, taking up, and resolving the question, which places them in tension with each other and with the contemporary standpoint from which the historian poses the problem. With the specific needs of the agregation students in mind, Merleau-Ponty sum­marizes, analyzes, and explicates the texts of Malebranche, Biran, andBergson from the perspective opened by his privileged question, but then goes beyond the kind of explication required by the program, or that exercised by a tra­ditional historian of philosophy, by including a critique of contemporary read­ings of these classical thinkers by Leon Brunschvicg, Jean Laporte, and Emile Brehier, whose texts were the standard university fare of his time.

In addition he inaugurates another subjective practice, a certain way of inviting the students to interrogatively inhabit with him the margins of these texts, of looking at what their authors overlooked because of methodolog­ical strictures, and thereby yielding the intuition of a truth which these mas­ters sought but were unable to express: "the historical situation of a philoso­pher delimits what he can think about with certitude, but not what he can try to think about" (47). This is the method Merleau-Ponty employs a decade later in his homage to Husserl, namely, "to evoke the unthought of element Q'impense) in Husserl's thought in the margin of some old pages" (Signs, 160), a "never yet thought of," at least in the formal sense, which we can think only by attending to the emerging outlaw subtexts of a different history with its yet-to-be-expressed horizons. We see these subtexts and horizons come to life through Merleau-Ponty's use of the conditional and subjunctive cases, for example when he says of Biran that "he would have abandoned psychology only if he had discovered corporeality . . ." (75). The poignant demonstration of Merleau-Ponty's method of reading the history of philosophy at once accounts for the importance of these lectures in their own right as well as for an understanding of the development of his thought. On this basis alone, not only the serious student of Merleau-Ponty, but also of the history of philosophy, will be rewarded by giving these lec­tures the careful attention they deserve.

Introduction 17

The works of Malebranche and Biran had long been considered classics of French philosophy, and were still the subjects of many commentaries at the time Merleau-Ponty was a student and then a new teacher at various lycees. For example, such notable scholars as Henri Gouhier, Victor Delbos, and Leon Brunschvicg brought out, during the 1920s, widely read books on both Malebranche and Biran; in 1934, George Le Roy published an influen­tial work on Biran, and in 1939 Martial Gueroult's highly respected text on Malebranche appeared. Bergson, who died in 1941, was already considered among the greatest philosophers of France. So important was Bergson that in 1946, his Matter and Memory, which is the subject of five of Merleau-Ponty's lectures here, was in its sixty-second edition. It is thus evident why the program for the agregation should have included the names of these thinkers. And that Merleau-Ponty should read them in terms of the problem of the union of the soul and the body is a testament to the importance of that problem in the history of French philosophy. Bergson explicitly devotes Matter and Memory to this problem. He says that it has not been suffi­ciently addressed by philosophers who state the union of soul and body either in terms of psycho-physical parallelism (an obvious reference to Male­branche) or as an irreducible and inexplicable fact (an obvious reference to Biran). The significance of the problem for Merleau-Ponty's work is evident in the title of the last chapter of The Structure of Behavior (1939), "The Relation of the Soul to the Body and the Problein of Perceptual Conscious­ness," a title which could well serve to mark the major focus of Merleau-Ponty's entire philosophical itinerary.

In the first lecture, Merleau-Ponty points to two traditions within French philosophy relative to this problem, the Cartesian tradition within which the soul's relation to the body is clarified by its relation to God, and the Pascalian tradition within which the soul's relation to God is clarified by its relation to the body (29). Merleau-Ponty puts Malebranche in the Carte­sian tradition, while Biran and Bergson belong to that of Pascal. Neither tra­dition can be articulated, however, without first taking up the thought of Descartes, and this forms the substance of the second lecture. Here Mer­leau-Ponty points out that for Descartes the union of soul and body cannot be thought, that it is a mythical concept (35) in the Platonic sense of the word, leaving us nothing to say about it philosophically. At most it is a "con­fused thought" given only prereflectively through the experience of natural inclinations as described in the Sixth Meditation (35). Merleau-Ponty credits Descartes for having introduced the notion of the "unreflective subject" (35) which will focus his own reading of the resolutions to the problem of the union of the soul and the body provided by Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson, and which will partially explain his interest in offering this lecture course. Through this lens the reader can see how Merleau-Ponty's own thought was subtly shaped by these masters.

18 INTRODUCTION

Like that of Bergson, but unlike that of Biran, the name of Malebranche is to be found, either as a foil or an influence, in all of the major works of Merleau-Ponty, from The Structure of Behavior to The Visible and the Invis­ible, and in the recently published Notes de cours 1959-1961 (Paris: Galli-mard, 1996). Without doubt, Malebranche was, for Merleau-Ponty, the most important of the seventeenth-century rationalists, the one to whom Merleau-Ponty returned throughout his life because, as he writes in the fourth lecture, "we see today's problems are already there in Malebranche" (47). Here Merleau-Ponty is pointing to the problem of rigorously elabo­rating an alternative between or beyond idealism and realism, of achieving a mediation between or beyond the pure For-Itself and the In-Itself, of mind and body, self and world by beginning with perception. More than 250 years earlier, Malebranche, through his theory of natural judgment, was attempting, according to Merleau-Ponty, such a mediation. In these lec­tures, Merleau-Ponty, again inhabiting the margins of some old texts, focuses, among other things, on the impense of Malebranche, on what he was trying to think about.

In the five lectures devoted to Malebranche, Merleau-Ponty demon­strates how this master approaches the problem of the union of the soul and the body from the perspective of both philosophy and Christian theology, giving primacy, however, to the latter. Merleau-Ponty does not eschew this emphasis, since he finds it makes room within Cartesian rationalism, and even contrary to it, for human experience as it is primordially lived, in desire, freedom, and dignity. Malebranche accounts for the obscurity and ambiguity of the sense of self and world by appealing to the theological doc­trine of the Fall by Adam and Eve. Adamic nature was characterized by the harmonious union of soul and body, but in fallen human nature this union has been reduced to dependence of soul on body (57), with the conse­quence that, unlike Descartes, "I do not grasp my thought in its constituent tracings and in its origin" (38). Although I have an inner feeling of self, I do not have a clear and distinct idea of the soul (38) and thus, in this fallen state, consider my body as part of myself (40), at the same time both mine and other (44).

The reader of these lectures will not let go unnoticed Merleau-Ponty's interpretation of all of this as a deliberate intention on the part of Male­branche "to introduce the unreflected into philosophy" (40). This shows up in Malebranche's description of the primordial directedness of inner feeling toward the world, and of a time which unfolds in me and which the mind does not dominate and unfold, and of how ideas are grasped, like perceptual objects, only in terms of their horizons. Merleau-Ponty finds these themes, which he himself had vigorously articulated in Phenomenology of Percep­tion, pointing Malebranche toward "a philosophy which would not at all be his own, to a philosophy in which it would be impossible to distinguish soul

Introduction 19

from body, to a sort of simple open thought" (41). Malebranche, immersed as he is in the rationalist tradition of the seventeenth century, must extricate himself from this existential tendency, this "impasse" as he would see it, by situating in God "the conditions of rationality, the clear relationships by virtue of which nature and the human person become analyzable" (41). In The Visible and the Invisible, Merleau-Ponty criticizes Malebranche for his emphasis on the passivity of thought, "which like perception loses every effi­cacy of its own and has to await its light from a causality that functions in it without it" (The Visible and the Invisible, 42). Here is the theoretical origin of MaLebmnche's occasionalism. For Malebranche, ideas are not mine, they do not originate within me, they are given to me: "there must therefore be an intelligible principle by and through itself, appearing behind ideas: this intelligible principle is God" (39).

In the last analysis Malebranche gives us, according to Merleau-Ponty, a profound philosophical analysis, in fact a phenomenology, of the human condition without God, only to distort it by a rationalism that depends on a mysticism of the beatific vision.

Turning now to Merleau-Ponty's lectures on Maine de Biran, we confront there an enigma, namely the absence in the major works of Merleau-Ponty of any serious mention or analysis of this post-Cartesian philosopher in the French tradition who anticipated some of the major insights of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy in both its earlier and later phases. Maine de Biran was the subject of some important books which appeared in the 1920s and the 30s in France, for example Le Raisonnement selon Maine de Biran (Paris, 1925) by Jacques Paliard, or Euthyme Robef's work Leibniz et Maine de Biran (Paris, 1927), Victor Delbos's study Maine de Biran et son oeuvre pbilosophique (Paris, 1931), and the Bersonian reading of Maine de Biran by George Le Roy in Experience de Veffort et de la grdce chez Maine de Biran (Paris, 1934). In 1942, three years before the publication of Phenomenology of Perception, a primary source work appeared, Maine de Biran: CEuvres Choisis, with an "Introduction" by Henri Gouhier whose Les Conversations de Maine de Biran later appeared in Paris bookshops in 1947, about the time these lectures were given. So, unlike Hegel's works which needed Alexander Kojeve to draw them from obscurity and signal their importance, the thought of Maine de Biran was already well in circulation in Parisian intel­lectual life as it continues to be today in the work of Antoinette Drevet, Maine de Biran (Paris: P.U.F., 1968), or Michel Henry, Philosopbie et ph&nomenologie du corps: essai sur Vontologie biranienne (Paris: P.U.F., 1987), and in essays by XavierTilliette and Jan Patocka. In view of this, Mer­leau-Ponty's silence is all the more enigmatic.

The scholar whose first introduction to the thought of Biran occurs in his or her reading of these pages will be astonished to find how Biran had anticipated, more than one hundred years earlier, the central project and

20 INTRODUCTION

related thematics of the Phenomenology of Perception. In confronting the problem of the union of the soul and the body, Biran, like Merleau-Ponty after him, tried to stake out a "new territory" between empiricism and ratio­nalism, a third philosophy, a third position, a third solution as it were, at once more dialectical and integrative, resolving the antinomies between mind and body, subject and world. Biran and Merleau-Ponty both under­stand philosophy as perpetual and active inquiry, methodic doubt as awe or astonishment, and the philosophizing self as fundamentally contingent. They share a similar point of departure for their philosophy, namely the body's experience and its motility, and a similar primitive fact (fait prim-itif), namely the irreducible, creative, coformative and dialectical tension between subject and object, consciousness and body, self and world, the interior and the exterior, the within and the without; in a similar fashion, they both articulate a movement toward an original notion of thought, namely a prereflective, prepersonal operative or motor thought from which reflective life stems by means of the self-differentiating process of a con­sciousness perpetually struggling against various formative points of resis­tance to become itself; each discloses a similar rooting of reflection in its organic base, the body doubling back upon itself in hearing and touching and seeing, engendering thereby the interiority of the voice, the hand and the eye, and thus a primitive reflection which is the first step and symbol of higher-order reflection; in addition, each provides a similar analysis of how lived time is inaugurated in the voluntary and involuntary motor efforts of the subject, and each delineates a similar notion of a corporeal spatiality, of one's own body Qe corps propre) relative to which the objective spatial world is built-up. Furthermore, Biran appears to have also foreshadowed Merleau-Ponty's notion of the primordial unconscious as wild, permissive feeling, as dispossession of the self in favor of what is felt, as "an opening toward that which we do not have to think in order that we may recognize it" (Themes from the Lectures, 131): in this respect, Biran speaks of preper­sonal apperceptions/feelings reverberating in the motor activity of the body and subtending and surrounding reflective life.

With these similarities in mind, let us now turn briefly to Merleau-Ponty's presentation of Maine de Biran's specific analysis of the problem of the union of the soul and the body, in order to see how Biran applies these concepts in his own unique manner. Merleau-Ponty's lectures assign principal importance to Biran's Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie and secondly to his Com-mentaire sur les meditations metaphysiques, and with minor attention to the later works.

Merleau-Ponty points out that for Biran the problem of the union of the soul and the body is a false problem; the connection of the one to the other is a primitive fact, an irreducible relationship between two terms which cannot be conceived separately. They are given together through a primor-

Introduction 21

dial form of consciousness by way of an inner feeling of our individual exis­tence through bodily motility and effort. It would be absurd (67) to speak of the union of the soul and the body because what we have here is a prim­itive duality (68), a primitive antithesis which is essential to the thinking subject. Interiority and exteriority, the within and the without, enter into the very definition of the subject such that there is no sensibility without the self and no self without sensibility. Biran wants to reestablish ontology in its legitimate domain, that of the primitive fact. By arguing that it is the eye and not the soul which sees, he offers an original notion of the Cogito, beyond Cartesianism and rooted in the mutual implication of thought and willful motility. Here Merleau-Ponty finds Biran articulating a process theory of con­sciousness. Through movement we become conscious, we temporalize our­selves, we work ourselves into consciousness and freedom. Beginning with the passive presubjective and preobjective neutral zone of phenomenal reality, Biran shows a kind of nascent reflection already set up in bodily hearing, which unfolds into explicit acts of attention and understanding. The Cartesian Cogito is thus an achievement, and not an existentially fun­damental ground of thinking. It is Descartes's understanding of the Cogito which creates the radical bifurcation relative to which the problem of the union of soul and body makes sense, as a problem, but for Biran it is a problem misconceived.

Given this analysis, Merleau-Ponty credits Bir&n for having anticipated phenomenology and for having circumscribed the phenomenal field. Although he discovers in all of Biran's analyses genuine and profound intu­itions, Merleau-Ponty claims nonetheless that they are "constantly compro­mised" by Biran's lapsing into psychologism. In this regard, Merleau-Ponty faults Biran for having conceived lived time as flowing from the past to the future instead of vice versa, for not having internalized the sign which links thought with the body, and finally for having embraced a nominal notion of the self. In the end, Merleau-Ponty finds Biran incessantly wavering be­tween empiricism and rationalism, between the exterior and the interior, and between philosophy and psychology without being able to "truly elab­orate the third position he was aiming at" (69).

In spite of the criticism, the reader of chapters 8, 9, and 10 of this volume is left with the impression that Phenomenology of Perception is, in some important respects, much less original in its inspiration than previously thought, that Merleau-Ponty is once again pressing at the margins of some old texts, looking for the impense, finding it, and then rigorously reinserting it. But unlike Malebranche and Bergson, Maine de Biran remains unnamed and unacknowledged, a rose missing from the bouquet in Phenomenology of Per­ception, constitutively present even through a kind of absence.

Of the three thinkers discussed by Merleau-Ponty in the lectures pre­sented here, it is Bergson who most directly commanded Merleau-Ponty's

22 INTRODUCTION

attention through much of his philosophical life. As early as The Structure of Behavior, where he is already confronting Bergson's notions of vital action and pure perception, Merleau-Ponty is discussing Matter and Memory. In Phenomenology of Perception, this work is taken up again in relation to space and time constitution, and later factors as part of the text and subtext of "Eye and Mind" and the posthumously published work, The Visible and the Invisible. Bergson was celebrated in Merleau-Ponty's inaugural address, "In Praise of Philosophy," at the College de France and was one of the authors studied in a 1956-57 lecture course, also at the College de France, "The Con­cept of Nature," the student notes to which were published in 1995 in La Nature (Paris: Editions du Seuil, 1995). Finally, in 1959, Merleau-Ponty deliv­ered an address, "Bergson in the Making," at the commemorative Congress Bergson, published in Signs, which reveals unabashedly Merleau-Ponty's pro­found debt to this monumental thinker when he writes of Beigson, "Now we can bear witness to the vitality of his works only by saying how he is present in our own" (Signs, 183).

In looking through these books and essays, we find that, for Merleau-Ponty, there are two Bergsons. There is the official textbook Bergson which he was taught in school and which he criticizes throughout his life, but with special vigor in these lectures, being as he was still under the influence of G. Politzer's "La Fin d'une parade philosophique, Le Bergsonisme" at the time of this course for the agr$gation. Then there is the disturbing, subter­ranean Bergson seeking, like Merleau-Ponty, to bring to expression a level of experience so profound that it ruptures the very language which would purport to carry it. Throughout The Structure of Behavior, Phenome­nology of Perception, and The Visible and the Invisible and in the lecture course presented here in this volume as well as those presented at the Col­lege de France, Merleau-Ponty rigorously stakes out points of opposition to Bergson's theory. And yet, in the midst of criticism, the reader detects a sympathy, a common project, and a dependence upon Bergson. In Sense and Non-Sense, Merleau-Ponty makes a revealing statement: "In all these respects, it seems to us that Bergson has perfectly defined the metaphysical approach to the world. It remains to be seen whether he was true to his method" (Sense and Non-Sense, 97nl5).

In the complexus of ideas conveyed in the fifteenth and sixteenth lectures, three features of Bergson's method are especially worth noting, as they announce the focus of Merleau-Ponty's own later methodology:

1. In the fifteenth lecture, Merleau-Ponty points to Bergson's proposal to rediscover a "prehuman link with the living" (110); this foreshadows Mer­leau-Ponty's ontological move toward "what resists phenomenology within us" (Signs, 178), the barbarous principle, the wild ily a. Bergson wants "to draw knowledge from our primordial unity with things" (110), joining "our mute being with our revealed being" (110). Following Bergson the later Mer-

Introduction 23

leau-Ponty proposes a radical interrogation of Being or what he calls lis­tening to silence, the abyss, through which he too will seek a fully unified starting point for ontology.

2. In the sixteenth lecture, we find Bergson is opposed to a metaphys­ical "unity without diversity," or a "unity without cracks" (116), without ecart. For the later Merleau-Ponty, the starting point for ontology is not, as it was for the post-Kantians, a unity through the identity of opposing terms, but a mediation through the flesh, through the intertwining and reversibility of the visible and the invisible, the sensing and the sensed.

3. Also in the fifteenth lecture, Merleau-Ponty says that, according to Bergson, "in order for metaphysical unity to be natural, we must discover within ourselves and outside ourselves what we know from the fact that we exist, we must grasp life in ourselves, we who are living" (110). This idea is taken up in the sixteenth lecture where Bergson is presented as showing that the part of the real that we most directly intuit is internal duration. Intu­ition is a coincidence not with a reality outside of us but "with a movement which originates within ourselves" (116) and, as he claims in the fifteenth lecture, this movement, this "duration (and the novelty which it implies) must grasp itself reflexively and practically" (111). These phrases clearly presage Merleau-Ponty's "thinking from within Being" approach to ontology. But Merleau-Ponty is quick to point out that intuition as the "thinking from within" becomes, for Bergson, immediate coincidence or fusion of thought with duration and not the interrogative and dialectical listening to the depths of Being; here in the fifteenth lecture Merleau-Ponty anticipates his lengthy critique in The Visible and the Invisible of Bergson's theory of intu­ition as coincidence.

The reader will find Merleau-Ponty's method for approaching a major historical work most manifest in his treatment in lectures eleven to fifteen on the four chapters of Bergson's Matter and Memory. Merleau-Ponty chal­lenges the very manner in which the problem of the unity of the soul and the body is posed here by Bergson, i.e., in terms of the alternative between the For-Itself and the In-Itself, of idealism and realism, and argues that the solution is insufficient, wavering between the terms of the alternative instead of going beyond it (106). He praises Bergson for having understood the body as a center of perspective, as a center of real action (87). But he criticizes him for not having admitted the primacy of perception, in its pri­mordial unity with things (110), as the middle ground between and beyond the For-Itself and the In-Itself, and for having retained the postulates of realism (92) to the extent that the body is not truly a subject (94). Favoring a world of images in itself (89), the being of consciousness with its multi-valent intentional structure is reduced by Bergson to an oscillation between aspects of the In-Itself (91). According to Merleau-Ponty, this results in the death of the subject (90), since in such an analysis neither pure memory nor

24 INTRODUCTION

the body is truly for itself (94). Because he understands the body as a "pre­sent existent" rather than a "temporal reality" (96), Bergson falls short of "describing anything resembling the corporeal dialectic of 'temporaliza-tion,' " and consequently cannot account for the consciousness of the past in the present (100), and ends up suppressing movement (111) and the syn­thesis of transition (101) through which it is perceived.

Despite the hypercritical reading of Bergson in these lectures, Merleau-Ponty is careful to draw the attention of the listener/reader to the fresh insights pressing for expression at the methodological limits of the text. "Bergson leads us to the brink of an intuition which he does not fulfill" (106), leaving it to us to liberate this intuition from the philosophical frame­work in which it is embedded (91). Through his notions of "existence" (104, 105), "duration" (91, 110, 113, 116), "pure perception" (91), "pure mem­ory" (91, 94), and "intuition as dialectical comprehension" (115), Bergson discloses something new, inaccessible to reflective analysis, i.e., "thing and consciousness as they are linked in the dialectical unity of time, not as cor­relatives, but as absolutely simultaneous" (89), without any priority given to either. A resolution to the problem of the union of soul and body is at hand, if Bergson can consistently employ these concepts by abandoning his realist commitments and thereby showing what he wants to show, namely that consciousness implies a body engaged dialectically in the constituting of time. Once again, the reader finds Merleau-Ponty listening for the fertile silence from which a great thinker draws his words, for that "residue which maintains the dialogue among persons and, consequently, the history of philosophy" (31).

The reader of these lectures is in the same position as Jacques Taminiaux some forty years ago, reading notes taken by others of lectures for which we do not have the professor's own notes. This would seem to be a disad­vantage, having to listen in vicariously to the listener's perspectival listen-ings-in. Merleau-Ponty gives us some assurance to the contrary when he writes elsewhere that we are as we affect others, that speaking and listening and writing are fundamentally intersubjective tasks. These notes are somehow the reverse side of his thought, the visible of his invisible. His thought was also elicited by the faces and questions of the inscribers, in the dynamic and charged setting of his lecture hall where the looks and gestures of so many cross and weave a single field of vision and voice; they too par­ticipate in what he enunciated; his thought joins the invisible of their vis­ible, and plays between and within their shared external and internal hori­zons. We are indeed grateful to the French editor, Jean Deprun, who put together a multitude of perspectives, found the points where they over­lapped to form a single texture. And, in this regard, must we not ask whether we have here, in these intertracings, a text better than what we might have risked wanting or hoping for, better than if we had the fully elab-

Introduction 25

orated notes of the professor such as those which Hegel and Heidegger left for their students? In the preface to this English edition, ProfessorTaminiaux tells us that "Merleau-Ponty, whose gifts of oratory and improvisation were remarkable, based his lectures on schematic notes, relying on the spoken word to give them life" (10). Are we not therefore encouraged to listen in the silences and margins of these pages for the living and creative voice of the professor and philosopher? And given the richness of what is already said, does this listening not unveil a movement of desire to know what "breath of fresh air" Michel Foucault might have inhaled in his notes, which are not among those gathered for the making of this volume?

Patrick Burke

FRENCH EDITOR'S FOREWORD

In 1947-48, the names of Malebranche, Biran, and Bergson were included in the curriculum for the agrtigation in philosophy. Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who was then teaching at the Faculte des Lettres in Lyon and at the

Ecole Normale Superieure, devoted a course, taught concurrently in Lyon and in Paris, to the problem of the union of the soul and the body in the thought of these three philosophers. It consisted (at least in its Paris version) of formal lectures, model analyses (our chapters 4 through 7) and commen­taries on texts (our chapters 13 through 15). Since we were able to recover neither the author's original notes nor the notes of those who attended the lectures in Lyon, we have attempted here to restore the substance of the course with the aid of those notes which were preserved by certain mem­bers of the Paris audience. To his own notes, the editor was able to add those of Andre Coazan, Jean-Louis Dumas, Jean Jolivet, Francois Ricci, and Etienne Verley. We wish to thank them for their general assistance.

The concise, confident words of Maurice Merleau-Ponty often left liter­ally identical echoes in his students' notebooks. The editor's task was there­fore simple. When the versions differed, he chose the one which seemed the clearest and the most explicit. Since none of these differences affected the substance of the ideas and interpretations, the reader can at least be assured that Merleau-Ponty's thought has not been distorted. Although we can no longer hear him speak, we can still continue to follow the develop­ment of his meditation.

In an effort to simplify the reader's task, we have standardized the refer­ences to the texts cited, referring to the most recent critical editions: for Malebranche, the edition of the (Euvres completes (Paris: Vrin, 1962-1968);

27

28 FRENCH EDITOR'S FOREWORD

for Bergson the Edition du Centenaire (Paris: P.U.E, 1959). The quotations from Maine de Biran are from the Tisserand edition, published during Mau­rice Merleau-Ponty's lifetime.

This work was undertaken at the friendly prompting of Andre Robinet. Madame Maurice Merleau-Ponty has graciously consented to authorize our project. We ask her to accept this expression of our gratitude.

Jean Duprun

FIRS^JECrWJE Note on the History of Philosophy

in Relation to Malebranche, Biran, andBergson

Malebranche belongs to a philosophical tradition altogether dif­ferent from the one with which we associate Biran and Bergson.

For Malebranche, the relationships between the soul and the body can teach us nothing positive; they are illuminated from without by the soul's relationship with God—this is in the Cartesian tradition. For Biran and Bergson, these relationships, on the contrary, lead to the soul's relationship with God—this is in the Pascalian tradition.

In Spinoza et ses contemporains, Leon Brunschvicg interprets Male­branche from a Spinozistic perspective.1 He sees Malebranche as a percep­tive follower of Cartesian idealism, for whom geometry represents the knowledge closest to the consciousness of God. "Understanding is prefer­able to faith."2 "Reason only incarnated Itself in order to lead men to Reason by way of their senses."3 According to Brunschvicg, Malebranche simply refused—unlike Spinoza—to take this idealism to its ultimate consequences by going beyond the problem of the soul and the body. In Spinoza, this problem disappears when the illusion of individuality is dispelled. "There is no longer a need to explain how the perfect became imperfect; for there is not, in the absolute reality, in the presence of God, an individual who says yes and an individual who says wo."4 Brunschvicg interprets Malebranche (and Descartes) in reference to the Spinozistic principle that every determi­nation is negative, and Malebranchism then appears as a resistance to Spinozism (in the Freudian sense of the word "resistance"). Thus, the soul's relation to the body should be disregarded, being nothing more than a state­ment of fact.

29

30 FIRST LECTURE

Now Malebranche quite consciously distinguishes—as Brunschvicg himself notes—between two kinds of knowledge: mathematical knowledge, the "exact sciences such as Arithmetic and Geometry," to which "the fear of falling into error" would have us "give preference," and knowledge acquired by experience alone, which makes us understand "not relations of ideas among themselves but relations to us and among themselves and the works of God with which we live.5 Hence, Malebranche wonders whether one should endeavor to attain clear ideas or whether one should understand things as they are, and the opposition he thus establishes prevents us from thinking of him as a failed Spinoza.

The historian of philosophy wavers between two dangers: that of being blind, by analyzing texts literally (thus avoiding rethinking them); but also that of judging more as a philosopher than as a historian and of valuing a work by way of our interpretations. The historian of Cartesianism is tempted to define a logic of Cartesianism which extends through and goes beyond Malebranche in order to move toward Spinoza, thereby neglecting the problem of the relationships of the soul and the body in Malebranche. But this objective logic of the history of philosophy is only seemingly obligatory. A fact is always interpreted. The Spinoza who judges Malebranche is not the historical Spinoza, but Spinoza interpreted by Brunschvicg. Brunschvicg himself admits that there is a "beyond Spinozism" in the sense that for Spinoza, as for Malebranche, "the problem of idealism, which will arise later for man, is still present. . . uniquely for God."6 Spinoza, then, saw idealism in the mirror of God. It could just as well be said that Malebranche saw the problem of existence in the mirror of God insofar as existence is not reducible to ideality. The objection raised at the start is Brunschvicg's ver­dict, not a verdict rendered by history.

Must we conclude from this that there is nothing objective in the his­tory of philosophy and that we can never compare two philosophers? Not at all: we can objectively establish whether Malebranche had a positive con­ception of the union of the soul and the body or whether he accommodated such a conception as best he could whenever he encountered it. In Descartes, only three texts insist on the union; a great number of texts insist on the distinction. In Malebranche, the portion of his work concerning the relations of the soul and the body becomes a major theme, that of knowing by feeling. The entire history of philosophy is a personal resumption by the philosopher of the problem he is studying; subjective resumption, therefore doctrine and philosophy, narration and reflection—but not free reflection. We must account for empirical relations, existing documents, and at the same time discern a truth which does not lend itself to a purely objective method. The truth of Descartes is not what he was empirically; nor is it the recapitulation of Cartesian texts; it is, together, the totality of what he wrote and the way in which he lived, bound together by the intuition that

Note on the History of Philosophy 31

we are able to have of a truth which he sought to express. For example, Descartes posed the problem of the union of the soul and the body; he affirmed their distinction, but he also thought that this distinction should be forgotten in everyday life. The objectivity of the history of philosophy is only found in the practice of subjectivity. The way of understanding a system is to ask of it the questions with which we ourselves are concerned: it is in this way that systems appear, with their differences, and bear witness whether or not our questions are identical to those which their authors themselves posed.

The history of philosophy is a confrontation, a communication with sys­tems, analogous to that which we are able to have with persons. Even though philosophers may choose, their choice is always accompanied, as if in the margins, by a suspicion of what it overlooks. All consciousness of a thing is, at one and the same time, consciousness of what is not this thing. Each philosophical choice stands out in relief against the background of what was not chosen, and it is in this way that philosophers communicate; it is this residue which maintains the dialogue among persons and, consequently, the history of philosophy. In this spirit, we will consider the texts of Male-branche concerning the soul and the body to be just as significant as other texts. We will seek what Malebranche preferred to see, without ignoring that which, in Malebranche, goes against the grain of Cartesianism.

SECOND LECTURE The Union of the Soul

and the Body in Descartes

In Descartes, the question of the union of the soul and the body is not merely a speculative difficulty as is often assumed. For him, the

problem is to account for a paradoxical fact: the existence of the human body. In the Sixth Meditation, the union is "taught" to us through the sen­sations of hunger, thirst, etc., which issue from the "intermingling of the mind with the body"; now, all "these sensations . . . are nothing but con­fused modes of thinking."1 In 1645, Descartes writes to Father Mesland,

[I]t is quite true to say that I have the same body now as I had ten years ago, although the matter of which it is composed has changed, because the numerical identity of the body of a man does not depend on its matter, but on its form, which is the soul.2

The body is not, therefore, just so much matter: it is a totality, though not in the Spinozistic sense—that is, like a constant formula. In Descartes, it involves merely a question of the continuity of a function. It follows from these texts that Descartes had to address the problem of the living body, "closely joined and . . . intermingled"3 with the soul.

Let us recall three fundamental texts; (i) the Letter of August 1641, to Hyperaspistes:

[S]i enim per corporeum intelligatur id omne quod potest aliquo modo corpus afficere, mens etiam eo sensu corporea erit dicenda ([I]f "corporeal" is taken to mean anything which can in any way affect a body, then the mind too must be called corporeal in this sense);4

33

34 SECOND LECTURE

(ii) the Letter to Elisabeth of June 23, 1643. Here Descartes explains that one must attempt to conceive of the union of the soul and the body in terms of the union of weight and extension in Scholastic physics. Now, this rela­tion remains unthinkable unless the soul is given a sort of materiality:

Your Highness observes that it is easier to attribute matter and extension to the soul than it is to attribute to it the capacity to move and be moved by the body without having such matter and extension. I beg her to feel free to attribute this matter and extension to the soul because that is simply to conceive it as united to the body5

(iii)The Letter toArnauld of July 29,1648:

[S]i enim per corporeum intelligamus id quod pertinet ad corpus, quamvis sit alterius naturae, mens etiam corporea dici potest, quatenus est apta cor-pori uniri (For if we count as corporeal whatever belongs to a body, even though not of the same nature as body, then even the mind can be called corporeal, in so far as it is made to be united to the body).6

The first of these texts was to figure in the Replies to Objections and thus deserves to be taken very seriously

Note, however, that in their context these formulas are always accom­panied by qualifications. Each time Descartes affirms, in one sense, the cor­poreality of the soul, he adds that the soul is not corporeal in the same way as "whatever is made up of the substance called body" (Letter to Hyper-aspistes)? And the Letter to Elisabeth specifies that

the extension of this matter [the body] is of another nature from the exten­sion of [he thought] [the soul], because the former has a determinate loca­tion, such that it thereby excludes all other bodily extension, which is not the case with the latter.8

In a Letter to More of April 15, 1649, Descartes seemingly attempts to elaborate philosophically the union of the soul and the body. He here dis­tinguishes between an "extension of substance" and an "extension of power," this latter belonging to the soul:

Quantum autem ad me, nullam intelligo nee in Deo nee in Angelis vel mente nostra extensionem substantiae, sed potentiae duntaxat (For my part, in God and angels and in our mind I understand there to be no exten­sion of substance, but only extension of power).9

But how can this concept be coherent? The soul, from the point of view of the body, appears as adapting itself to this body and is endowed with an

The Union of the Soul and the Body in Descartes 35

extension by contagion. However, here the point in question concerns only the souls of others, and not the soul as soul. From without, we find the extensity of extension; from within, we can grasp this extensity only through reflection.

Thus, nowhere does Descartes claim that we can conceive of the union. There is nothing to say on this point. The concepts he introduces in this regard are mythical in the Platonic sense of the word: designed to remind the listener that philosophical analysis does not exhaust experience.

The union can only be known through the union:

[I]t is the ordinary course of life and conversation, and abstention from meditation and from the study of the things which exercise the imagina­tion, that teaches us how to conceive the union of the soul and the body10

A new question then arises: no longer "how to reconcile the experienced union and the distinction of essences" but "how does it happen that there exists a realm of experience which we cannot conceive"? The Sixth Medita­tion speaks of "natural inclinations" which have their validity since God is not a deceiver. However, if Descartes truly adopts this double attitude, toward God and toward the world, can he sustain it? If we take the methods of the First Meditation seriously, are we not led to consider the Sixth as an aberration? And conversely, if we take the Sixth Meditation seriously, how were the methods of the First possible? In Descartes, extreme theism (all truth depends on God) joins with practical atheism, since the divine truth, once acknowledged, exempts us from returning to God. If the union of the soul and the body is a confused thought, how was J able to discover the Cogito? And if I discovered the Cogito, how can I be the unreflective sub­ject of the Sixth Meditation?

Spinoza will treat the mode of experience in the Sixth Meditation as "privative." Conversely, Malebranche will obscure the Cogito—which, henceforth, will no longer "detach"—so that neither the "I think" nor the proof of the existence of God will allow us to transcend our inherent nature as unreflective subjects. Thus are defined two opposing ways of restoring a balance to Cartesianism.

THIRI^SCItJRE Consciousness of Self

in Malebranche

L THE COGITO IN THE RESTRICTED SENSE, AS EXPERIENCE OF MYSELF

Descartes established an inner connection between thought and being (the significance of which M. Guerdult minimizes, it seems,

seeing in it only the understanding of "a conceptual relationship between [two] simple essences"1); if this were not the case, this connection would be no more certain than other truths. If I think I am, this does not result from an objective thought aimed at "thought" and "being," but rather from the fact that I, myself, am this link and that I accomplish it. As M. Gueroult writes—very correctly in this instance—the Cogito is "certitude in relation­ship to that certitude itself."2 When Descartes recalls that "in order to think, it is necessary to be," he formulates his thought, but does not elaborate on it: it is the formulation of the movement through which thought becomes being. But this activity can only be grasped at that very moment: the pulsa­tion of time which follows the Cogito separates me from myself, and nothing proves that I must continue to exist thereafter. As Lachieze-Rey points out, Descartes refused "to introduce into the mind the atemporal unity of time"3 and therefore was unable to "accommodate himself to the internal law [of thought], in its constituent unity"4 At the moment of the Cogito, it remains true, however, that this certitude is perfect.

Malebranche, on the other hand, openly presents the Cogito as depen­dent on a single principle. "Nothing has no properties. I think. Therefore I

37

38 THIRD LECTURE

am."5 That is to say, I observe myself as a property of an unknown X. My thoughts must be properties of something since they cannot be nothing. Any manner of thought would allow this type of Cogito to function. Male-branche does not go through the prolonged doubt that makes thought emerge inasmuch as it gives itself its own being, but rather he engages in an inventory of all that is found in the mind. He observes that, true or false, my thought remains a thought. If it is not nothing, we must relate it to some­thing. "Even if you would have something in the soul preceding thought, I have no wish to disagree."6 It is an "open" conception: Malebranche doesn't even affirm that thought is the essence of the soul. His notion of the Cogito does not put me in possession of my thought, nor does it identify me with its principle. "Nothing is more certain than inner feeling in proving that something exists; however, it is useless in helping us know what it is. "71 do not grasp my thought in its constituent tracings and in its origin. "I am not my light unto myself." Moreover, this thought would be frightening in his eyes. "I cannot think [of this] without a kind of horror."8

H. THE COGITO IN THE BROAD SENSE, INCLUDING OBJECT OF THOUGHT

The ideas which I think are not my thoughts since thinking of an idea is not engendering it intelligibly. My ideas appear to me as if by a miracle. It is from the obscurity of the sense of self that we move to the vision in God. This obscurity "might also serve to prove that the ideas which represent to us things outside of us are not modifications of our soul"9 What will define the idea is that it is present to me, that it is something to be seen, it is object. There is no confused idea; what is obscure in us stems from the soul. If I know myself, this will be by a kind of blind contact. Therefore, there will be no idea of the soul, but only of extension. This idea is light, I never coincide with it; it always presents itself as the result of an intention which originates within me but which leaves it at its distance. The distinction between my perceptions and ideas, then, is based upon this notion. There is no relationship between the content of the ideas and the trace they leave in me.

Where do ideas originate if they are not nothing and they are not mine? Every idea is a representation of something; it is what makes it, simultane­ously, a light and something that is insufficient to itself. It is a representative being, and therefore a derived or imperfect being. There is some nothing­ness in ideas. Each idea is distinguished from other ideas in that it negates them. "My hand . . . embraces . . . an infinity of nonbeings."10 By the same token, the idea of extension negates any other perfection of being.

It follows from this that an idea cannot subsist by itself, and that it

Consciousness of Self in Malebranche 39

stands out against the background of a whole, from which it appears to have been taken. The idea is not intelligible through itself. It is "representa­tive of," "referring to"; there must therefore be an intelligible principle by and through itself, appearing behind ideas: this intelligible principle is God. "I cannot conceive . . . how being that is without restriction, immense and universal, can be perceived through an idea, i.e., through a particular being."11 God is grasped without an idea; all of our activity involving knowl­edge related to ideas is based on our contact with him.

Hence, there is a tripartite division in the Cogito: (i) consciousness of myself: I am in touch with myself obscurely; (ii) knowledge of ideas con­sidered by me; (iii) knowledge of God, without ideas. God is not, strictly speaking, proved except by a proof of simple sight of him. The Malebran-chist Cogito includes, simultaneously, the three experiences of myself, of ideas, and of God. The complete Cogito is the vision in God. But we do not see God directly: "We see only what God saw in Himself, when He wanted to create the world."12 If ideas are not ours, how can we conceive of any­thing? Knowledge seems possible only on the condition that it can clearly formulate. Even when I don't think expressly about them, ideas remain pre­sent in my mind: "it moves away from them in such a way that it never loses sight of them, and it is almost always ready to seek them out and to move near them"13

My relationship to ideas is therefore identical to my relationship with the perceived world. The horizonal relationship is not the index of a total possession: I can only illuminate the horizon by moving myself from place to place, which is nevertheless incomprehensible to me. Such, also, is my relationship to ideas: in order to see ideas better, I use means whose secret I, myself, do not possess.

This being Malebranche's conception, serious difficulties emerge, as pointed out by Arnauld. "I am not my light unto myself."—Moreover, this light of the idea, I must see it! Malebranche must acknowledge this and speak (in the III Entretien metaphysique) of a "created reason" ("created reason, our soul, the human mind, the purest and most sublime of intel­lects, can indeed see the light, but they cannot produce it"14). However, if I am a "created reason," it is certainly I who think, and then can what was said about the transcendence of the idea be maintained? What is it to have the feeling of an idea? Such, however, is our lot. What kind of a reason can it be if it is limited to having a feeling? Malebranche admits in his Response to Regis: "created minds would perhaps be more exactly defined as sub-stances which apperceive what touches them or modifies them, rather than simply saying that they are substances which thinks

Furthermore, as Arnauld observes, Malebranche speaks of the soul: he must then have, in some way or another, some idea of it. Can we grant him that we do not have an idea of the soul, but that we do have an idea of

40 THIRD LECTURE

extension? Isn't the obscurity thus introduced going to be extended to other ideas and even affect the idea of the body? Can we accommodate obscurity?

Since pain, color and other such things are known obscurely and confus­edly only when we erroneously consider them as existing outside our soul, it follows that ideas about these sensible qualities are obscure and confused only when we relate them to bodies, as if they were modifications of bodies. And therefore we cannot reasonably conclude anything from their obscurity contrasted with the clarity of the idea of the soul, and this would cause us, rather, to doubt the clarity of the idea of extension.16

Besides, Arnauld is wrong in seeing nothing but a complete inconsis­tency in this theory; Malebranche actually tried to make the theory of a con­sciousness of self obscure but legitimate. I can construct a "pseudo-idea" of the soul based on the idea of extension: (a) a contrario, by exclusion, by separating from the soul anything relating to space; (b) by analogy, because I can extend certain properties of extension to every created being—and therefore to the soul, the soul having been created by God just as bodies were. However, it is not a question of true knowledge. Ultimately the soul will remain undetermined, and the idea we have of it will remain a half-thought. This situation brings to our attention the difficulties of language in general, especially the difficulties of the natural language of emotions, of these "natural signs" which assure their "contagious communication." Male­branche uses—mutatis mutandis—a. similar procedure to construct his theory of the soul:

It should be noted that these comparisons between mind and matter are not entirely appropriate, and that I compare them only to make the mind more attentive, and, as it were, to illustrate my meaning to others.17

There is, in Malebranche, the deliberate intention to introduce the unreflected into philosophy. The very fact that Descartes's Cogito was dis­covered on a certain date, that it was late in coming, that it needs to be taught, proves that the reflecting self cannot be considered as myself. Moreover, I consider my body as a part of myself: if I had an idea of the soul, this would not be so, and I would not have to offer this body as a victim to God. "If you were to see clearly what you are," says the Word, "you could no longer be linked so closely with your body. You would no longer look upon it as a part of yourself."18 This is tantamount to saying that our bodies are taken legitimately for us.

Malebranche deals with our natural attitude. I am naturally oriented toward the world, ignorant of myself. I know only by experience that I can think about the past; my memory is not known to me through the direct grasp of an operation. My reference to the past is not my doing. I receive it:

Consciousness of Self in Malebranche 41

certain memories are given to me. I am not then a mind which dominates and unfolds time, but a mind possessing certain powers, the nature of which it does not understand. I never know what I am worth, if I am just or unjust. Hence, there is an aspect by which I am truly given to myself, and not a principle of myself. There is no clarity for me which does not imply obscurity, and this obscurity is myself. If my soul were known by the idea of it, I would need to have a second soul to have the idea of the first. It is essential for a consciousness to be obscure to itself if it is to be faced with an illuminating idea.

Malebranche confronted the problem of passivity. We inherit powers which are not immediately ours. I record the results of an activity of which I am not a part. In Malebranche, there is not a philosophy of the mind, but a symbolic and material thought of the soul. Knowledge loses its unity in this thought. The soul is "touched" by intelligible extension. No internal rela­tionship unites it to a space which it has not constituted. There is an inevitable split in a philosophy in which there must be a detour to go from self to self and an obscure contact of the soul with itself.

Ultimately, Malebranche would come to a philosophy which would not at all be his own, to a philosophy in which it would be impossible to distin­guish the soul from the body, to a sort of simple open thought. In order to extricate himself from it, he must find the means to reestablish the rationality that does not appear in the soul, he must find a perspective from which what is obscure for us will be clear in itself. The feeling of self will be displaced in order to be situated in God.

This is what his concept of human freedom shows. In it he gives the consciousness of self greater value. The inner feeling I have of myself is suf­ficient to affirm my freedom, but insufficient to know it. Why do we not have an inner notion of freedom? This latter is nothing more than the power we have to follow or not to follow the movement which brings us to God. Now, we do not have an affective intuition of this movement. Freedom united us with God before the Fall and not since: the sinner replaces the movement toward the infinite by the uncertain possession of thousands of individual goods. To describe the human condition before the Fall, Male­branche will therefore use an artifice: starting with the establishment of an existence—in the strict sense, that is to say something opaque—he refuses to remain in irrationalism and resorts to a theological superstructure without a direct relation to our actual situation, which is fallen. However, he does not introduce sin in the way in which Kant will later introduce "rad­ical evil": human nature in itself is entirely rational. Malebranche recognizes the existence of the irrational, but projects in God the conditions of ratio­nality, the clear relationships by virtue of which nature and the human person become analyzable.

FOOm^£CrtJRE Natural Judgments

and Perception

JL ^ e atural judgment" is an ambiguous and bastard expression, evoking two opposite possibilities of consciousness. On the

one hand, consciousness is always feeling, never a coincidence between myself and the content of my thought: "It is necessary that I feel myself only in myself when one touches me,"1 even on the lev^l of ideas. There is, between sentient consciousness and intellectual consciousness, only a dif­ference in the action of intelligible extension on me. But, on the other hand, what defines me as mind is the fact of apperceiving: "For it is the same for the soul to receive the mode called pain as to perceive or to sense pain, since it cannot receive pain in any other way than perceiving it."2 It is impos­sible for a consciousness to be caused or activated: consciousness can only maintain relations of apperception with that which is not itself. Certainly Malebranche does not believe that to apperceive is to illuminate, but there remains an opposition between "apperceiving" and "sensing oneself."

This problem comes up again with regard to natural judgments. Con­sciousness will form "free judgments" when it receives a slight impression of the idea of extension. This is the origin of a "free geometry." But the clarity of the judgment is not due in this instance to consciousness of connection: even then, there is a distinction between the affection (J who see) and the content (what I see). On the contrary, there is a confusion between the two levels when the touch to which I am subjected is stronger: at that moment, I p& extension in my affections; and, as the soul can only be apperception, it is necessary that this also be a judgment. However, I do not apperceive

43

44 FOURTH LECTURE

the link between subject and predicate. We were seeking to find out how the soul could at one and the same time be perception of idea and passive subject, subject to error: natural judgment forms the junction between these two aspects of the soul.

Certain natural judgments are always erroneous (the presence of heat in the hands), others always true. This notion constitutes a building block for a theory of one's own body. How can I be conscious of the results of an intellectual operation which takes place outside me? Now the problem of one's body consists precisely in that it is at the same time both mine and other. The theory of natural judgment resolves this problem owing to a the­ological superstructure: God judges in me, for me, without me, and in spite of me.

Brehier, in his study on "Les jugements naturels chez Malebranche,"3

speaks of "pseudo-problems" due to the fact that "Malebranche supposes that forms and distances are the givens of sight."4The theory of natural judgment becomes, therefore, pointless as soon as one agrees with Berkeley that "it is with solids known by touch that geometry deals."5 But this totally disregards everything which gives a general scope to this theory, everything that roots it in Malebranche's thought.

The comparison of the editions of the Search shows that Malebranche changed in this regard from idealism to occasionalism. Let us study further this dilemma.

(A) Descartes, in the Sixth Discourse of his Optics, interprets the per­ception of depth from an intellectualist point of view. The distance from point X is judged "as if by a natural geometry" and

by a mental act which, though only a very simple imagination, involves a kind of reasoning quite similar to that used by surveyors when they mea­sure inaccessible places by means of two different vantage points.6

Hence, it is a question of an enveloped judgment. It is here more than an unconscious judgment (an unthinkable notion since it supposes the uncon­scious consciousness of a true relationship). This is more finalism rather than idealism. One considers the perceiving subject by placing oneself out­side of the subject: an attitude of a scientist, and not an attitude of the sub­ject. We are involved with an exterior point of view: Descartes introduces here a judgment In Itself or For Me, but not For Itself. In the Meditations, on the other hand, he adopts an authentic attitude, that of the human person engaged in the experience of perception. Here genuine idealism appears, the type in which one ceases to invoke judgment as a factor or as a force. In the case of the piece of wax, for example, judgment in not a sup­plementary factor, an aid. Quite the contrary, the piece of wax, as an immutable quantity of extension, only has meaning for the mind. As Alain

Natural Judgments and Perceptions 45

was to express it, "the cube is judged," since the very definition of the cube has an existence only for thought: the cube is never seen as cube. In this case, perception is judgment inasmuch as it brings into play a fixing power, which alone can grasp the entire cube. By the same token, when the per­ception of size is involved, authentic idealism does not consist in saying "There is a judgment, since the size of the object is deduced." Here again judgment would be a factor, a psychic cause. Idealism, in this case, consists in saying that there is only one total system which is the world, in which only a partial perception is possible.

We could reply to the intellectualist psychologist, "You conclude the dis­tance from the size, and inversely; however, where do we begin?" This is introducing judgment in a purely causal sense. True idealism affirms that there is a perception of size and of distance included in the position and the construction of the object and of the universe: for this idealism, there could be no consciousness of anything whatsoever without total consciousness of the world. It is meaningless here to talk of sensible perception. Now, Male-branche lost sight of this true idealism: his theory of the soul prohibited him from thinking in these terms. But his own theory raises internal difficulties: natural judgment cannot be homogeneous with any other judgment.

Idealist analysis follows from each perspective to its geometric repre­sentation, but these perspectives are devoid of meaning and we destroy what we are trying to analyze. Let us transport ourselves into the "cube as it is thought of": it disappears as cube. The subject doesn't see the cube from anywhere in particular; it sees it from everywhere. But how can the unsitu-ated subject distinguish the inside and the outside, the interior and the exte­rior of each square? By the same token, what would "perpendicular move­ment" signify for an unsituated subject? We cannot move to an unsituated thought which would be beyond the perceived, nor find a way to go beyond the sensory givens by an operation carried out from our perspective.

(B) The other hypothesis is Malebranche's. When I am given indices, I receive a conclusion already formulated by virtue of a law established by God. This is finalism: I benefit from the passage made once and for all by God from sign to meaning. Now, if it is God who judges, it is not I: if he com­municates to us the conclusion without an intermediate term, my con­sciousness becomes a simple, finite unfolding. In the constancy of objects, it is God who now fixes the image. It is no longer a question of an ideal con­stancy, but of a real constancy produced in me. This finality is outside me and the theory of natural judgment becomes the equivalent of an ordinary empiri­cism. In fact, the constancy of this radiator, for example, is the fruit of an identification practiced across change: now idealism and realism both sup­press perspectivalism. For idealism, perspective is only a nonbeing. Realism, for its part, replaces perspective by the grasp of an actual size.

The theory of natural judgments poses, then, a very general problem:

46 FOURTH LECTURE

that of the alternative of going beyond the dilemma of idealism which attrib­utes to me an immanent consciousness of the whole world, and realism in which consciousness is constituted from a succession of states. Both of these conceptions miss the point. For idealism, it will be necessary to show how this pure consciousness can receive in it the particular perspective of the thinking subject engaged in the perceptible world. This idealism was Sartre's idealism in Transcendence of the Ego; there, consciousness is "all lightness, all translucence"; it doesn't leave any place for an "inhabitant," not even the "I."7 Sensations, such as the I, are before consciousness. For Sartre, there was not, therefore, any problem of the other: I am no further from the other than from my own states, which is the same as saying that the other is as near (or far) from me as myself. But how can we understand the relationship of this consciousness empty relative to its hyle? The problem was unsolvable: the basic materials were too far from consciousness. This consciousness which is not linked to any hyle exists nowhere, it is divine. If the inherence in the hyle is taken seriously, we can no longer cling to a bipartite analysis. Consider the analysis of the Psychology of the Imagina­tion: in this work the image is not given as a thing present in my con­sciousness, but as an imagining consciousness. Now Sartre's analysis is not entirely explicit: how does the imagining consciousness differ from the judging consciousness? When I imagine, there is not before me just an anal-ogon of the absent being: the absent being appears to me as mysteriously present, present by a magical quasi presence. How can I give myself this vir­tual presence? I conjure it up, as one conjures up the spirit of the dead.

Consciousness, in this instance, becomes caught up in its own game. There is, between it and the image, a relationship of complicity, of fascina­tion. But if my consciousness is fascinated, there is, then, a secret relation­ship between it and its hyle. This problem thus leads us beyond idealism.

Will we say that the constancy of forms, of objects, etc., stems from a natural organization? This would be tantamount to forgetting that my per­ception is consciousness and would be professing an inverted idealism.

The problem is as follows: it is necessary that there be mediation between the pure For Itself and that which consciousness poses In Itself in the presence of itself, that there be a connivance between the For Itself and the In Itself. "[I]t is the soul which sees, and not the eye," Descartes said.8 "The eye or the soul": for him, there is only one or the other. Natural judgment would attempt to be this mediation, yet it is only a wavering between the In Itself and the For Itself. In order to get beyond this alternative, it would be necessary not to consider pure consciousness first, but to return to the per­ception itself: to take consciousness already at work, already situated, and not to put our trust in a schematic notion of consciousness. If I give myself a pure idea of consciousness, I will never be able to recover perception. But isn't consciousness precisely that which can never be taken as pure?

Natural Judgments and Perceptions 47

We see that today's problems are already there in Malebranche and appear as in myths or in dreams. The historical situation of a philosopher delimits what he can think about with certitude, but not what he can try to think about.

FIFTH LECTURE Perceptible Extension and

Intelligible Extension

Extension cannot be said to be perceptible since sensations are modal­ities of the soul. We relate these modalities to extension: there is,

then, a relationship between them and intelligible extension, and we must discover the basis of the instinct which pushes us toward it.

Extension is not a manner of being, but a being. It is not an abstract, it contains its parts as a white canvas contains the drawings which will be traced upon it. This relationship between extension and its parts cannot be elucidated by a reference to analytical geometry, as Leon Brunschvicg thought to be the case:

Malebranche envisages analytical geometry only in its relationship to space. . . . the concrete representation of space supposes the reality of the idea which is without parts, without extension, which is a relationship such as the equation of a circle.1

Laporte, in L'Etendue intelligible chez Malebranche,2 observes cor­rectly that Malebranche never draws examples from analytical geometry3

There is nothing in common between intelligible numbers, which are "all. . . mutually commensurable,"4 and intelligible extension, whose parts are not always such.5 In fact, Malebranche undertakes a direct analysis of extension, just as Leibniz openly attacked analysis situs. Malebranche confronts the notion of spatiality head on.

What relationships are there between intelligible extension and created extension?

49

50 FIFTH LECTURE

In the Search (first edition), we see in God the ideas of all bodies. The theory is modified in Elucidation Ten: human experience of extension is in fact subject to perspectival variations, and one cannot accept that God per­ceives individual bodies himself. But Malebranche does not renounce placing in God the ideal foundation for particularities. "It is therefore certain that one sees bodies only in general and intelligible extension, made perceptible and particular by color."6 The word "general" is ambiguous: it is not a matter of the relationship of potency to act; rather extension contains the internal seeds of every being.

Intelligible extension is "the idea of created extension." There is in fact only one extension (created) and one idea of extension (intelligible). Percep­tible extension is itself connected to the source without which it would be inconceivable: there is an inner genesis of exteriority, at the end of a move­ment which establishes the relationship of the parts among themselves.

Here Malebranche returns to his analysis of knowledge: in order to have light, I must have a representative (in scientific language) being facing me, otherwise my soul would be dispersed and at the mercy of its various states. This necessitates a being whose entire essence is to offer itself to knowledge and which refers back to reality, because the human soul does not, by itself, have this agility and this transparence which alone would render it capable of knowing.

Intelligible extension is neither on the side of the subject (it is not a fact of knowledge) nor on the side of the object (it is not an In Itself): it is the conceptual nucleus by which real extension opens up to consciousness. Thus it can be explained that while there is only one extension, there is nonetheless an intelligible extension, that is to say a mode of being which is only the transition from consciousness of extension to effective extension. Intelligible extension is not an aspect of divine psychology, which would render it a thing or a kind of thing.

Descartes, in a letter to More, writes: "I call extended only what is imag­inable as having parts distinct from one another" ["ita illud solum quod est imaginabile, ut habens partes extra partes, . . . dico esse extensum"].7This certainly represents a good description of this conceptual nucleus which consists of continuity and possible division. Malebranche, in turn, con­siders this nucleus and describes it as an object composed of intelligible parts and including "outsides and distances."8 However, he affirms as early as the Responses to Arnauld that "the intelligible segment of a circle is smaller than the same circle and occupies neither more nor less space since it occupies no place."9 Is this a compromise? In no way: Malebranche con­ceives of an extension which extends itself—a spatializing space—but which remains a space because the subject has already spatialized itself. This is the attitude of a philosophy for which there is ideality of space, but without any reduction of extension to what is not itself.

Perceptible Extension and Intelligible Extension 51

Having failed to understand this, Laporte fell into several errors: (1) He wonders, "how can we understand that something immaterial

and unextended could represent matter, or could be used by God as a model for creating it?"10 Now it is precisely because it is merely representative that intelligible extension can represent effective extension. Laporte does not distinguish between the unextended in the sense of psychological interi-ority and the unextended in the sense of ideality: the former inextension is opposed to the thought of extension whereas the latter makes it possible.

(2) He writes,

In this case, the known object, in that it is known by pure knowledge, is the idea of an entirely nude extension, colorless, invisible: in short, the idea of empty space, or more precisely (the notion of the void being as chimerical for Malebranche as it was for Descartes) the idea of air

and in this regard he quotes, in a footnote, a fragment of the Response to R4gis, chap. II, § 3: "Since air is invisible, this idea does not modify my soul with some color nor with some sensible perception in order to represent it, but with a pure perception."11 However, this does not signify that the intel­ligible is merely attenuated sensibility. This purity is entirely relative.

(3) From Malebranche's having written that intelligible extension is "the immediate object of the mind when it thinks about bodies which do not exist,"12 Laporte deduces that intelligible extension is nothing more than imaginary extension, that it is "part of what makes up these images, of which contemporary psychology often still makes one of the ingredients of the psy­chic world as opposed to the physical world,"13 and that it only resides in our consciousness. This is an error because Malebranche does not think con­sciousness is closed: its meanings are not its own. Here again Laporte mis­takes the example for a definition and believes them to be interchangeable. Malebranche, precisely because he is a classic philosopher, escapes from realism by means of illusion (dream, hallucination, the error of amputees), but this is not to say that ideality is illusion. Psychological immanence is here only a transition toward transcendental immanence.

The real difficulty would be this: "Does there exist a way to include in the idea of extension the total reality of extension?" Malebranche writes,

[God] possesses everything which is real and perfect in creatures, without any imperfection, without any limitation. My hand is not my arm. It is real, but it contains, so to speak, the negation of my arm and of all the rest of

' the universe.14

Now in God such negations have no place, and Malebranche, who knows this well, adds, "But in God there is no nothingness."15 How, then, can the

52 FIFTH LECTURE

divine Word represent extension? Malebranche does not respond except by a categorical refusal:

That if I am asked to explain clearly how the divine Word contains bodies in an intelligible way, or how it is possible that the divine substance, although perfectly simple, is representative of creatures or participatable by creatures, I will respond that it is a property of the infinite which appears incomprehensible to me, and I will leave it at that.16

In other words, is the constitutive nothingness of creatures a simple pri­vation of being? If nothingness is nothing, we are on the path which leads to Spinoza. Otherwise it can be asked whether God remains God, since he does not have in him this real nothingness. Now the Correspondance avec Mairan maintains the reality of the reciprocal exteriority of the parts of extension. A "cubic foot of extension," whether there is something around it or not, will remain what it is. Since it is the negation of all others, it will maintain its existence:

What makes one cubic foot different from all others is its own being, its existence. Whether there are beings of the same or a different nature, if this is possible, or whether there is nothing which surrounds it, it will always be what it is.17

To Mairan, who objects that if ball A were a substance, "it would be infinite, for who would limit it?" Malebranche responds: "Nothing, I will reply. Because nothing is required to limit it."18 Therefore Malebranche chooses resolutely to say that the alleged nothingness of things is not nothing; since they are not God, things must have their existence in themselves.

Going back to a perceptible extension, instinct, natural judgment: all these themes assume a "connection with existence" outside clear and dis­tinct thought.

sixmuiciura Causality in the Relationships

between the Soul and the Body

Does Malebranche find causality in God alone?This is what seems to emerge from the texts. However, the efficacy of God's will escapes

our clear understanding:

You ask me for a clear and distinct idea of this infinite efficacy, which gives and conserves the being of all things. Your asking is inappropriate. You are asking me about God's power; ask me about his wisdom if you want me to satisfy you now. I do not give men a distinct idea which corresponds to the word power or efficacy; because God did not give any real power to crea­tures and because I must share ideas only in order to make God's worries and the wisdom of his way known.1

We must therefore content ourselves with knowing that it is impossible for God to be inefficacious.

Moreover, Malebranche shows himself to be anti-Cartesian in regards to the creation of organized beings; for him the laws of nature are not—as for Descartes—prior to the formation of organisms: they come into play only after "the first impression of motion wisely distributed which would suffice to form at once the animals and the plants."2 Finality, then, is reintroduced.

God himself is only accessible by means of the "short proof" of feeling. True knowledge of God (for fallen humanity), that which results in our timing toward him, is grace, that is to say a counterpleasure. Feeling alone can reveal to us an entire dimension of divine life; this profound life of God is accessible only by grace.

53

54 SIXTH LECTURE

Feeling enlightens us indirectly about the exceptions God had granted before original sin, in favor of Adam, relative to the laws of the union of the soul and the body The soul in this Edenic state "was never interrupted invol­untarily in its meditations and in its ecstasy"3 And Malebranche adds, "When you are deep in thought and the light fills and delights you, do you not feel in yourself a remnant of this power?"4 Unlike Descartes, Malebranche did not build a "two part" philosophy

[We did not feel compelled to leave this lecture out of our text, despite its extreme brevity. Let us remember (see supra, p. 27) that it was a cor­rected oral presentation and not, strictly speaking, a lecture.—J.D.]

SEVENTH LECTURE

Theology and the Union of the Soul and the Body

Malebranche distinguished between knowledge arrived at through ideas and a knowledge through feeling: what we know from the

mere fact that we are. Does theology not also, just as the knowledge of extension, introduce the recognition of a realm of experience which could not be understood from our activity as observers? Is there not a nonobserv-able knowledge, at least of the value of God, which would remain opaque and should remain so for reasons drawn from the very nature of God?

At first Malebranche directs his criticism against religious experience. However, he encounters such difficulties that thereafter he moves toward a compromise: religious experience, however obscure it might be and remain, becomes superimposed upon an absolute rationality.

(A) As soon as Malebranche examines the relationship of understanding to the will, we see that he subordinates the will to understanding. The will does not constitute a part of the soul's essence, for "the mind's essence con­sists only in thought." The will is only a modality; further, it is inseparable:

The power of volition, though it is not essential to it, is inseparable from the mind—as mobility, though not essential to it, is inseparable from matter. For just as immovable matter is inconceivable, so a mind incapable of willing or of some natural inclination is inconceivable.1

Nothing is more obscure than this status of a modification inseparable from what it modifies. A mind without a will would be "altogether useless, since the mind . . . would not love the good for which it was created."2There is no

55

56 SEVENTH LECTURE

will without thought, but the relationship is not reciprocal, at least in prin­ciple: "Willing is not the essence of the mind, since willing presupposes per­ception."3 The will, then, is subordinate. It is in the relationships of perfec­tion that the will finds, in itself, what sets it in motion. Thought is already "relationship to ."The will is but one aspect of the movement which carries us toward God. This law does not allow any exceptions: "men [are] capable of some perceptible love or hate only because they are capable of a spiritual love or hate."4 "God produces whatever is of a real nature in the sensation of concupiscence."5 Morality, then, is defined as a search for happiness. All these theses imply the conception of a human person naturally ordered to an end. Evil is merely a privation, and the world appears as an obstacle to the soul's movement toward God. Faith is only a short-cut for signifying to feeling what could just as easily be signified to reason. An almost naturalistic formula like "I gave to mankind this celestial bread . . . to show them out­wardly that I am the Bread which now nourishes the substance of their souls"6 renders manifest to reason a truth which is not of its order. We read further in the Meditations cbretiennes: "Since most men are not made for reflective work . . . they must learn about their obligations by reading the Holy Scriptures."7 The life of Christ offers us "a faultless model." But know, adds the Word, "that in order for you to conform to it even more surely, you must consult the order such as it is in itself."8 The recourse to Holy Scrip­tures, then, is merely a simple expedient. "Dealing with fools, [the Son of God] used a kind of foolishness to make them wise."9 For the same reason, grace will be a holy concupiscence, a counterpleasure:

It is because desire puts us out of order and, to conquer it, God must inspire us with a different desire which is entirely holy; it is because, for us to acquire the equilibrium of a perfect freedom, we must have a coun­terweight—since we have a weight pulling us to the ground—which raises us to heaven.10

There is no essential difference, at this level, between nature and grace. Christ is occasional cause just as any other phenomenon. Grace, in this con­text, is a simple restoration of nature: these are two species of the same genus.

(B) It was difficult for Malebranche to stop there. Even if the will is a movement toward God, this will must be distinguished from our will, in the ordinary meaning of the word. This will toward God is the same whether we will or don't will. Our natural love for God never increases nor dimin­ishes, although presently, at every moment, it can be distracted by finite goods which monopolize it. Our action is present love. Only this love is constitutive of ourselves.11 The problems heretofore avoided are now going to reappear in relationship to this present love.

Theology and the Union of the Soul and the Body 57

The natural love of God is not yet us. In the beginning, however, he did permit that disorder which is sin. What is the difference between natural love and present love? Natural love concerns being, and sin inclines us toward well-being. What happened when we sinned? We considered the relationships of perfection poorly. Malebranche provides four reasons for this, three of which are deficient:

(1) We are finite minds which need time. Consequently, our willed will (volonte voulue) is not at the same level as our willing will (volonte voulante).12—But then, God would be responsible for sin! (2)" [0]ur senses diffuse our soul throughout our body . . . "13—But it is God who is the cre­ator of the senses! (3) We don't have an idea of the soul, but only an inner feeling.14 But this must be precisely the case!15 (4) Since the Fall, "the union of our mind with our bodies has changed to dependence."16 This response is better; but how was the original sin possible? If we introduce sin as an indispensable event in order to understand the human person, we then renounce constituting a philosophy of human nature, since we no longer possess an Adamic nature. Human nature or the natural love of God retreats before sin. "God withdrew from [man] and no longer wanted to be an inte­gral part of man."17 It follows that our natural inclinations are no longer knowable by feeling. Was the original sin "an act without consequence"? According to Malebranche himself, however, it threw our nature into chaos. Moreover, is our "nature" anything more than an artificial construct?

At this stage, Malebranche minimizes the consequences of sin. Sin does not lead to any change in God's wishes. God had given Adam the power to completely master his body's actions. He did not have to maintain this priv­ilege for a rebellious creature and therefore did not change his will by pun­ishing us.18 Moreover, the natural love of God is in full effect after the sin: it is an equal contest between good and evil in the regenerated human person.19 Adam, on the other hand, did not have a relative freedom but an absolute freedom. Aware of the difficulties that all of this involves, after the Search Malebranche adopts a new conception of religion and of religious philosophy, and he takes the exact opposite position to his first theses.

Could the history of the church have achieved nothing? Could it con­stitute but a vicious circle? Could it end with a reestablishment of the golden age, in a circular evolution? No: the world redeemed by Jesus Christ is better than the world before the Fall; "it is worth more than the same uni­verse in its initial state."20 Therefore sin is not merely a temporary interrup­tion of the world's equilibrium. The world has yet to be made: the present world is "a neglected work."21 "God wanted to teach us that it is the world to come which will properly be his work."22 Religion ceases to be retro­spective in order to become prospective. The notion of creation is turned upside-down: the human person is no longer subject to a finality but becomes capable of absolute initiative. In the Meditations chr&iennes,

58 SEVENTH LECTURE

Malebranche rejects the idea that certain people would be predestined for salvation. God wants to save everyone. The Word does not choose which people will be saved but only builds his spiritual temple in its general out­lines. "It makes no difference whether it is Peter or John who creates a given effect in my temple."23 The Word does not choose this or that stone: it is my will which will determine which place I will occupy. The Word opens for competition a place in his spiritual temple. "I constantly act in this way so as to encourage the most people I can to enter the church."24 "The people," and not all the people. If everyone were saved, this would, says the Word, "make my temple deformed by making it big and rambling."25 The Word therefore, which wants to save all people, cannot in fact save them all. Is this only for esthetic reasons, for reasons of harmony, as, for example, the use of the word deformed indicates? Malebranche alleges another, more interesting reason: if the Word were to give everyone a feeling grace "granting certain victory,"26 the human person would no longer exist. "Feeling grace diminishes worthiness. . . . Bliss is virtue's reward; it is not its principle. When we sacrifice everything to it, we do not slaughter any victim."27 In order to save everyone, everyone would have to be trans­formed into objects. Here Malebranche disavows the morality of happiness: as a Christian, he must have remembered that "he who wants to save his life will lose it." In this perspective, hell is the condition which demands that all those who save themselves possess freedom and sacrifice, and that the temple be a human temple. The glory of God thus takes three forms, which are as so many distinct glories:

1. The "glory of the Architect," in the order of finality. This glory would not have been, however, a sufficient reason for creation;28

2. "The Architect also receives a second glory from the spectators and admirers of his building "29 Their homage restores the world to God;

3. Supreme glory: not satisfied with "recognizing" this world, we accomplish its divinization ourselves through sacrifice:

But it is only Christians, only those believing in the Divinity of Jesus Christ, who truly count their own being and this vast universe we admire as nothing,... the annihilation to which their faith reduces them gives true reality before God.30

Here Malebranche introduces the distinction between the profane and the sacred: this world itself reduces itself to nothing in order to honor God:

Our actions indeed derive their morality in the relationship they have with immutable order . . . but they do not derive their supernatural dignity and as it were, their infinity and their divinity except through Jesus Christ.31

Theology and the Union of the Soul and the Body 59

In the order of perfections, there exists no relationship between humankind and the infinite, but Jesus Christ's act of sacrifice creates a relationship between humanity and God. His incarnation, his sacrifice, his priesthood, "clearly proclaiming that there is no relationship between creator and crea­ture also establishes thereby so great a relationship between them that God delights and takes perfect pride in his work."32 Therefore this sacrifice must appear as a reciprocal recognition of God by the human person and of the human person by God. We are irreplaceable in this act of self-denial. Sacri­fice is an absolute initiative while being at the same time finality; therefore the difficulty is overcome. The love of Christ is the love of someone for someone and in this way transcends the alternative of finality versus initia­tive. Malebranche thus establishes a theory of religious experience in which practical love resolves theoretical difficulties.

Malebranche himself speaks of "experience" in regards to religion: "the facts of religion or the established dogmas are my experiences in matters of theology."33 Henceforth the myth is no longer a simple expedient:

It might be said .. . that the objections raised against the main articles of our faith, especially against the mystery of the Trinity, are so strong that they cannot be given solutions that are clear and convincing and that they do not in any way shock our feeble reason, for these mysteries are indeed incomprehensible.34

We no longer evoke the possibility of an intelligence of faith.

When my disciples reflect and consult with all the respect and all the required application, I reveal to their mind in a purely intelligible way several truths which they knew with certainty only because of the infallibility of my word. However, because religion contains mysteries completely incomprehensible to the human mind...; the shortest and surest way to learn religion and morality is to read the Scriptures and to listen to the Church.35

In the Dialogues on Metaphysics, Malebranche quotes Saint Paul (Eph. 2:3,12): before Christ, "We are in this world asAtheists, without God, without a benefactor."36 God can be completely understood by nothing other than Christ's love which, destroying our finite being, causes God to be in the world. Our relationship to Christ is not a relationship based on reason. In this new perspective, God is not of the order of being, and we can no longer conceive of human nature as a naturally oriented movement toward God.

Moreover, the relations of the soul to the body appear as exemplary: these are the same categories which make the union of the soul and the body and the union of Christ with the church thinkable. "I give life to my church as the soul gives life to the body," says the Word in the Meditations chr€tiennes$7And the Treatise on Nature and Grace already clearly stated

60 SEVENTH LECTURE

[ WJhen we speak of the action of the soul of Jesus, we consult ourselves. . . . Jesus Christ does not act on his members in a particular way except by successive influences. In the same way our soul does not move, at one single time, all the muscles of our body38

The history of God in the world can be thought of only in terms of human categories.

At the outside, this conception of faith would be more similar to Kierkegaard's than to the traditional conception of faith. Faith, according to Kierkegaard, is no longer faith in something or in some being. Of those who love Christ, it can be said that they are Christian because their love always remained beneath what it should be. We cannot, then, relate to God as to a comprehensible object. But Malebranche backs away when faced with the consequences of a conception in which we would renounce seeing things from God's point of view. He wavers between the two attitudes and places himself most often in God's point of view, as he does, for example, when he meditates on miracles.

Although they proceed from God's particular desires, miracles are fore­seen from all eternity in the act of creation:

[W]hen God performs a miracle and does not act in accordance with other general laws which are known to us, I claim that either God acts in accor­dance with other general laws which are unknown to us, or what he does then is determined at that time by certain circumstances which He had in view from all eternity when He enacts that simple, eternal, invariable act which contains both the general laws of His ordinary providence and also exceptions to these very laws.39

Therefore, even here, Malebranche maintains God's point of view. Finally, he resolves the problem of monsters and disorder in the same

spirit. We read in the Treatise on Nature and Grace,

If rain falls on certain lands, and if the sun scorches others;... if a child comes into the world with a malformed and useless head growing from his breast, and makes him wretched, it is not that God has willed these things by his particular wills; it is because he has established laws for the com­munication of motion, of which these effects are necessary consequences: laws so simple, and at the same time so fruitful, that they serve to produce everything beautiful that we see in the world, and even regain in a little time the most general mortality and sterility.40

The philosophy of monsters and disorder remains subordinate to a more fundamental order.

EIGHTH LECTURE

From Malebranche to Maine de Biran

In ^Experience humaine et la causality physique, Leon Brunschvicg established a parallel between the philosophies of Maine de Biran and

Malebranche, and we shall begin by examining this parallel. In this work, Brunschvicg affirms that the Cartesians had saved philosophy by transfer­ring to ideas the prerogative of evidence granted to sensory experience by the Scholastics: "The evidence invoked by Scholasticism is evidence of a sensory order; Cartesian evidence, upon which Malebranche relies, is evi­dence of an intelligible order."1 Biran, for his part, works out a "transfer of evidence," but by displacing it again, "if not towards sensory data, at least towards an experiential certainty."2 Bringing the philosopher's gaze back to the body, he abandons traditional philosophy and contrasts it with a non-philosophy, working "to the advantage of this very skepticism, whose poison [he] wanted to eliminate."3

Brunschvicg praises the pages of Elucidation Fifteen in which Male­branche contests the implication of the experience of effort, and he con­curs with it: "In the supposed inner feeling of movement, precise analysis necessarily discerns the subjectivity of the feeling and the reality of the movement: this latter is not necessarily linked to the former."4 Conscious­ness of muscular effort is doubly deceptive, since it implies neither knowl­edge of the means which we use to act on the muscle involved, nor certi­tude that this muscle is actually moved. Brunschvicg commends Male­branche for having written:

It seems to me evident that through inner sensation or consciousness the mind does not even know the movement of the arm it animates. Through

61

62 EIGHTH LECTURE

consciousness it knows only its own sensation, for the soul is conscious only of its thoughts. Through inner sensation or consciousness they know the sensation they have of the movement of their arm, but it is not through consciousness that they are informed of the movement of their arm, of the pain they suffer there, any more than they are of the colors they see in objects.5

[Note that in this work Malebranche seems to retract what he had said con­cerning "natural judgments." He adds, it is true, "Or, if one doesn't want to acknowledge it, I say that the inner feeling is not infallible, because error is almost always found in the sensations when they are composite."6 There is a hesitation in his thought.] Brunschvicg appreciates such a clear distinction thus established between "consciousness of self" and "consciousness of things." He also praises Malebranche's critique of intellectual effort:

Malebranche, with this incomparable, in-depth gaze that seventeenth-century philosophers cast on the unconscious, shows how intellectual effort, how the will to understand, are only appeals to intelligence: intelligence tran­scends these appeals, because ideas are realities of an entirely different order than the sensory givens of consciousness.7

Authentic philosophy must avoid any contamination of the idea by psycho­logical determinations, must establish itself in the clear idea and discover on this level an autonomous dimension of truth. No problem is raised con­cerning the origin of the idea. Philosophy consists of a conversion, clari­fying, beyond psychological events, the pure relationship of the mind to the idea. Starting with shrouded forms of the idea, the philosopher will pursue the total idea.

Biran, on the other hand, displaces the notion of evidence again. He takes as his point of departure the body's experience and its motility. He contrasts with mathematical evidence or with reason a psychological evi­dence which he also refers to as metaphysical* This evidence cannot be communicated directly:

The signs which we use in metaphysics can awake and excite the imme­diate feeling of this evidence, proper to each mind, which is, as we say, compos sui; but these signs, always arbitrary and conventional, have no relationship with the signified subject: they produce inner evidence, but they do not create it; this inner evidence is prior to them, and signs would not exist without it.9

Unlike mathematical signs which convey their meaning, the philosopher's words cannot communicate exactly to the reader's mind an " 'entirely inner' evidence which nothing outside can reveal."10 This is strictly individual

From Malebranche to Maine de Biran 63

experience. The philosopher can only invite us to bring about for ourselves this coincidence with our "ego-ness" (egoite); his discourse is a kind of incantation.

Brunschvicg infers that this is tantamount to refusing to accept any transmissible philosophy. More critical of Biran than he is of Bergson (and this dissymmetry is surprising), he singles out one doctrine "which chal­lenges in such a clear way (we would be tempted to say: in such an insolent way) the rights of intelligence and of representation,"11 and he cannot con­cede Biran's writing:

When it is a question of facts involving an inner sense (it is this very sense or reflection which is capable of conceiving of them), any other faculty, such as imagination, or even reason by itself, would be ineffective and incompetent to judge. It is above all in this context that the only true and equitable judgments are those among peers.12

Going back to one of Leibniz's tenets, Biran criticizes philosophers more than once for "asking what they know":13 "There is good reason to exclaim at the strange behavior of men who torment themselves over misconceived questions: 'They seek what they know already, and they know not what they seek.'"14 He objects to them citing the evidence concerning the rela­tion of the soul and the body. Here there is no knowledge to rediscover: a statement of fact suffices,

this relationship being a primitive given of consciousness or of man's exis­tence, the mystery would be more in the possibility or the very necessity of conceiving or believing in the absolute reality of each of the terms sep­arated from each other.15

And Brunschvicg ironically points out,

The problem of the union of the soul and the body disappears as a prob­lem, because it assumes that the thinking substance is known as a separate reality, and this conception is merely a fiction of the understanding.16

He might as well say that Biran transforms the problem into a solution. What was clear for Malebranche is obscure for Biran. What is clear for him was obscure for Malebranche. Such a primacy of what for Malebranche was "absolute night"17 places the Biranian doctrine "beyond any asking for expla­nation and elucidation."18

But is there, as Brunschvicg believes, on the one hand philosophy and on the other its negation? Is the question posed as he feels it should be posed, and would not Biran's "nonphilosophy" be more the expression of an effort toward heightened consciousness, annexing new territories to phi-

64 EIGHTH LECTURE

losophy? Brunschvicg must recognize19 that Biran describes the experience of effort as scrupulously as Malebranche had. He knows that the conscious­ness of effort is accompanied by a total ignorance of its means and that it does not precede consciousness of movement, but is contemporaneous with it;

Every act of the will is truly indivisible and instantaneous in the fact of inner sense. In considering this action from a physiological point of view, I distinguish therein two elements or moments in which it takes place. The first corresponds to the simple motor determination or the release of the central impulse on the nerves. Yet this part of the action, thus limited to the nervous system, doesn't seem to necessitate carrying with it a partic­ular inner perception: but in assuming that there was such a perception and that it was not necessarily confused with the perception of resistance or inertia of the contracted muscle which accompanies it or immediately follows it, we would still not yet be able to associate it with the symbolic sign of individuality or of self, which can begin to recognize itself or to exist for itself only insofar as it can distinguish itself as subject of the effort, of a term which resists. . . . The second moment corresponds to what takes place in the motor system, from the instant the muscle contracts until the contraction's effect is transmitted or reported to the central nervous system, where the muscle sensation then takes on this characteristic of repudiation which constitutes the inner realization of the effort, insepa­rable from a resistance, or the inner apperception of the self, which knows itself by distinguishing itself from the resisting term.20

Consciousness of the effort emerges, then, from the confrontation of a deci­sion and of information regarding the organism's reaction.

We are quick to say "motor subject or thinking subject," as if they were terms of an alternative. Biran did not reduce consciousness to motility but he identified motility and consciousness. The primitive fact is consciousness of an irreducible relationship between two terms irreducible themselves. It is not a consciousness becoming movement, but a consciousness reverber­ating in movements. It is neither an interior fact nor an exterior fact: it is the consciousness of self as relationship of the I to another term. Therefore it is not a question of an empirical philosophy which would fill conscious­ness with muscular phenomena, but a philosophy which recognizes as fun­damental a certain antithesis, the antithesis of the subject and of the term which bears its initiatives.

"Knowledge is arrived at necessarily by an antithesis;"

. . . everything is antithesis for the human person; the human person is in itself a primitive and indelible antithesis: it forms an antithesis with the uni­verse. All beings, perhaps, reveal themselves in this way in their essence, including God, whom it is impossible to conceive of as a solitary being.21

From Malebranche to Maine de Biran 65

Everything in Biran's work is based on this antithetical view. What is hence­forth embedded at the heart of philosophy is no longer the recognition of the I by the I, but the relationship of the I to what is not itself. Now for Brunschvicg, the antithesis is unintelligible, it is nonbeing. "It is impossible that the primitive fact be one fact, because it is, fundamentally, two facts."22

But if the antithesis were to appear as universal, as enveloping the very con­sciousness of the idea—motility, such as the ability to speak, serving as the basis for language—could we then continue to consider it unintelligible? Would it not be better to establish the identity of the idea with itself, a simple limit?

Moreover, does Brunschvicg's Kantianism allow him to criticize Biran in this way? Would not Biran contrast the pure existence of a fact to the clarity of the idea? But is not the Spinozistic affirmation of the idea, which Brun­schvicg accepts, also a simple fact? Is this presentation of the true idea to the mind of the philosopher something other than a fact? Confronted with the problem of the union of the soul and the body, Descartes admits that this union has its own clarity. Malebranche takes exception to this clarity, but he discovers in God the reasons for the union: he too did not avoid the problem. But Brunschvicg, for his part, does something entirely different: he suppresses it.

Every philosophy starts from a fact, but only the system which, starting from a fact, can account for other facts, will appear sound. Can idealism, for example, account for imagination? Can Biranism account for ideas? Beginning with a fact? This is true for all philosophies. The "transfer of evi­dence," instead of being a regression as Brunschvicg believes, is the very progress of philosophy. Brunschvicg himself, to the degree that he does not merely repeat what scholars say, is led to designate a term for those who read him the Mind, which cannot be expressed as scientific objects are. All philosophy is compelled to consider the metaphysical evidence of which Biran speaks. The mind is not completely whole in its works, otherwise there would no longer be any philosophy. It is Brunschvicg who suppresses problems: he speaks on behalf of a philosophy which considers itself as acquired, definitively in existence since the appearance of Cartesianism. But philosophy is a perpetual inquiry and must call into question ideal evi­dence itself.

Moreover, Brunschvicg's attitude has strange consequences. He accepts as self-evident the absolute distinction between consciousness of self and external sensibility. However, this distinction is in no way self-evident and doesn't stand up even in the light of Kantian philosophy: if I analyze, as Kant does, consciousness at work (in the Refutation of Idealism, for example), I must establish an integral relation between "consciousness of self" and "consciousness of things."

Brunschvicg takes presuppositions for norms when he refers, as Male-

66 EIGHTH LECTURE

branche did, to the amputees' illusion in order to discredit "the subjectivity of feeling."2^ Now, to agree with Malebranche that we feel pain in ampu­tated limbs "because if the corresponding fQaments of the brain are dis­turbed in the same way as if these parts had been injured, the soul feels a very real pain in these imaginary parts,"24 is not to invoke evidence but to adopt a theory which forms a system with Cartesian physiology. Today we cannot accept this sensorial theory of the "phantom limb" which replaced the theory that we maintain in us an implicit and global consciousness of the body, an "image of the body" subsisting after amputation. Therefore it is impossible to use it against the perception of the movement of the body itself, unless we condemn, on the pretext of saving philosophy, any devel­opment of effective knowledge. Is the authentic respect of science on the side of a philosophy which is only maintained at its expense? (It is also not a question of subordination, in the relationships between psychology and philosophy, psychology and science. Science is only a part of our experi­ence, and philosophy must be able to concern itself with all experience.)

The real question we can ask is the following: did Biran succeed in being a philosopher, or did he only contrast the exigencies of a psychology with philosophy? Is what he contrasted with Cartesianism a philosophy, a conception of Being, or only a psychology, a simple thematic ordering of an aspect of Being? Biran often gives the impression of leaning toward psy-chologism, for example, when he declares that he is elaborating a philos­ophy of touch and not of sight: this is an imprudent statement, because it is not a question of conceiving of the whole being as tactile, and the con­sciousness of vision is not challenged by the primitive fact. If Biran often did not measure up to philosophy, it is not for having questioned the evidence of the idea (because this inquiry is philosophy itself), but, on the contrary, for not having questioned Being itself.

Let us now examine the introduction to the Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie in order to discover what corresponds to the problem which we are posing. (We will consider other texts later on.)

Let us first take a look at the role played by the notion of fact in this work. Biran criticizes Condillac for taking one term as his point of depar­ture—sensation—which does not yet possess this characteristic:

Sensation, such as Condillac and Bonnet both viewed it, each from his own point of view, when they wanted to situate themselves at the origin of knowledge, simple sensation, I say, is not yet a fact.25

Biran, for his part, starts with thought, and in this sense he is Cartesian. (There are abstractions derived from the adjective and abstractions "derived from verbs"; the former have only a conventional value; the latter "express action with intense power"26 and thought is of this nature, different from

From Malebranche to Maine de Biran 67

sensation.) But beginning with this notion of fact, his position deviates from Descartes's position.

"All that which exists for us, all that we can perceive outside ourselves, feel in ourselves, conceive of in our ideas, is only given to us as fact."27 And, Biran adds,

There is a fact for us only to the degree that we have the feeling of our indi­vidual existence and the feeling of something, object or modification, which confirms this existence and is distinct or separated from it. Without this feeling of individual existence that we refer to in psychology as conscious­ness (conscium sui, compos sui), there is no fact that we can say is known, no knowledge of any sort: for a fact is nothing if it is not known, that is to say, if there is not an individual and permanent subject who knows.28

There is, then, a fact only for a witness. The fact contains a reference to someone to whom it occurs. It is this notion, and not immediately con­sciousness, that Biran takes for his point of departure. Consciousness is an "existence For Itself" (a notion that Biran rediscovers free from any Hegelian influence). Biran does not begin with a being which exhausts itself in the consciousness that it has of itself, but with a being which is in the process of becoming conscious that it exists, struggling for this consciousness against a pre-existing opaqueness, with a being which seeks to "become self." In the expression "fact of consciousness," the word fact (in the singular) is no longer understood the way psychologists understand it (as a world event). It denotes essential "facticity" of consciousness, a synthesis of inte-riority and exteriority.

This fact translates a relationship:

Every fact implies necessarily with it a relationship between two terms or two elements which are thus given in connection, without any one of these terms being able to be conceived in itself separately. Thus the self can know itself only in an immediate relationship with some impression which modifies it, and, reciprocally, the object or whatever the mode can be conceived only under the relationship to the subject which perceives or which feels. This is the origin of the very expressive title of primitive duality.2?

This duality is irreducible: "any evocation of the two elements to unity is absurd and implies a contradiction."30 And Biran writes a little further on in regards to categories,

Will we say that they are innate in the sense in which, as Leibniz says, the thinking subject is innate to itself? We will respond that this subject itself is not innate, but it is constituted as such in a fact or primitive relationship.31

68 EIGHTH LECTURE

Let us understand completely this word "constituted": the subject is not derived from something else, but refers itself by its very essence to some­thing else.

Starting from this position, Biran was able to elaborate this initial notion of original duality and to derive a philosophy from it. However, he did not really succeed: most often, rather than transcending the alternative of Condillac and Descartes, he lapses into the juxtaposition of reflection and empiricism. The Essai alternately adopts these two perspectives, wavering between the point of view of the primitive fact and the simple description of the "how" of consciousness. Now, if the primitive duality is irreducible, the theory of the primitive fact must be profoundly changed. The distinction between "primitive" and "derived" (Biran speaks of "dependencies" or of "immediate derivations from the primitive fact"32) cannot be conceived: everything is equally primitive. We cannot validly deduce categories on the basis of intimate experience, in order to subsequently apply them to things: the latter are not explained by the former. Biran should have adopted nei­ther the exterior model nor the interior model. If he had carried out a suffi­cient critique of the two orders of experience, external and internal, Biran would have realized the absolute parallelism of the problems which are posed in both instances. Moreover, there is a passage in which Biran accepts this parallelism. In dealing with external experience, he distinguishes between

the art of observing facts which offer themselves on their own to our senses, and another art of discovering those facts which hide themselves, in order to torment nature, as Bacon himself says, and of forcing it to reveal its secret to us.33

And he adds,

But if the first art of interior observation has been fortunately cultivated by psychologists, who are Locke's disciples, has the latter, much more difficult, that of inner experience, really been practiced?34

Thus, within, as well as without, the true method is an active inquiry and not just a simple recording. The very fact that he brings together the two series—internal and external—shows that Biran does not consider himself closer to one than to the other. There is no longer precedence given to the inner: inner experience must be an attempt to regain an interiority which is at first opaque. A text such as this is beyond empiricism: anticipating phe­nomenology, Biran seems in this work to move toward a philosophy which is indifferent to the distinction between interior and exterior. We can quote in this same context the page in which he quotes Lucretius:

From Malebranche to Maine de Biran 69

The knowledge which is involved here is not that of our sense, nor of for­eign impressions or wounds [Plagaeper sensus inflexae externa quasi vi. Lucretius] to which they are subject. All of this is not the self, which resides entirely in inner feeling or in the consciousness of this free activity which constitutes it.35

The relationship between the self and the senses is such here that we cannot treat the senses as simple modalities of the self, as a diminution of its unity: they are exterior to it.

When he studies the relationship between psychology (in the modern sense: as the science of the subject situated in the world) and reflection (as he understands it), Biran does not hesitate any less. Must we separate the self from sensibility? Is the self the condition of sensing or is it subsequent to it? Sometimes Biran separates the self from sensibility so that, while refer­ring continually to the Cogito, he nonetheless affirms that we can speak of "sensibility without self": simple affections, obscure perceptions, precon-sciousness.36 He criticizes Locke for positing, from the first sensation, the presence of an individual personality constituted from an innate self and without origin. He wants to show in opposition to Kant that the distinction between the form and the matter of knowledge is not "purely logical."37

Sometimes, on the other hand, he reaffirms his principle that the original duality is irreducible and inseparable: there is no longer any sensibility without self as there is no self without sensibility. In this spirit, he finds the Cartesian doubt opposed to the primitive fact: the world and the self are two absolutely correlative perspectives. But here again he hesitates, he wavers between "the primitive fact" (a Cartesian concept) and "the primitive facts" (Condillac's concept), in search of a third solution, more dialectical, which he glimpses without clinging to it, and which would be neither Cartesian nor empirical. He would like to explain simultaneously how there is reflective unity of experience (that is to say, totality) and how there is a temporal unfolding of experience (that is, genesis). Quoting the page from the Fondements de la psychologies in which Biran comments on the Dis­sertation of 1770 and writes, "the self, therefore, is truly abstrahens in its reflective action, and not abstractus? Brunschvicg observes that Biran was able "to glimpse Kant's original and seminal contribution, and how he was capable, through reflective analysis, to define the truly modern orientation of philosophical inquiry"39 But Biran sometimes goes—as we will see—in the opposite direction, connecting this inner capacity of reflection to the interiority of the voice: thus the body itself would reflect. . . . We see that Biran did not truly elaborate the third position he was aiming at.

Let us now consider the relationships between motility and thought. We distort Biran's thought by concentrating on the experience of the subject moving its body. Biran started with Schelling and Fichte (whom he quotes,

70 EIGHTH LECTURE

according to Degerando, in the Memoire sur la decomposition de la pensee40), and he borrowed from them the idea that the will is the condi­tion of the self. It is incorrect, then, to say that he neglected the thinking subject in favor of the motor subject. This error is due to the fact that Biran first gave an extrinsic and symbolic expose of his thoughts, translating his intuition in psychological terms. On the odier hand, this intuition is expressed in a direct way in the Essai sur les fondements de lapsychologie, where we can read,

If distinct perception is not prior, as I believe it to be, to whatever exer­cise of the will, the will too could not exist before a certain degree of per­ception, and although it is true to say that the thinking being can begin to know only inasmuch as it begins to act and to will, it is nonetheless true, according to ordinary expression, that we cannot want expressly what we do not know in any way.41

In other words, there is mutual implication between will and perception, which is not to say that Biran reduces one to the other. What does this mutual implication mean? That we must recast the theory of perception. Currently, the psychology of form considers the "perceptive sector" and the "motor sector" as elements of some global system. Perceiving is to orient oneself toward a thing, to zero in on it. Acting is to put in motion an inten­tion endowed with a meaning. This requires that knowledge be a "way of behaving in relation to," and that action be integrated with the perceiving self. Biran speaks in the same vein of a case of complete paralysis, in which the individual no longer has the feeling of existing. What he wants us to understand is that there is no difference between moving his body and per­ceiving it. Biran does not want to dismiss consciousness, but rather to rede­fine it.

This is what a page on the experience of freedom shows: "I conclude from this," he writes,

that freedom, considered as the feeling of a power at work, as the intimate feeling of my existence, proves to us its reality. And as Descartes said: I feel myself existing (or I think), therefore I really exist, we will say the same thing with evidence of the same order of primacy: I feel myself free, there­fore I am free. If this feeling of power were to deceive me, if I were still able to doubt, if, at the moment when I determine myself, when I perform an effort, it is another being, another invisible power which is the cause of my determination, which appropriates my effort and executes my will; I could also doubt, when I feel or apperceive my individual existence, whether it is not another being which exists in my place.42

From Malebranche to Maine de Biran 71

Biran only wanted to restore, as this page shows, to the "I think" what he considered its full meaning. Here he speaks as if Descartes accepted with reservation the occasionalist idea, and he affirms the motor capability of the body in terms which are the very ones by which Descartes affirmed the exis­tence of the self. The "I think" is not eliminated, but broadened: if I can call into doubt such and such sensory data relative to the outside world, I must ultimately show how I feel myself situated in this world. Malebranche's cri­tique does not explain to us how we can have the very notion of effective movement: I would not ask a single question about the means of my move­ment if I were not first conscious of moving my body.

Finally, the Essai sur les fondements contains an attempt to introduce the notion of a corporeal spatiality, overcoming the alternative of reflec­tivity and empiricism. There exists, next to exterior space, indefinitely divis­ible, which is the object of sight or of touch, an inner extension of the body, object of immediate apperception. This extension is the locus of all internal impressions:

In considering all the moving parts of the body united in a single mass, sub­ject to the impulse of a single and same will, the subject of the current effort, which distinguishes itself from this composite, which distinguishes itself from that composite which resists by its inertia and obeys the motor capability, this subject will have the apperception of this resisting conti­nuity that is to say of an inner extension, but still without limits or dis­tinction among parts.... In order for the impressions to be localized in the different parts of the interior space of the body itself, these parts must be differentiated or be separated, so to speak, some outside others by the repeated exercise of their own immediate sense. But the general muscular system finds itself naturally divided into several partial systems, which offer as many distinct terms to the motor will. The more these points of division are multiplied, the more the immediate, inner apperception becomes clear and becomes differentiated, the more the individuality or the unity of the permanent subject of the action manifests itself by its very opposition to the plurality and variety of changing terms. By placing oneself outside each of them, the self learns to place them outside each other, to know their common limits and to relate the impressions to this process.45

Correlatively to this spatiality prior to space, Biran introduces a method involving simultaneous analysis of inside and outside:

Our primordial power or the empire of the will over the parts of the body is obviously known, but only in that it is felt and not in that it is repre­sented to the outside as the existence [of] a foreign mechanism could be. In considering only this representation, and considering the exterior move­ment as an effect which the will would be assumed to be the cause of, it is certainly true to say that power cannot be known in the effect and vice

72 EIGHTH LECTURE

versa, for these two conceptions are heterogeneous, the one being based only on an inner sense, and the other on an outer sense.... How can we not see the opposition which occurs between these two types of knowl­edge, opposition such that at the moment when the will is going to move a part of the body, if the instruments of mobility were able to be repre­sented instead of being felt or being apperceived interiority, the will would never be born? By the same token, if we were to represent to ourselves the nerves of the retina and the light source, we would no longer see colors; and how could eyes designed to see inside of themselves see what is out­side? It is thus that in order to know objectively the hidden workings of our own volitions, we must be simultaneously self and other.44

Therefore knowledge of the body can be neither purely exterior nor purely interior. If we want to both inhabit our body and know it, we must be simul­taneously ourselves and another. Therein lies the point of departure for a general attempt to legitimize the primitive duality of within and without.

The notion of fact, the relationships between reflection and psy­chology, the relationships between thought and motility, corporeal spa-tiality: we will have to follow these four themes in their elaboration prior to and after the Essai.

NiNTHiECTmE Biran and the

Philosophers of the Cogito

A s we have already seen, the notion of fact plays an important role in Biran's thought and it is to this notion that we shall return first.

Biran does not use the word "fact" in its usual sense (something which comes from without and which we observe); rather he seeks to explore new territory. By "fact" he means something which is grasped in the nascent state of reflection, where reflecting and reflected are in the process of dis­tinguishing one another. Fact, thus understood, is not something which exists in itself, facing me; the consciousness we have of the fact is not free and distant with respect to it. Biran takes as his theme a reflection turning toward the unreflected in which it takes root, an activity emerging from passivity.

The Cogito must therefore be profoundly modified. Descartes purchased certitude at the price of a renunciation of all relationships to anything other than self. The void which I created measures certitude. Indeed, we can say that the Cogito does not make me lose everything: I discover as thought what doubt had set aside. However, I lose contact with what is not thought; what remains is the intention of thought, not its content as thought of this or that. The object which I saw becomes blurred; what remains is nothing more than a presumptive vision.

With the Biranian notion of "fact" we would conceive of a Cogito of operative or current thought, a Cogito containing implications or uncer­tainties. Its affirmation sums up and condenses a series of intuitions yet to come. If I say, for example, that I actually see, an increasing number of such

73

74 NINTH LECTURE

intuitions intervenes: all the possible developments that I allow myself by saying that I see blue or red, potential intuitions which arise to obscure the Cogito and to include in it a series of relationships of the self with the world, relationships which are not made explicit and which lack complete trans­parence. The Cogito becomes certitude in the presence of certain results. Has it not been said, "The more one thinks, the less certitude one has"? On the contrary, certainty is a prerequisite for analyses and reflections: it is cer­tainty that makes them possible. This experience of truth must be there first: if I call it into question, my search for truth loses all meaning. Thinking is grasping at results for which we do not have all the premises. We should not base actual thought on possible thought, but rather just the opposite. Step by step, for example, my certitude of the color red or of the shape tri­angle becomes part of a system of certainties called the world, and in which I find myself involved from the moment I exist.

We could thus conceive of the abandonment of criterio-logical philos­ophy based on the experience of error, in favor of a philosophy supported by the experience of truth, supported by current certainty. Doubt must not be understood as the resolve to deny as long as possible, but rather as a break with our immediate certitude, destined to make us examine our certitude in depth: an awe rather than a mistrust. The evil genius, as the possibility of error, would still be present, but with a different demeanor: the idea that we are threatened by error as soon as we devote our attention to something our thought cannot fully embrace, instead of being a hypothesis onerous to the point of leaving us only intimacy with ourselves, would reveal, rather, the inti­macy of my thought with itself in its transcendence toward the object. To doubt would be to rejoin one's self at a distance, to anticipate one's self.

We should ask ourselves if the certitude described by Descartes, exam­ined more closely, does not already contain a transcendence of itself. If we look for what lies behind the words of the Cogito, we see that this identity of thought with itself is grasped only in its transcendence. The "I" would no longer be a cautiousness, but a possible success. Likewise, the subject of freedom would be understood less as choice and power to make multiple choices than as choice already made, an exercise following from choices already accomplished.

Such is the direction indicated by the Biranian concept of the identity of thought with willful motility: although we are consciousness and freedom, we have to become them, to manifest them, to make ourselves consciousness and freedom. We must then accept thinking of ourselves as a living antithesis. We could thus transcend the alternative of spiritual interi-orization and psychologism. Brunschvicg writes in this regard,

In the description [that Biran] presents of a fact of feeling, there is some­thing which clearly contradicts the constitutive nature of a fact as fact:

Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito 75

feeling should be capable of transcending the immediacy of the moment at which it actually takes place in order to attain, beyond the present of the immediate apperception, the virtuality which preceded the data of the inti­mate sense and which is destined to survive it. In other words, and before recognizing that Biran's affirmations are open—I would not even say to truth, but to meaning—it would be necessary to allow for an experience which would assure us the possession both of self and the beyond self, an experience which would seem as if it could at the same time be, both on its own level of transitory manifestation and on a higher level of persistent entity, taking place in time and retaining, nevertheless, the plenitude of time. Such an experience is a psychological monster, whose paternity Biran, understandably, hesitated to claim.1

"Psychological monster"? Perhaps, but we become monsters precisely because we temporalize ourselves. In fact, Biran most often wavered between the terms of these various alternatives. He foresaw, for example, the priority of the actual over the possible, of existence over essence. At least once he criticized Descartes for having questioned whether the world was real instead of seeking to see the world. He foresaw a spatiality of the body prior to objective spatiality, a presence of the outside world within the consciousness of self. He saw that consciousness of self is at the same time consciousness of the body. He correctly stated that although we are con­sciousness, we have to transform this consciousness of ourselves into knowledge of ourselves by means of signs. But all Of this is constantly com­promised. At the same time that he roots the self in a body brought closer to the self, he lapses again into physiologism (second and third parts of the Essat). He resumes, in dealing with the self, the position of an outside observer, and he treats the self as something that can be explained. He con­ditions the primitive fact from the outside and comes back to the point of view of an outsider, thus risking falling outside the confines of philosophy and becoming a psychologist.

Biran would have abandoned psychology only if he had discovered cor­poreality, the lived world, and others in this new dimension, instead of dealing merely with a portion of being. Most often he will oppose discipline to discipline, psychology to ontology. Speaking of Malebranche, he will criticize him for having assumed the ontological point of view, which implies that he considers himself a simple psychologist and admits to not engaging in philosophy.

Let's verify all this briefly by reviewing first the texts in which Biran coinpares himself to the philosophers of the Cogito: Descartes, Male­branche, Kant; and then those texts in which he treats the problem in a related fashion in regards to space and time, to the senses, and to signs. These latter texts assume the main problem to be solved and show how Biran conceived of consciousness.

76 NINTH LECTURE

Most certainly Biran wanted to connect at one and the same time both the form and the contents of experience. The philosopher, especially if one is an idealist like Kant, is not, in principle, concerned with contents, but with their form. The psychologist tends to reduce form to contents. How­ever, we can conceive of a philosophy which does away with this absolute distinction and considers form as the manner in which content is presented. Form would then be traced, in filigree, in content. Psychology and philos­ophy thus become identified with one another without any damage being done, because philosophy, henceforth, grasps the universal structures of our world. Now Biran often forgets these universal structures, and this is espe­cially noticeable in regards to time. He points out, correctly, that lived time begins with the absolute initiatives of a subject, the motor subject. But it would have been interesting to show how a future dimension, flowing from future to past, becomes established first in the experience of the free sub­ject. Nothing of the sort is found in Biran's work: lived time flows, for him, from past to future. Contents should intervene in such an analysis only if they bring something to the universal structure of time. But Biran constantly pre­supposes the intuition of a classical temporality inside of which our initia­tives successively posit units of time. Biranism is a philosophy of good inten­tions. The way in which Biran comments on Descartes's Meditations informs us about his own:

The certitude I have about my existence is not the certitude of an abstract being, but of an individual who senses himself modified in an extended body, inert, organized, upon which he acts. The certitude of the existence of this body therefore constitutes an essential part of the certitude that I have of my being.2

Hence, Biran affirms in a related way the incontrovertible evidence of body and thought, but he does not think at all of affirming the motor sub­ject as opposed to the thinking subject. He only introduces the motor sub­ject as a subject capable of having thought: the motor subject is thinking, "we find in ourselves the intelligence which operates through the will."3

Willing and understanding cannot be dissociated. Therefore, we can acknowledge that Biran wanted to show that the presence of the body was necessary for thought itself.

The body,.. . contributes as necessarily to intellection as it does to imagina­tion. In fact, I could no more conceive of a triangle than of a myriagon if there were not signs to which these concepts are attached, and, moreover, if there were not the idea of an exterior extension of which the immediate apperception of my own body is the necessary model.4

Here, then, the sign plays the part of an intermediate term:

Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito 77

All signs are necessarily material or drawn from one of our senses. There­fore, in order to conceive, the mind must, with the aid of some signs, also turn itself towards the body in some way. It is true that the function of the body or the brain, in pure intellection or in the conception of ideas which are not related to exterior senses, is different from the function which takes place in the imagination or representation of ideas which are related to any interior sense, the brain being more active in this latter case, or requiring a deployment of more energetic, more precise effort on the part of the soul. But one cannot conclude from this that the body plays no role in the intellect nor in any act of thought whatsoever: and if it were to play no role, there would be no self, and, it follows, no thought.5

This text shows Biran's strength: he knows that the motor subject exhibits sufficient thought to merit that it be considered a primitive trait. But this text shows his weakness as well, which is to rely on signs—and on them alone—in order to link thought with the body. Always on the brink of authentic intuition of the body itself, he limits himself to saying "the brain plays a part" in thought. For the observer of the brain, corporeality does not arise from within, but from without. It would be necessary to grasp the sign from within, which Biran—still too close to the eighteenth-century "ideo­logues"—does not do. When he criticizes Descartes, Biran objects first to what he calls "the fiction of doubt":

The fiction of doubt is repugnant to the mind relative to truths of this order. I think, I exist as a thinking thing or substance; I am the cause of certain acts or active modifications of my being; I am a subject liable to other modalities which begin and end without the intervention of my will; there are causes and substances other than myself. Descartes misunderstood the authority of the primitive laws inherent to the human mind: he did not see that if it were possible to doubt necessary truths for a single instant, there would be nothing true nor certain for our mind.6

This is a text fraught with difficulties: Biran does not see that, in the face of doubt, there is a reversal of values and that, for advanced doubt, appearance becomes sufficient. He considers doubt simply as fictitious. However, if we suppress hyperbolic doubt, we suppress at the same time the only means we have to perceive ourselves as having the capacity to be continually reborn as thought. The Cogito becomes a simple conversion to psychic facts. We imply, therefore, an absolute observer of this thinking soul and we miss the essential result of the Cogito, whether the subject becomes a psychic thing, or whether it becomes absolute intellect. How­ever, in a text from his youth, the Meditation sur la mort pr&s du lit fundbre de la soeurVictoire, Biran declares that he is "astonished to feel that he exists,"7 which excludes the attitude of pure and simple recognition of

78 NINTH LECTURE

self as a brute fact. In such an astonishment there is consciousness of the contingency of self, a questioning of this fact. This could be grounds for fruitful inquiry. Why didn't Biran understand in Descartes what he should have appreciated the most?

He also criticizes Descartes for not having linked thought to action because "this self, which thus withdraws into itself to affirm its existence and to conclude from it absolute reality, thus performs an action, makes an effort."8 Here Biran explicitly declares his intention of reintegrating thought and action.

He further criticizes Descartes for proving the world instead of directly experiencing it. The question of the reality of the world is nonsense; we must ask ourselves what it is, not if it is. Biran challenges any type of causal reasoning which refers to a world in itself: feeling bears witness that there is something we can call "world." "I am not denying that these ideas occur within me," said Descartes.9 And Biran responds,

You are wrong not to deny it, because if there is something that you could claim to apperceive clearly and distinctly, it is that what you call ideas or images of the sky, of the stars, is outside you, or is represented as foreign to your self, far from being found in the self. What is in you, or belongs to you, is the judgment or the thought that these things are outside or foreign to your self; and you can only affirm this insofar as you apperceive it as clearly and distinctly as you apperceive that you are a thinking being. When you thus judge that there are things outside you which prompt these ideas, you are not mistaken and you have no need for any additional knowledge to support the truth of this first subject. But when you affirm that your ideas are similar to things, or rather that the thing is in itself such as you apper­ceive it by the mediation of a sense which is possibly not appropriate for this object, you are going beyond perception, and your judgment can be erroneous or doubtful. I see the sky as a very low, blue firmament. I affirm that such a visible appearance exists because I apperceive it clearly and dis­tinctly; in the same manner, I affirm that what I apperceive is outside of me, although I risk a false judgment by attributing to the object necessarily apperceived as outside, modalities or qualities which are not in it.10

TENTH LECTURE Biran and the

Philosophers of the Cogito (Conclusion)

Biran had criticized Descartes's "fiction of doubt"; his "mediate realism" with which Biran contrasts the numerical identity of the

idea of extension and of extension itself, linking essence to existence and refusing to distinguish essence from its manifestation;1 and his insufficient connection between thought and action. The thought which we are certain of must not be taken in a restrictive sense, but as/a whole and with all that it implies. Or, rather, there is something more originary than thought: the subject in the process of accomplishing certain acts. Reflection itself stems from this, if it holds true that "this self which withdraws into itself, . . . thus performs an action."2 In short, "perhaps Descartes failed only to link thought with action, as he linked existence to thought, and if he had done so, his thought would have taken another direction."3

These themes will be found again in Biran's critique of Malebranche. In the course of this critique, Biran at first emphasizes the differences

between psychology and ontology, then tends, on the contrary, to identify them with each other. He subsequently begins to see a new, broadened defi­nition of the psychological. In his Notes sur certains passages de Male­branche et de Bossuet, he quotes a fragment of the Meditations chretiennes:

But I see what still misleads you. It is that in order to move your arm, it is not enough for you to want to do it, for you must exert some effort in order for this to happen. And you think that this effort, which you have an inner feeling of, is the true cause of the movement which follows it: because this movement is strong and forceful, in proportion to the amount of effort you

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80 TENTH LECTURE

exert. But, my son, is it not obvious that there is some kind of relationship between what you call effort and the determination of nerve impulses in the nerve fibers which allow for the movements you wish to perform?4

And Biran first responds, "Here Malebranche confuses the psychological and ontological points of view."5 Our ignorance would therefore bear on the ontological level, not on the psychological level, which would be clearly dissociated from the first. Now, several lines further in the text, Biran affirms that my motor power is not only certain for me, but in itself and even for God:

But does it follow from what / am or apperceive myself to be the cause of, that I am truly an absolute, independent cause? Here my inner feeling can not con­firm anything to me since it involves precisely knowing what is in the absolute, independently of my inner feeling, independently of the existing and self-apperceiving self. But why is it important for me to know it and why inquire about it, if once the self is removed—there is no longer anything, no will, no cause, no existence perceived as mine, nor conceived of as foreign?... It is when I strip myself to the essentials or when I want to know whether what is me or true in me and for me, is still true without me and outside me, it is only then that I imagine and that I can ever progress to the point of contradicting the primary conditions of my existence or of denying what constitutes it. I have no need, then, of knowing the relationship of my will to nerve impulses or nerve fibers in order to be inwardly assured that my effort is inefficacious: as soon as it is so for me or in my intimate sense, it is already absolutely ineffi­cacious in itself and in the eyes of God; this is what creates the responsibility of the moral agent.6

Therefore, what appears to us is. What we would conceive of as being in itself could not be so outside the psychological domain, which is coextensive with being. We must therefore reestablish ontology in its legitimate domain, that of the primitive fact. In this regard, Biran is moving toward an original notion of the Cogito, beyond Cartesianism.

If we attempt to follow the practice of this new Cogito in Biran's works, what do we find?

First, a new conception of the "body for me" and, in particular, an orig­inal notion of the senses. My subjective life, in its previous state of "unre-flection," comprises senses which define what Biran refers to as "animality." Biran attempted to describe what the exercise of the senses prior to move­ment, prior to the person, might be. He speaks of a "passive immediate intu­ition,"7 of states in which "the weakness of motor action excludes the apper-ceptive characteristic."8 (Therefore, it does not exclude it completely.) His description does not work without a certain amount of mythology: sensation then appears to him "to come ready made from the outside"9 as if the rela-

Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito (Conclusion) 81

tionship to the object were a property of the impression itself. He points out a sort of passive coordination, in space and in time, between these impres­sions. He is uncertain, moreover, about the reality of this prepersonal apper­ception, of this primitive space and time: what is an apperception which is not apperceived? Yet, he discerns correctly the problem such intuitions raise: do they surround the self? "We could say," he responds to Royer-Collard, "that the self appears as enveloped in sensations from which it distinguishes itself only later.... But this is an hypothesis and in no way a fact of intimate sense."10 A Cartesian would say that the construct, the hypothesis, is this idea of a sensibility without the "I." For Biran, on the other hand, the hypothesis is to introduce the self, this "outside spectator," into the consciousness that this sensibility has of itself. For Biran, it would be erroneous to say, as Descartes does, "it is the soul which sees, and not the eye."11

He continues by describing a primitive space understood by "contu-ition,"12 a primitive time of which he says,

There is in hearing, as in vision when it is still passive .. ., an organic dis­tinction of different tones which follow one another in time or follow one another harmonically without becoming confused;13

in short, a whole "preworld" that one could make disappear by thinking about it, and about which we cannot ask whether it is of the order of object or of subject. This neutral zone is the "phenomenal reality"14

During this entire description, Biran starts to convince us, then disap­points us. He remains very close to empiricism: for him, the "intimate sense" is limited to making statements based on evidence. He scarcely con­siders the objections that could be raised, and the outcomes do not corre­spond to the promises. Nonetheless, we find in his works intermittent, but genuine, intuitions. He is looking for a path between empiricism and intel-lectualism, precisely in regard to reflection. He would like to show how reflection is carried out by certain mechanisms of a corporeal nature, those of hearing, for example, without being the pure result of them.

In the fourth section of part two of the Essai, chapter 1 (JDe Vorigine de la reflexion), Biran wonders what is the origin of the fundamental refer­ences of thought to the object and to the self. These universal traits cannot be ascribed to the sensory organ. How are they connected to one another? By reflection which makes us grasp the underlying framework. Now con­sciousness, influenced by habit, continually forgets its own origin. In order for reflection to be possible and for the senses to discover their proper activity, a corporeal mechanism must intervene, a mechanism which we cannot use without our being aware of it. Now the pair hearing—phonation is an example of this. Here the motor activity perceives itself without becoming lost in its product. "This is the living harp that plucks its own

82 TENTH LECTURE

strings."15 (In reality, this is only true for articulated sounds, not for cries.) The articulated sound hears itself and reflects itself; the child imitates him­self. Uttered sounds and repeated sounds are interrelated: "The activity which immediately produces the former is reflected in the latter."16 Biran thus attempts to describe the body as the locus of a kind of thought which penetrates the density of the body, which is not reflection strictly speaking, but which forms the first step and is the symbol of it. He recalls the ety­mology of "to hear" (entendre) and writes in regard to hearing,

We can say that hearing is pre-eminently the sense of understanding (enten-demenf), since it is due to hearing alone that the being who thinks, inas­much as he acts and moves, understands (entend), in the full meaning of the word, all the ideas he conceives of, all the acts he determines.17

Biran seems to be looking for a new status for our experience. He would like to make the auditive-motor mechanism something other than simply a particular case of a general ability to think. He would like to show thought seizing this instrument and, through it, achieving creations in which our intellectual destiny is realized.

Such also is the meaning of chapter II of this same section (Institution des signes). Through signs, I have access to a heightened consciousness: my motor initiative no longer disappears in its result; I can refer the matter to someone outside myself, referring myself to exteriority. Here appears "the intellectual sign is, which is the Word, the logos par excellence."ls But are these attitudes made possible by thought, or is the inverse true? There is a circle between the word and the abstraction which proceed from one another, and both from primitive fact. The first use of signs presupposes primitive fact. On the other hand, there is in us a sort of natural ignorance about the problem of signs which stems precisely from the fact that signs are efficacious, already endowed with evidence.

Biran does not reduce thought to a result of signs imported into the mind. He attacks this form of naivete which considers the universe of speech as acquired, refusing to break out of it. At the origin of signs, he sees a spiritual initiative of the self, a yet-to-be-developed seed of what reflection will be:

Without the inner apperception of acts or of the desired effort, no signs would be instituted, without instituted signs, there would, strictly speaking, be no reflection, no ideas or distinct notions of our acts or of their results . . . finally no ideas of the subject (self) separated from its attrib­utes and, it follows, no universal, abstract ideas.19

Therefore, we will distinguish three moments: inner apperception, signs, and explicit reflection involving the use of notions. These three levels are

Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito (Conclusion) 83

continuous and merge into one another. There is, for example, the sign of the self or of "I exist": "As often as this sign is voluntarily repeated, the same self just as often becomes present to itself by an act of intimate reflection."20

The phonological instrument is used by inner apperception and at the same time aids this perception in moving to the reflective level. It helps this inner apperception by translating in articulated phrases what it felt in a confused fashion. From the beginning there is consciousness of self, but a consciousness which is also ignorance of self and which needs signs in order to conquer itself. Consciousness of self, then, is conceived of as a becoming, a process.

Thus, Maine de Biran wavers continually between two philosophies, one empirical and explanatory, the other reflective, neither of which suits him: at his best we find the outline of a third philosophy, at once concrete and reflec­tive. This dissatisfaction explains the later evolution of his philosophy starting with the Essai. He glimpsed, but failed to establish, a synthesis of explanation and reflection. He thought he could overcome the duality of the terms by moving to the level of belief. The Notes on Descartes and Malebranche are prior to 1814. The Notes sur Kant are after this date. It is around 1813-1814 that he understood the necessity of allowing for a faculty of the universal and the absolute. Unable to show how the subject can be both connected to con­tingent structures and subject to Being—connected to the universal Being— Biran was forced to concentrate the conditions of universality beyond the inti­mate sense. He now moves to a noumenal self, breaking with his earlier phi­losophy. He rises from the For Us to the In Itself-^an approach he criticized Descartes so much for; as if his philosophy had not consisted up to this point in denying the soul in itself!

The self does not become objective in an image; it is also not conceived of as an ontological abstraction. Its entire real existence is in the apperception of the effort which it feels itself subject of or cause of. But when we want to discover the origin of this felt effort, we must necessarily situate ourselves in a point of view outside the self, and then we no longer really embrace but the image or a notion with abstract force, of the feeling of itself.21

In reality, it would be unfair to criticize a pure and simple contradiction. If we want to consider the soul from the outside, how can we distinguish it from a corporeal image? Moreover, this latter conception of the self is not without prior roots. Biran elaborates on this conception in the Rapport des sciences naturelles avec la psychologies2 and we will conclude by exam­ining it briefly.

In the first place, the belief in the noumenal self is not prior to the prim­itive fact; nor is it independent of it either. Our notion of the soul as soul would have no meaning if we were not to start with the soul for us. Biran indicates a relationship; he does not recant this.

84 TENTH LECTURE

In the second place, the belief in the noumenal self is the affirmation of a thing without essence. Consequently, from that moment, if the primitive fact did not exist, our affirmation would be empty. In order to give meaning to this absolute position, we must begin with the experience of ourselves. The difference between the experience of self and the belief in the soul is as follows: when we experience the self in us, we apperceive what we are doing; when we believe in the thinking being, we apperceive what we are not doing. This involves neither a deduction nor a logical transition:

Believing is not knowing. What our mind believes universally and neces­sarily, it did not create. Now, the mind knows only what it does or can do; it does not believe in what it has created—its general ideas, its classifica­tions, its language, its arbitrary combinations—and it cannot believe in these things as it believes in existing things.23

So then, we know what we have done; we believe in some existing that we have not created. In order to act, we must be:

By following the process of belief, we establish as an axiom that before acting, before being modified in any determined way whatsoever, before determining one's self in terms of any attribute, quality or property, we must exist absolutely or as substance, as thing in itself, as noumenon.2*

Our belief will bear, then, on an existing conditioning our finite activity. This belief in the noumenal self represents, in short, the excess of our exis­tence over what we know of it, the fact that we are given to ourselves, and that we did not create ourselves ex nihilo. The noumenal self is certain, pre­cisely because it is unknowable.

Biran identifies, then, absolute objectivity and absolute subjectivity. It is on this subjectivity that the objectivity of knowing is based. The noumenal subject is neither demonstrated nor proved: it is always behind me, as something which surrounds me, and this is why we can believe in this absolute subject which confers a universal value on primitive fact:

How does this individual, reflective abstraction, which constitutes, with the self, the relationship and the inherence of variable modes in a perma­nent subject, go from the individual and relative character, precise and determined as a consequence of consciousness, to the universal and to the absolute?25

The Reponse a Stapfer tells us: the self—founded upon the noumenal soul—being the very experience of causality, the latter achieves rational value among all possible objects:

Biran and the Philosophers of the Cogito (Conclusion) 85

The self immediately apperceives its causal power as its existence; and from the first inner experience which reveals this power to it by revealing it to itself, it has, with the present feeling of permanent energy of the self cause, the intuition of effect or of motion which will necessarily and infallibly operate as soon as an express desire occurs.26

This certitude is then transferred outside:

Since each effect of the locomotion of one's own body is inseparable for the self from the feeling or from the external apperception of the cause, as the self is inseparable from itself, no exterior movement, no passive modifica­tion will be able to begin without being immediately attributed to a cause conceived in imitation of the self.27

Furthermore, the relationship of God to the world is about the same as that of the noumenal soul to the self: "We know and we believe presently that our soul exists as substance or as absolute cause in the same way that we know that God exists as substance and as infinite cause."28

In conclusion, Biran's importance depends more on certain of his descriptions than on an intellectual grasp of the proper principles of his phi­losophy. He attempted to move beyond psychologism, to show that a sub­ject's experience is not the simple application of a logos; but he failed to save the particular, to show its movement and transition to the universal. Thus the conclusion of his philosophy sees the problem of the soul and the body posed once more, and in just as difficult terms; he reestablishes the absolute soul facing the absolute body: we again find ourselves where we started.

ELEVENTH LECTURE

Matter and Memory: The New and the Positive in the

Analysis of the First Chapter

W: hat is the starting point of Matter and Memory?1 Bergson tells us in the "Introduction" to the seventh edition:

There are .. . diverse tones of mental life, or, in other words, our psychic life may be lived at different heights, now nearer to action, now further removed from it, according to the degree of our attention to life. Here we have one of the ruling ideas of this book—the idea, indeed, which served as the starting point of our inquiry.2

The distinction of the two levels of action and dream and the notion of attention to life are, then, at the origin of Bergson's reflections; for his part, he did not follow the itinerary of Kantian philosophy.

The first chapter develops a biological conception of the body and the nervous system that is, at the same time, a philosophical conception of the acting subject placed by its body in the presence of the world. Bergson aims at restoring the body to its struggle with the world; and not as the isolating analysis of science presents it to us, a body dissociated between sensory and motor poles. The body must be grasped in a global view, in its connection with its surroundings and in its positive function as "center of real action."3

Nonliving material bodies do not truly act: they are acted upon by external forces. The living body is entirely different in that it affirms itself as distinct and retains stimulation, responding to it only after a certain delay and in an unforeseeable manner. It expresses less the properties of things than its manner of treating them, otherwise stated, that which things and

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the world are for it. The living organism, precisely because it is a center of real action, is a center of perspective. "The objects which surround my body reflect its possible action upon them."4 A "horizon" takes shape around the living body5

Perception is not, then, a simple inspection of things: it is an anticipa­tion exercised by the body. If we set aside the contributions of memory (which alone make hallucination possible), there remains a "pure percep­tion" which establishes the body in things. This does not take place in us, but, more properly, there, where perception seems to be, in the midst of the world, outside. Science, therefore, is not well-suited to establish an objective theory of perception, because it is based on this very perception. Science refers us to the perceived world, previously given. The idea of a sci­entific knowledge, closed in upon itself, is only a myth:

Reduce matter to atoms in motion: these atoms, though denuded of phys­ical qualities, are determined only in relation to an eventual vision and an eventual contact, the one without light and the other without materiality. Condense atoms into centers of force, dissolve them into vortices revolving in a continuous fluid: this fluid, these movements, these centers, can themselves be determined only in relation to an impotent touch, an ineffectual impulsion, a colorless light; they are still images.6

By thus rehabilitating secondary qualities, Bergson quite consciously picks up where Berkeley left off. In the "Introduction" to Matter and Memory we read that

Philosophy made a great step forward on the day when Berkeley estab­lished, in opposition to the "mechanical philosophers," that the secondary qualities of matter had at least as much reality as the primary qualities.7

In positing the material world, we therefore give ourselves, right away, an ensemble of images the existence of which it is no longer possible to renounce. Bergson repudiates the realism of thinkers which seeks to engender consciousness, to deduce it. We do not have to "deduce con­sciousness," for "by positing the material world we assume an aggregate of images."8 There is no In Itself which is not already a For-Me. In the approach that Bergson takes, every esse is already a percipi. But Bergson does not follow this approach to its ultimate conclusion: in place of scientific realism, Bergson will substitute another realism, one founded upon the preexistence of total being. In it the percipi is deduced from the esse by degradation and carving out. "[T]he representation of an image [is] less than its presence."9

Bergson does not see, does not address the problem of the Cogito: he poses total being and carves out my perspective from it.

An image can exist without being perceived. Bergson deduces the per-

Matter and Memory 89

ceived from being rather than admitting, as he had been tempted to do, a primacy of perception, a kind of intermediate existence between the In Itself and the For Itself. He does not really look for the starting point of the subject's knowledge of being in the subject's situation in being, but places himself directly in being in order to then introduce the perceptive decoupage. Neither Bergson nor the psychologists he criticizes distinguish between consciousness and the object of consciousness.

In Kantian idealism, consciousness and extension are correlatives. Bergson criticizes subjective idealism, but not transcendental idealism.

There is in Bergson, then, a blindness toward the proper being of con­sciousness and its intentional structure. There is the same difficulty in explaining what the self which perceives is: Bergson represents this to him­self as a mixture of perception and recollection, the condensation of a mul­tiplicity of movements, a "contraction" of matter. Whence, in this first chapter, a constant mechanism of passage to the limit—with recognition of everyday experience as a "mixture."

It would have been necessary to show that the body is unthinkable without consciousness, because there is an intentionaiity of the body, and to show that consciousness is unthinkable without the body, for the present is corporeal.

Bergson began to see a philosophy of the perceived world which, in his first intention, was not realist. However, this view was spoiled by the move­ment to realism that considers the percipi as a lesser esse, consciousness being carved out from the interior of a world of images In Itself.

The truth is that the point P,. . . the rays which it emits, the retina and the nervous elements affected, form a single whole: that the luminous point P is a part of this whole: and that it is really in P, and not elsewhere, that the image of P is formed and perceived.10

Here, on the other hand, there is something new: not the fact of linking consciousness and object—Kant had already linked them—but the manner in which they are linked. In Kant, their relationship was that of a positing power to a posited object: the being of objects was at first idealized. The sentence quoted above is obvious for Kant, because the point P is, for him, nothing more than an ideal object. Kant considered the phenomenon of the object as an ideal order. What is new in Bergson, once again, is not found here. Bergson ignores reflective philosophy; thanks to this naivete, he is in a position to discover what remains inaccessible to reflective analysis: the thing and consciousness of the thing are linked, not as correlatives, but as absolutely simultaneous, without any priority Now Kant, despite every­thing, granted priority to the consciousness of the linker.

For Bergson perception is not constituting: it is impossible, in his per-

90 ELEVENTH LECTURE

spective, for us to place ourselves in the dynamism of a constituting subject. Perception is insensitive to the effort of reflective analysis (in spite of Spinoza, we continue to perceive the sun at two hundred paces). The con­nection between consciousness and what it perceives is not the connection between what makes and what is made: the perception preceded the con­nection. Consciousness of something is not an intentionality comparable to judgment: consciousness does not appear to itself, as accounting for itself. If we were to follow the Bergsonian thesis to its ultimate conclusions, the body would become privileged, being what refers me to the preexisting tilings. I am not an agile subject, and without inertia, a subject can freely make use of a perspective; I perceive from here and not from elsewhere. It follows that the perceptive aiming is not an immanent aiming. There is transcendence in the active sense of the word: a presence at a distance. Consciousness, then, would appear as situated; its finitude would be the means of positing being.

But this simultaneous transcending of realism and idealism, barely glimpsed for an instant, miscarries. Having chosen to look at the world as spectacle, Bergson sank into realism and realized the subject by subtrac­tion. The subject dies because of this; the percipi is henceforth only a lesser being. The subject will no longer have to be thought: this will be an imper­ceptible distance.

In fact, Bergson indeed attempts to introduce the subject later on: our perception, he recognizes, is never "pure." But he will introduce the subject in realist terms, as a non-being; and from the moment he conceives noth­ingness from being, he will conceive the subject starting from the world.

His description of pure memory, then, will be that of a "second world" (his static conception of the unconscious attests to this). Radically different from objectivity, the subject will at the same time be radically homogeneous with it—a simple difference of substance and not of existential modality. The encounter between the two worlds takes place in concrete perception, and when Bergson will want to carry out this articulation there will be a concurrence of reality between recollection and perception. In the second and third chapters of Matter and Memory, we will therefore see a wavering between two theses: sometimes perception is entirely memory, the per­ceived being but a most recent recollection; sometimes the inverse will be the case: memory is nothing outside the present, pure recollection being but a bloodthirsty phantom, "drinking the blood of the living."The past, as such, escapes us. This concurrence takes another form: sometimes it seems that the initiative comes from recollections, the body intervening only in order to prevent their actualization: recollection, then, would be capable by itself of becoming present again, and the dimension of the past would lose its ideality; sometimes, conversely, there is no proper consciousness of the past, and the needs of the current action alone explain the call to rec­ollection. These two descriptions cancel each other out.

Matter and Memory 91

The theory of the body, at the junction of perception and memory, will reveal the conflict we are speaking of: sometimes the body is the locus of passage for movements in themselves, in the manner of an element from the physical world; sometimes it is only a representation, homogeneous with images from memory. Bergson plays on the two meanings—idealist and realist—of the word "image."

Consciousness and freedom, then, will have no place in chapters II and III. Where do we find the IF It will neither be at the apex of the cone (which corresponds to an In Itself, that of the physical world), nor at its base (pure recollections): mental life takes on the aspect of a coming-and-going between two levels of the In Itself. Bergson fails to establish the articulation between the two levels he described: he tries in vain to achieve the syn­thesis through the combination of two objective elements: pure percept and pure recollection.

This having been said, we find valuable intuitions in these pages: we must recognize the truth therein, "in enigma and in a mirror." Having con­verted into objective propositions a reflection on the subject, Bergson glimpses something true from time to time. It is up to us to sort out these intuitions from the philosophical framework in which they are embedded.

The first is the analysis of extension. Here Bergson describes, all the while objectifying it, the plan of our relationship with space. Thanks to this analysis, the world is, in the fourth chapter, extricated from its In Itself condition. Perception, even external perception, appears there as a dura­tion (contrary to what we read in the first chapter): Bergson struggles to create a theory of the world.

The second is the theory of pure perception: being is always perceived being; this allows us to respond to the objections of realism.

The third is the theory of pure memory in the role that it ascribes to a mixed reality. In the theory of pure perception, being was only perceived being; in pure memory, the past is conceived by the present. This consti­tutes a dialectical view, for it is the same movement which opens the future and closes the past. We transcend the simple mixture of subject and object in order to constitute a genuine dialectic of time.

In chapter II, Bergson draws the consequences from what precedes and strives to determine whether or not they are verified by experience. The body is but a mere conductor, which assures the originality of memory in relation to cerebral mechanisms. This effort is both successful (since it allows us to account for the disconcerting aspects of aphasia) and useless (because a minute of reflective philosophy would tell us as much: memory is a consciousness of the past, and no present trace could suffice in accounting for the past). The trouble Bergson takes in this regard seems to be wasted effort, for the realist postulates which he retains lead him to con­ceive of memory as a second being.

92 ELEVENTH LECTURE

Nevertheless, this second chapter contains some interesting perspec­tives. Even if we were to show, reflectively, that the unreality of the past prevents the past from having as support an existing present, a problem would remain: why don't we have a total consciousness of this past? Even if we admit that consciousness is naturally centrifugal, recognition and for-getfulness remain to be explained. For Bergson, the body is the present: it is, therefore, a moment in the dialectic of time, and all consciousness of the past has a relationship with the body. From the Kantian perspective, memory poses no problems since the past is constituted by us. But if con­sciousness is atemporal, the past, as past, loses this quality: there is no past except in relationship to a present against the background from which it separates itself. The problem of the past must be resolved by showing how consciousness of the present contains reference to a past. Now this is what Bergson does at certain times, when he tries to endow the body with a func­tion in the constituting of time: there could, then, be a "bodily memory"11

a comprehension of time by the body.

TWEIFraiECrtM The Second Chapter of

Matter and Memory

In this chapter, Bergson attempts to test the central ideas from the pre­ceding chapter, in light of the physiology of the brain.

In regards to the relationship between memory and the brain, he con­cludes that the body cannot be producer of the representations of the past, since it is itself only an image: the body is but a simple conductor. But if Bergson were to cling to this position, he would come to the conclusion that the body, inefficient as it is, could not condition our capacity to have access to the past: if it were only an image among all others, how would it have the power to modify all of them? It is imperative, this being the case, that the word "image" change meaning. The body, a mere element up to this point, becomes a center.

It would be necessary to make this "central function" of the body more precise, to show that the world is for the body. However, Bergson makes subjectivity a simple function of representation: he maintains the dichotomy between movement "in the third person" and the subject. Thus, when he wants to connect the body and the mind, to make the body a tran­sition toward consciousness, he must organize a series of equivocations and stratagems.

The motor function of the brain is pregnant with consciousness. "The past survives itself. . . . " Now there is ambiguity: it does not subsist in the same sense in the motor mechanism (it survives there for me, observer) and in consciousness (where it survives for itself). The use of the word "survival," then, is a verbal stratagem: we could just as well say that the past survives

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94 TWELFTH LECTURE

itself in things. This does not suffice in order to give the body a memory. It is, moreover, only for a "pure" memory, independent from the body, that there can truly be recognition. For motor recognition is merely the past played, not represented. For Bergson, therefore, there is not true memory of the body: memory of the body requires the mediation of pure memory. Thus the recourse to a second stratagem: the body will offer "pure memory" the means of realizing itself. Sometimes Bergson attributes everything to the mind, sometimes he attributes everything to the body. He should have shown that the body is necessitated by the dialectic of time as moment, and, inversely, that consciousness implies a body. But Bergson wants to show that there is in memory "something" which cannot be explained by the body. His method consists in determining a residue which cannot be explained by physiological means, in order to better preserve the being of spiritual sub­stance. Thus, neither pure memory nor the body is truly For Itself. The body does not succeed in being a subject—though Bergson tends to give it this status—for if the body were subject, the subject would be body, and this is something Bergson does not want at any price.

Take the example of the theory of two types of memory. Habit-memory is sometimes conscious, sometimes not: it is then merely the simple refer­ence mark of a past the body replays. Why still call it "memory"? Bergson would have the right to do so only if all memories were indissolubly habitual and conscious, pure recollection itself containing an element of generality. In reality, the significance of a past episode uproots it from its temporal haecceitas (ecc&te). Situating the past at its date is not attaining it in its chronological locus by a direct intentionality, but rather rejoining it through the thickness of the present. Our relationship to the past is therefore a rela­tionship of being which transcends pure knowledge. Inversely, our rela­tionships with the present transcend simple, practical insertion and are already relationships of knowledge.

Bergson contrasts dream and action in a dichotomy which is open to criticism. Dreams as he understands them still revolve around the world, and action is conceived of only as a response to physical stimuli in close proximity. As a result of a prejudice inherited from Spencer, the human person is conceived of as an animal power of action, on which a "faculty of distances" would be pathetically superimposed. Everything which is not animal action moves then to the side of dreams. Now this description is false: everything is action in the human person, but everything in the human person is supra-animal organization.

"[I]n regard to things which are learned . . . , the two memories . . . lend to each other a mutual support."1 What does this mean? We don't see what these memories can do for one another. Lived recognition most certainly is neither pure recognition nor pure motor habit: there is reciprocal assistance, as is shown a contrario by the difficulty experienced by the subject who is

The Second Chapter of Matter and Memory 95

asked to speak while looking at a series of letters he must remember.2 Now this uneasiness contradicts the Bergsonian dichotomy. It is either the body or pure recollection which is superfluous. If the body is not subject, all the movements in the world will not bring about consciousness of the past.

On page 98,* he says with regard to "attentive recognition," we avoid the alternative of action and dream. In this kind of recognition, "the movements forego their practical end, and . . . motor activity, instead of continuing per­ception by useful reactions, turns back to mark out its more striking fea­tures."3 It is no longer the human person facing nature, summoned to respond under the pain of death, but the human person who utilizes its body to explore a situation.

From the examination of the facts of aphasia, Bergson tries to conclude that recollection has not been destroyed by the lesion. But the real question lies elsewhere: what can this memory become, once it is deprived of the body where it is at play?

Here is another example of ambiguity: Bergson wants pure recollec­tions to rush into the framework offered by perception. On page 103, he writes, "[A]ny recollection-image that is capable of interpreting our actual perception inserts itself so thoroughly into it that we are no longer able to discern what is perception and what is recollection."4 What we read in a printed text is a recollection as much as it is present.

[R]apid reading is a real work of divination. Our mind notes here and there a few characteristic lines and fills all the intervals with recollection-images which, projected on the paper, take the place of the real printed charac­ters and may be mistaken for them.5

Now Bergson is wrong to distinguish in this way between "projection of rec­ollections" and "perception": this distinction is not legitimate because it is drawn from the consideration of retinal impressions. Bergson should not judge perception by the retinal impression, which is only a part of the cere­bral field: his approach is based on the "hypothesis of constancy," which has since been proven to be unfounded by the theory of form.

He justifies spiritualism starting, as an antithesis, from a certain realism which introduces the mind as a surplus. In his study of aphasia and verbal deafness, he shows that the brain does not contain recollections, but he does not show that recollection would have a meaning without a body What he proves in fact is not what he set out to prove. The sensory-motor process demonstrates that there is an intelligence of the body. Take the

*[When passages from Matter and Memory are cited by page in the main body of the orig­inal lectures, the numeration has been changed to correspond with the English translation. Page references to the French text are contained in endnotes.—Eds.]

96 TWELFTH LECTURE

example of hearing an unknown foreign language, compared to hearing a language that I understand:6 we carve out our impressions by means of our own movements, from the "motor diagram . . . of the speech we hear."7

Now Bergson forgets that his critique of the "projection" of recollections also works against him: perception can no more incorporate in itself move­ments ("in the third person") than it can incorporate recollections. The "logic of the body" cannot be a process "in the third person": it attests to the fact that human motility is not motility in itself.

Bergson treats the centrifugal phenomenon of the projection of recollec­tions in the same spirit. He foresees that the loss of a recollection is not the loss of a thing, but of a capacity to speak, of an attitude (and not of an isolated word). This is true, but it is tantamount to saying that without the body there is no possession of our verbal recollections. The body, as foundation of a dynamic, would then be linked to memory. Before becoming enmeshed in this dynamic, recollection is nothing.

On page 130, Bergson writes, "Between the intention, which is what we call the pure recollection, and the auditory recollection-image properly so called, intermediate recollections are commonly interrelated."8 Pure rec­ollection, then, is only an intention, a borderline case. Sometimes the body represents an obstacle to its realization, sometimes it gives it, on the con­trary, the means of realizing itself. How can this empty intention exist in itself?

We understand that, in the beginning of chapter III, uncertainty is intro­duced into the formulas: "We have distinguished three processes—pure rec­ollection, recollection-image, and perception—of which no one, in fact, occurs apart from the others."9 Is this "in fact" an accidental misfortune or, on the contrary, a normal state?

Henceforth, when Bergson will want to speak about recollection, he will forget what he had written most insightfully about the body, and when he will speak about the body, he will ultimately leave consciousness of time out of his consideration. His different descriptions do not fit together very well. For him, the body is indeed a means of actualizing the past, but he conceives of the body as a present existent rather than a temporal reality. Bergson does not show how we can escape the present in order to consti­tute the consciousness of time. In Bergson there is no passage from present to past: we are confronted either with a ghostly, distant past, or with a pre­sent without any temporal horizon. Bergson distinguishes himself in this regard from Husserl, for whom the present is a consciousness of passage. Sometimes Bergson attaches us to the present, and the past is no longer but pure virtuality; sometimes he detaches us from the present, and he does this in order to cut us off entirely from the world: neither of these approaches is satisfactory. Bergson is wrong both when he attaches us to the present and when he uproots us from it.

THIRTEENTH LECTURE Commentary on Text:

The Unconscious

I. THE TEXT (MATTER AND MEMORY, CHAPTER m, PP. 140-43)1

That which I call my present is my attitude with regard to the immediate future; it is my impending action. My present is, then, sensory-motor.

Of my past, that alone becomes image and, consequently, sensation, at least nascent, which can collaborate in that action, insert itself in that attitude, in a word make itself useful; but, from the moment that it becomes image, the past leaves the state of pure recollection and coincides with a certain part of my pre­sent. Recollection actualized in an image differs, then, profoundly from pure recollection. The image is a present state, and its sole share in the past is the recollection from which it arose. Recollection, on the contrary, powerless as long as it remains without utility, is pure from all admixture of sensation, is without attachment to the present, and is, consequently, unextended.

This radical powerlessness of pure recollection is just what will enable us to understand how it is preserved in a latent state. Without as yet going to the heart of the matter, we will confine ourselves to the remark that our unwillingness to conceive unconscious psychical states is due, above all, to the fact that we hold consciousness to be the essential property of psychical states: so a psychical state cannot, it seems, cease to be conscious without ceasing to exist. But if consciousness is but the characteristic note of the pre­sent, that is to say, of the actually lived, in short, of the active, then that which does not act may cease to belong to consciousness without therefore ceasing to exist in some manner. In other words, in the psychological

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domain, consciousness may not be the synonym of existence, but only of real action or of immediate efficacy; limiting thus the meaning of the term, we shall have less difficulty in representing to ourselves a psychical state which is unconscious, that is to say, ineffective. Whatever idea we may frame of consciousness in itself, such as it would be if it could work untrammeled, we cannot deny that, in a being which has bodily functions, the chief office of consciousness is to preside over action and to enlighten choice. Therefore, it throws light on the immediate antecedents of the decision, and on those past recollections which can usefully combine with it; all else remains in shadow. But we find here once more, in a new form, the ever-recurrent illu­sion which, throughout this work, we have endeavored to dispel. It is sup­posed that consciousness, even when linked with bodily functions, is a fac­ulty that is only accidentally practical and is directed essentially toward spec­ulation. Then, since we cannot see what interest, devoted as it is supposed to be to pure knowledge, it would have in allowing any information that it possesses to escape, we fail to understand why it refuses to throw light on something that was not entirely lost to it. From this we conclude that it can possess nothing more de jure than what it holds de facto, and that, in the domain of consciousness, all that is real is actual. But restore to conscious­ness its true role: there will no longer be any more reason to say that the past effaces itself as soon as perceived than there is to suppose that material objects cease to exist when we cease to perceive them.

We must insist on this last point, for here we have the central difficulty, and the source of the ambiguities which surround the problem of the unconscious. The idea of an unconscious representation is clear, and despite current prejudice we may even say that we make constant use of it, and that there is no conception more familiar to common sense. For every­one admits that the images actually present to our perception are not the whole of matter. But, on the other hand, what can be a nonperceived mate­rial object, an image not imagined, unless it is a kind of unconscious mental state? Beyond the walls of your room, which you perceive at this moment, there are the adjoining rooms, then the rest of the house, and finally the street and the town in which you live. It signifies little to which theory of matter you adhere; realist or idealist, you are evidently thinking, when you speak of the town, of the street, of the other rooms in the house, of so many perceptions absent from your consciousness and yet given outside of it. They are not created as your consciousness receives them; they existed, then, in some manner, and since, by hypothesis, your consciousness did not apprehend them, how could they exist in themselves unless in the unconscious state? How comes it then that an existence outside of con­sciousness appears clear to us in the case of objects, but obscure when we are speaking of the subject? Our perceptions, actual and virtual, extend along two lines, the one horizontal, AB, which contains all simultaneous

Commentary on Text: The Unconscious 99

objects in space, the other vertical, CI> on which are ranged our successive recollections set out in time.

C

I B

The point /, at the intersection of the two lines, is the only one actually given to consciousness. Whence comes it that we do not hesitate to posit the reality of the whole line AB, although it remains unperceived, while, on the contrary, of the line CI, the present / which is actually perceived is the only point which appears to us really to exist? There are, at the bottom of this rad­ical distinction between the two series, temporal and spatial, so many con­fused or half-formed ideas, so many hypotheses devoid of any speculative value, that we cannot all at once make an exhaustive analysis of them. In order to unmask the illusion entirely, we should have to seek its origin and follow through all its windings, the double movement by which we come to assume objective realities without relation to consciousness, and states of consciousness without objective reality—space thus appearing to preserve indefinitely the things which are there juxtaposed, while time in its advance devours the states which succeed each other within it. Part of this work has been done in our first chapter, where we discussed objectivity in general; another part will be dealt with in the last pages of this book, where we shall speak of the idea of matter. We confine ourselves here to a few essential points.

II. COMMENTARY

We will attain the past only by placing ourselves in it. Moreover, the past is something virtual: wanting to characterize the dimension of the past, Bergson fills it with phantoms; it is on this one condition that there will be past. Pure recollection, then, will be a phantom, a power of suggestion, of incantation, a guide which permits the full image to be reconstituted.

The present occupies a place: when we say "center of movements" we say occupation of a point of space; it is for this reason that the present is unique:

[0]ur present is the very materiality of our existence, that is to say, a system of sensations and movements, and nothing else. And this system is

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determined, unique for each moment of duration, just because sensations and movements occupy [places of]* space, and because there cannot be in the same place several things at the same time.2

When I relive the past, I transport myself, then, out of space, since the pre­sent is adhesion to a place. The "ideality" of knowledge consists in not con­fining references to space. Recollections, floating and inextensive, are the hollow in being that we are aware of in us, prior to present consciousness.

Since consciousness is presence, unconsciousness will be the absent. Bergson does not mention the genuine difficulties raised by this thesis (he reduces them to an observable and speculative conception of conscious­ness, cf. Matter and Memory, pp. 142-43).3 Now they stem in reality from the fact that we cannot dissociate the relationship to an object from the grasp of this relationship: there is no vision without the consciousness of seeing. Bergson does not envisage this difficulty. However, once we accept that every reference to an object contains a consciousness of self, does Bergson's theory still have any meaning? We must recognize that it still has meaning, for this description reveals the transcendence of the past. Con­sciousness must have its object in its possession as something "for myself." But such an object would not be something past: consciousness would be coextensive with the totality of time. Whence the necessity, for conscious­ness, to be temporal in order to be consciousness of time, to be something other than a simple existence in time. Most certainly, Bergson does not describe anything resembling a temporalization. The "virtual" past is not shown to us in any other way than a former present. Correlatively, all con­sciousness of the present moment already contains the temporal index of this moment when it will be past (as is attested to by the theory of "recol­lection of the present"). In this instance as everywhere else, a "lack of describing" is revealed: Bergson translates the transcendence of the past as a simple exteriority; at least he deserves credit for having-posed the problem of this transcendence.

By the same token, when it involved nonperceived objects, Bergson did not consider even for an instant the Kantian point of view, according to which these objects have an ideal existence to which I can always return, just as a theorem is perpetually true and I can return to it. But this having been said, such an analysis would sin by underestimating its object: the exis­tential modality of nonperceived objects is not ideality: this latter would give to the absent object either possible existence, or necessary existence; now the absent object is real. Take a desert, for example: when I affirm its existence, I am not only saying that it is accessible, I am giving it a mode of

* [Because of the importance in this context of the distinction "place"-"space," we have chosen to render this phrase "places of space" as it appears in the French text d'lieux de l'e-space"). —Eds.]

Commentary on Text: The Unconscious 101

existence comparable to the mode of what I see. The synthesis of seen and unseen is a synthesis of transition: inasmuch as I have an insertion in space, I feel myself capable of transporting in space this instrument of exploration which is my body: the absent, then, is present to me as the horizon of a world whose total possession is inherently impossible, since, in this case, the world would disappear into nothingness. Bergson sensed all of this, but his error is in translating this horizonal relationship by saying that the absent object is "a kind of unconscious mental state,"4 in not seeing that con­sciousness is precisely this transcendence. Bergson never sees the positive value ofourfinitude. But he is right to point out that the absent object is not only an ideal existent, as cultural objects are. He is right to say that simultaneity is problematic and inseparable from subjectivity. How can a consciousness in situation see objectivity appear? What coexists with my field, however, makes me change my perspective but only inasmuch as I am tied to it. My table keeps me from seeing the Eiffel Tower, but it is because I see my table that I do not see the Eiffel Tower. My body is linked to the world by a universal reference which gives me a view of it which both is and is not mine: this is what Bergson translates in speaking of the unconscious.

At the end of the text, Bergson shows that he described only borderline cases. But it is not by assembling two realities that we can reconstitute a complex phenomenon. Note, however, that there are in the pages that follow several valid points. On page 144, he says this:

It is, then, of the essence of our actual perception, inasmuch as it is extended, to be always only a content in relation to a vaster, even an unlim­ited, experience which contains it; this experience, absent from our con­sciousness, since it spreads beyond the perceived horizon, nevertheless, appears to be actually given.5

It is therefore no longer an unconscious mental state, but a horizon: here, we are moving beyond the simple relationship of exteriority.

From page 145, we see "The same instinct, in virtue of which we open out space indefinitely before us, prompts us to shut off time behind us as it flows."6 This involves a unique movement: here Bergson foresees a dialectic of time and no longer treats the past as an In Itself.

On the same page:

In truth, the adherence of this recollection to our present condition is exactly comparable to the adherence of unperceived objects to those objects which we perceive; and the unconscious plays in each case a sim­ilar part.7

By this term "adherence," Bergson certainly seems to be indicating a syn­thesis of transition.

FOURTEENTHUiCItJRE

Commentary on Text: The Definition of Existence

I. THE TEXT (MATTER AND MEMORY, CHAPTER m, PP. 146-48)1

But here we come to the capital problem of existence, a. problem we can only glance at, for otherwise it would lead us step by step into

the heart of metaphysics. We will merely say that with regard to matters of experience—which alone concern us here—existence appears to imply two conditions taken together: (1) presentation in consciousness, and (2) the log­ical or casual connection of that which is so presented with what precedes and with what follows. The reality for us of a psychical state or of a material object consists in the double fact that our consciousness perceives them and that they form part of a series, temporal or spatial, of which the elements determine each other. But these two conditions admit of degrees, and it is conceivable that, though both are necessary, they may be unequally fulfilled. Thus, in the case of actual internal states, the connection is less close, and the determination of the present by the past, leaving ample room for con­tingency, has not the character of a mathematical derivation—but then, pre­sentation in consciousness is perfect, an actual psychical state yielding the whole of its content in the act itself, whereby we perceive it. On the con­trary, if we are dealing with external objects it is the connection which is per­fect, since these objects obey necessary laws; but then the other condition, presentation in consciousness, is never more than partially fulfilled, for the material object, just because of the multitude of unperceived elements by which it is linked with all other objects, appears to enfold within itself and

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to hide behind it infinitely more than it allows to be seen. We ought to say, then, that existence, in the empirical sense of the word, always implies con­scious apprehension and regular connection; both at the same time, although in different degrees. But our intellect, of which the function is to establish clear-cut distinctions, does not so understand things. Rather than admit the presence in all cases of the two elements mingled in varying pro­portions, it prefers to dissociate them, and thus attribute to external objects, on the one hand, and to internal states, on the other hand, two radically dif­ferent modes of existence, each characterized by the exclusive presence of the condition which should be regarded as merely preponderating. Then the existence of psychical states is assumed to consist entirely in their appre­hension by consciousness, and that of external phenomena, entirely also, in the strict order of their concomitance and their succession. Whence the im­possibility of leaving to material objects, existing, but unperceived, the smallest share in consciousness, and to internal unconscious states the small­est share in existence. We have shown, at the beginning of this book, the consequences of the first illusion: it ends by falsifying our representation of matter. The second illusion, complementary to the first, vitiates our con­ception of mind by casting over the idea of the unconscious an artificial obscurity. The whole of our past psychical life conditions our present state, without being its necessary determinant; whole, also, it reveals itself in our character, although none of its past states manifests itself explicitly in char­acter. Taken together, these two conditions assure to each one of the past psychological states a real, though an unconscious, existence.

H. COMMENTARY

At the beginning of chapter III, Bergson turns his attention toward pure recol­lection, defined by its latency. He must show that consciousness is populated just as the world is: the past is behind us, just as the world is around us. Exis­tence has, then, the same meaning in both domains.

Initially (from "But here we come to . . ." up to ". . . determine each other"), he begins by limiting the discussion (the problem will only be "glanced at"; we will exclude from the discussion what is beyond experi­ence, such as God, or the absolute). He then provides an empirical and pro­visional analysis of existence: existence requires two conditions taken together: presentation to consciousness and connection with other facts. This analysis raises several questions: (1) Regarding the first condition: what exactly is this "presentation"? A passive test, imposing itself by the impact of the shock received? An intelligent grasp, imposing itself by the evidence of the content? (2) Regarding the second condition, what is the nature of this "connection"? Does it extend the field of our certitudes? Is it in itself con-

Commentary on Text: The Definition of Existence 105

stitutive of the meaning of the words "to exist"? (3) What is the relationship between these two conditions? Each of them can be taken either in the empiricist sense or in the intellectualist sense. For an empiricist, the second condition is reduced to the first, since connection requires a presentation to consciousness. For an intellectualist, the first condition is reduced to the second, since presentation results from a connection, from an establish­ment of a relationship accomplished by the mind. What we give to one we take away from the other. They can be simultaneously constitutive only by being linked, only by being reduced to unity.

Now Bergson refuses to reduce them to unity. His objective is to tran­scend this alternative, and that is what he tries to do in the second part of the text (from "But these two conditions, . . . " up to". . . conscious appre­hension and regular connection"). This second part sets forth three ideas: (1) These two criteria are independent (the conditions are "both neces­sary"). (2) Let us pursue this. When experience satisfies one of the condi­tions, it fails the other. In the psyche, the connection is loose, which is explained by Bergson's psychological indeterminism. The link among my internal states is always retrospective: my personality is never an object. (3) Inversely—and for this same reason—my psychic present is always perfectly given; each "present psychological state" gives consciousness the totality of its content. In each present, the presentation is perfect. If this were not the case, we would have no notion of the present. In the physical world, the connection is perfect; however, at the risk of progressing infinitely, we must give up on the idea of a total presentation. The criteria are, then, con­tradictory: it is for the same reason that internal experience is never satis­factorily linked and external experience is always linked, that internal expe­rience always enjoys a total presentation and that external experience never enjoys it. Interdependent (existence implies them always "both at the same time"), these criteria are antagonistic. Why is this the case?

The third part of the text ("But our intellect, . . . though an unconscious existence") furnishes the solution: it is the intellect which crystallizes into two distinct types what is in reality mingled. If we find again, on this side of the analytical understanding, the contact of the self and the contact of the world, we discover, on the one hand, that matter is a perspective, an ensemble of images (cf. chapter I); on the other hand, we discover that the psychic has a thickness: consciousness of the personality holds in hand the plurality of elapsed duration. With regard to intuition, the two conditions are "taken together" and no longer constitute an alternative.

In fact, it is we who speak of contradiction, of coming together: we set in opposition the In Itself to the For Itself. But Bergson speaks of two mixed elements: he talks about participation in physical existence and participation in consciousness as if he were talking about qualities. Bergson never speaks of his consciousness; he does not grasp the fundamental difference of texture

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between the partes extra partes and the being who knows itself. In posing the problem in an insufficiently precise way, he provides only an insufficient solution to it. Bergson always leads us to the brink of an intuition that he does not fulfill. Instead of placing in the world seeds of consciousness and instead of leaving in consciousness traces of materiality, he should have grasped con­sciousness as history and proliferation; he should have shown, in exterior per­ception, that the exigency of connection and the exigency of presentation are linked; he should have shown the connection through the horizon of per­ception, which does not exclude a certain "mis-focus." Bergson wavers between the terms of the alternative, instead of effectively moving beyond it. If he had moved beyond it, and only on this condition, he would have had the right to challenge the question "Where are recollections kept?" as he subse­quently does. How could he have the right to do so, he who speaks of a "psy­chic place"? The weakness of his theory of the unconscious is linked to the general weakness of his description of the For Itself.

FIFTEENTHUiCnjRE

Commentary on Text: "Seek Experience at Its Source'

I. THE TEXT (MATTER AND MEMORY, CHAPTER IV, PP. 183-86)1

That which is commonly called a fact is not reality as it appears to immediate intuition, but an adaptation of the real to the interests of

practice and to the exigencies of social life. Pure intuition, external or internal, is that of an undivided continuity. We break up this continuity into elements laid side by side, which correspond in the one case to distinct words, in the other to independent objects. But, just because we have thus broken the unity of our original intuition, we feel ourselves obliged to estab­lish between the severed terms a bond which can only then be external and superadded. For the living unity, which was one with internal continuity, we substitute the factitious unity of an empty diagram as lifeless as the parts which it holds together. Empiricism and dogmatism are, at bottom, agreed in starting from phenomena so reconstructed; they differ only in that dogmatism attaches itself more particularly to the form and empiricism to the matter. Empiricism, feeling indeed, but feeling vaguely, the artificial character of the relations which unite the terms together, holds to the terms and neglects the relations. Its error is not that it sets too high a value on experience, but that it substitutes for true experience that experience which arises from the imme­diate contact of the mind with its object, an experience which is disarticu­lated and, therefore, most probably, disfigured—at any rate arranged for the greater facility of action and of language. Just because this parceling of the real has been effected in view of the exigencies of practical life, it has not followed

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the internal lines of the structure of things: for that very reason empiricism cannot satisfy the mind in regard to any of the great problems and, indeed, whenever it becomes fully conscious of its own principle, it refrains from putting them. Dogmatism discovers and disengages the difficulties to which empiricism is blind; however, it really seeks the solution along the very road that empiricism has marked out. It accepts, at the hands of empiricism, phe­nomena that are separate and discontinuous and simply endeavors to effect a synthesis of diem which, not having been given by intuition, cannot but be arbitrary. In other words, if metaphysic is only a construction, there are sev­eral systems of metaphysic equally plausible, which consequently refute each other, and the last word must remain with a critical philosophy, which holds all knowledge to be relative and the ultimate nature of things to be inacces­sible to the mind. Such is, in truth, the ordinary course of philosophic thought: we start from what we take to be experience, we attempt various possible arrangements of the fragments which apparently compose it, and when at last we feel bound to acknowledge the fragility of every edifice that we have built, we end by giving up all effort to build. But there is a last enter­prise that might be undertaken. It would be to seek experience at its source, or rather above that decisive turn where, taking a bias in the direction of our utility, it becomes properly human experience. The impotence of speculative reason, as Kant has demonstrated it, is perhaps at bottom only the impotence of an intellect enslaved to certain necessities of bodily life and concerned with a matter which man has had to disorganize for the satisfaction of his wants. Our knowledge of things would thus no longer be relative to the fundamental structure of our mind, but only to its superficial and acquired habits, to the contingent form which it derives from our bodily functions and from our lower needs. The relativity of knowledge may not, then, be definitive. By unmaking that which these needs have made, we may restore to intuition its original purity and so recover contact with the real.

This method presents, in its application, difficulties which are consider­able and ever recurrent, because it demands for the solution of each new problem an entirely new effort. To give up certain habits of thinking, and even of perceiving, is far from easy: yet this is but the negative part of the work to be done; and when it is done, when we have placed ourselves at what we have called the turn of experience, when we have profited by the faint light which, illuminating the passage from the immediate to the useful, marks the dawn of our human experience, there still remains to be reconstituted, with the infi­nitely small elements which we thus perceive of the real curve, the curve itself stretching out into the darkness behind them. In this sense the task of the philosopher, as we understand it, closely resembles that of the mathematician who determines a function by starting from the differential. The final effort of philosophical research is a true work of integration.

We have already attempted to apply this method to the problem of con-

Commentary on Text: "Seek Experience at Its Source" 109

sciousness; and it appeared to us that the utilitarian work of the mind, in what concerns the perception of our inner life, consisted in a sort of refracting of pure duration into space, a refracting which permits us to sep­arate our psychical states, to reduce them to a more and more impersonal form, and to impose names upon them—in short, to make them enter the current of social life. Empiricism and dogmatism assume interior states in this discontinuous form; the first confining itself to the states themselves, so that it can see in the self only a succession of juxtaposed facts; the other grasping the necessity of a bond, but unable to find this bond anywhere except in a form or in a force—an exterior form into which the aggregate is inserted, an undetermined and so to speak physical force which assures the cohesion of the elements. Hence the two opposing points of view as to the question of freedom: for determinism, the act is the resultant of a mechan­ical composition of the elements; for the adversaries of that doctrine, if they adhered strictly to their principle, the free decision would be an arbitrary fiat, a true creation ex nihilo. It seemed to us that a third course lay open. This is to replace ourselves in pure duration, of which the flow is contin­uous and in which we pass insensibly from one state to another: a conti­nuity which is really lived, but artificially decomposed for the greater con­venience of customary knowledge. Then, it seemed to us, we saw the action issue from its antecedents by an evolution sui generis, in such a way that we find in this action the antecedents which explain it, while it also adds to these something entirely new, being an advance upon them such as the fruit is upon the flower. Freedom is not hereby, as has been asserted, reduced to sensible spontaneity. At most, this would be the case in the animal, of which the psychical life is mainly affective. But, in man, the thinking being, the free act may be termed a synthesis of feelings and ideas and the evolution which leads to it a reasonable evolution. The artifice of this method simply consists, in short, in distinguishing the point of view of customary or useful knowledge from that of true knowledge. The duration wherein we see ourselves acting, and in which it is useful that we should see ourselves, is a duration whose elements are dissociated and juxtaposed. The duration wherein we act is a duration wherein our states melt into each other. It is within this that we should try to replace ourselves by thought, in the exceptional and unique case when we speculate on the intimate nature of action, that is to say, when we are discussing human freedom.

II. COMMENTARY

These pages have a dual interest. (1) In the first place, in regards to the relationship between experi­

ence and construction, in metaphysics.

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Every synthesis, at the risk of being as arbitrary as those syntheses which Bergson criticizes dogmatism for, must be given in an intuition. We must, then, challenge every analysis (even an ideal one) of knowledge in terms of multiple elements and of linking this multiplicity. In order for metaphysical unity to be natural, we must discover within ourselves and outside ourselves what we know from the fact that we exist, we must grasp life in ourselves, we who are living. Instinct is a prehuman link with the living. Bergson aims at rediscov­ering this prehuman link. He attempts to find a passage between a being who knows nothing and a knowledge cut off from this being. Instinct knows nothing; intelligence knows, but at a distance from things. Therefore, we must join our mute being with our revealed being, we must regrasp through a vio­lent effort our spontaneous being, we must draw knowledge from our pri­mordial unity with things. However, we have only a fragment of the curve at our disposition: we are not the totality of being. The Bergsonian method will not be, then, a pure and simple identification, but a coming and going between contact with being and construction (the "integration") of being.

"Laughter"2 contains a positive theory of speech as incantation: "by rhythmical arrangements of words, which thus become organized and ani­mated with a life of their own, they tell us—or rather suggest—things that speech was not calculated to express."3 However, in this instance, Bergson is speaking of poets. If speech were a bearer of truth only when it becomes incantation, why would philosophers still be necessary? Bergson should therefore have disavowed his theory of immediation and constructed a theory of true communication. If the task of this philosopher is to "reconsti­tute the form of the curve," Beigson's philosophy cannot exhaust itself in immediation. If life is ignorant of itself, we must recast the theory of intelli­gence and the theory of valid language. Besides, this task has been started: in The Creative Mind4 Bergson returned to the problem of intuition.

(2) Secondly, regarding the relationships between reason and freedom. Bergson takes as an example of intuition the intuition of self in which

duration appears in its natural unity. But when the objection is raised "[f]reedom is . . . hereby. . . reduced to a sensible spontaneity," he responds that "in man, the thinking being, the free act may be termed a synthesis of feelings and ideas, and the evolution which leads to it a reasonable evolu­tion."5 This is tantamount to recognizing that the free act does not come from the self the way fruit comes from a flower. The novelty of the act belongs in principle to every moment of duration. But this novelty, guaranteed in advance to every act, is not the full novelty. Already Time and Free Wilft stated as much: "Many live . . . and die, without having known true freedom."7

Freedom is not, then, only a formal property of psychic becoming: there is true duration only if, in its unfolding, there intervenes a moment during which the act is suspended, during which the meaning of the past is clarified and meditated upon. Duration, then, is not duration in each of its moments:

Commentary on Text: "Seek Experience at Its Source" 111

it must grasp itself both reflexively and practically, without which the expres­sion "reasonable evolution" would remain meaningless.

The pages which follow have for their objective the purpose of obtaining an intuition of the world: the extension behind space, the indivisible move­ment behind the series of positions occupied by the mobile. Applied to move­ment, intuition certainly appears to be, once again, a coincidence. Con­sciousness rejoins effective movement in returning from the movement of multiplicity to the unity of movement, from the trajectory to the distance trav­eled. A question arises: is intuition going to consist for us in discovering the interior of movement? At the time Matter and Memory was written, move­ment is "a solid and undivided whole."8 Now Bergson does not ask himself if this perception is separable from all exterior perceptions: is there conscious­ness of duration without consciousness of a multiple? Kant showed, in his Refutation of Idealism, that time could be perceived only against a backdrop of space. Bergson was going to show that there is a lived space; passing, not from space to time, but from space divided into pieces to extension. More­over, he stated it in this same chapter IV, "It might, then, be possible,... to transcend space, without stepping out from extensity; and here we should really have a return to the immediate."9 However, this indication does not receive the subsequent development that it suggested.

Thus, after having presented a first conception of intuition (immediate coincidence), Bergson completed it with the idea of integration, therefore of construction: his intuition tended to become dialectic. But what fol­lowed showed that he forgot these modifications and he returned, in prac­tice, to his initial conception.

NOTE ON ZENO'S ARGUMENTS

Bergson is wrong to conclude, as indeed he does, that movement is "an indi­visible whole."10 Does he not himself speak of it, in reference to the dichotomy, as "a series of undivided facts"?11 If there is a series, the whole problem is raised again. Bergson is right when he comes out against the idea that movement would be a simple change of coordinates; he is wrong if it is true that movement is a change of state, as he himself so affirms (p. 202: "Real movement is rather the transference of a state than of a thing"12). This change of state, if it does not leave a spatial wake, is not movement. He wants to take movement out of space and to transfer it on the side of time, but he suppresses movement. Why does common sense translate movement in terms of space? What would movement be without this translation? Bergson goes beyond the contradictions without assuming them, because this would require more than a coincidence: an understanding of the con­tradiction, without which intuition is the same as refusing to think.

SIXTEENrai£CrT^E The Relationships between

Intuition and Construction in Bergson 's Metaphysics

In regards to intuition and its nature, Bergson's work reflects oscilla­tions in thought, rather than a change.

The Introduction to Metaphysics (1903)1 defines a doctrine of intuition different from the one found in Matter and Memory (1896). But Creative Evolution (1907) takes up again the thesis of intuition-coincidence! Fur­thermore, the preface of The Creative Mind (1922, published in 1932), also reveals this opposition. In this same work, Bergson adds to his Introduction to Metaphysics a long note2 in order to return to his "concordism." Depending on the text, intuition is a coincidence with the object (first con­ception) or, on the other hand, it is only a borderline case, with the mind being required to elaborate images and concepts in view of a reconstruction (second conception). In reality, this question involves a difficulty continu­ally encountered by Bergson.

I. INTUITION-COINCIDENCE

In this first conception there is, in all rigor, intuition only of oneself:"... at least a part of reality, our person, can be grasped in its natural purity"3 Intu­ition, then, will be a knowledge of the self, of a limited part of the real. "The intuition we refer to then bears above all on internal duration."4 If it extends to, something other than me, this will be by means of a series of dilations (cf. Introduction to Metaphysics: "we can dilate ourselves indefinitely by a more and more vigorous effort").5

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(1) A first extension has us attain the unconscious self:

Intuition, then, signifies first of all consciousness, but immediate con­sciousness, a vision which is scarcely distinguished from the object seen, a knowledge which is contact and even coincidence.—Next it is con­sciousness extended, pressing upon the edge of an unconscious which gives way and which resists, which surrenders and which regains itself: through rapid alternating of obscurity and light, it makes us see that the unconscious is there.6

It is the marginal view that one has through an open door when one passes by a room without entering.

(2) A second extension introduces us into "consciousness in general" by a "psychological endosmosis."7 It is to this type of intuition that, for example, telepathy belongs.

(3) From consciousness in general, we proceed to life by a third exten­sion:

[I]s it only with consciousnesses that we are in sympathy? If every living being is born, develops and dies, if life is an evolution and if duration is in this case a reality, is there not also an intuition of the vital, and conse­quently a metaphysics of life, which might in a sense prolong the science of the living?8

(4) Finally, a fourth extension will lead us to unorganized matter:"... the material universe in its entirety keeps our consciousness waiting, it waits itself... it has to do with intuition through all the real change and movement that it contains."9 Matter is therefore understood as was unconsciousness: it is what is on the brink of the self. Bergson adds that "the idea of differential, or rather of fluxion, was suggested to science by a vision of this kind."10 (The same indication occurs in the Introduction to Metaphysics-regarding modern mathematics: "I take the view that several of the great discoveries, of those at least which have transformed the positive sciences or created new ones, have been so many soundings made in pure duration."11) Intuition, having the penchant for its "real domain," would like "to grasp in things, even material things, their participation in spirituality."12 Therefore the intuition of the world is indirect. In this first conception, metaphysics has a limited object, a special method: harmony with science becomes possible on the basis of a sharing of the real. Science is,

therefore, already fulfilling half of the program of the old metaphysics... . Metaphysics, then, is not the superior of positive science.. . . They both bear upon reality itself. But each of them retains only half of it.13

Science undertakes therefore to know what is not ourselves.

The Relationships between Intuition and Construction 115

H. INTUITION AS COMPREHENSION

But this does not suffice: "as mind and matter touch one another, meta­physics and science, all along their common surface, will be able to test one another, until contact becomes fecundation."14 There is an "extension into each other."15 Consequently, metaphysics is no longer localized in the mind.

In the Oxford lectures, metaphysics is presented as a perception of the world: "(without, of course, ceasing to exercise our faculties of conception and reasoning) ought we not rather return to perception, getting it to expand and extend?"l6This involves, then, a return to perception and not to intuition. "But suppose," states Bergson,

That... we were to plunge into [perception] for the purpose of deepening and widening it. Suppose that we were to insert our will into it, and that this will, expanding, were to expand our vision of things?17

We would obtain a philosophy in which "nothing . . . would be sacrificed."18

This philosophy must be capable of telling us what it perceives. Instead of the "ready-made," "rigid" concepts with the "fixed outlines" of dogma­tism,19 it will substitute "new concepts . . . cut out for the object. . . which are appropriate to that object alone."These new concepts will be "flexible, mobile, almost fluid representations, always ready to mold themselves on the fleeting forms of intuition."20 The use of concepts is therefore legitimate and necessary in metaphysics: "concepts are indispensable to it."21 Scientific conceptualization itself is based on the nature of things. Next to "formulated mathematics," there is a "virtual or implicit" mathematics which is "natural to the human mind."22 Scientific conceptualization is not without contact with intuition. Science thrives on intuition. "The most powerful method of inves­tigation known to the mind, infinitesimal calculus, was born of that very reversal."23 Modern mathematics aims to "follow the growth of magni­tudes."24 Moreover, "quantity is always nascent quality."25 Metaphysics, then, will perform "differentiations and qualitative integrations."26 The very context of scientific formulation is intuitive. Galileo gave "a sounding" in the depths of duration.27 We are a long way from an agreement concluded on the basis of a distinction of domains: henceforth there will be philosophical science, and philosophy is to be conceived as a science. "Modern science is neither one nor simple."28 Its profound and prolific ideas "are so many points of contacts with currents of reality which do not necessarily con­verge on a same point."29 The Creative Mind will distinguish, in the same spirit, two lands of clarity, the superior one being the clarity of "the radically new and absolutely simple idea," which we will see, "itself obscure . . . dis­sipates obscurities."30

Thus, intuition is obtained by virtue of an effort:

116 SIXTEENTH LECTURE

[T]o philosophize consists precisely in placing oneself, by an effort of intu­ition, inside that concrete reality on which from the outside the Critique takes the two opposing views, thesis and antithesis.31

The passage through thesis and antithesis can therefore be a means of gaining intuition. Intuition is not the grasp of a unity without diversity: it is "dogmatism" which understands unity without cracks.32 Metaphysical intu­ition has an "essentially active character."33 It is not a question of "simply . . . watching oneself live."34 It allows us—and this is its paradox—"to affirm the existence of objects inferior and superior to us, though nevertheless in a certain sense interior* to us."35 Duration is this paradoxical reality which links us to things, and to things outside ourselves. In intuition, coincidence therefore becomes confused with a transcendental movement: we coincide, indeed, but with a movement which originates within ourselves:

(J]ust as a consciousness of color, which would harmonize inwardly with orange instead of perceiving it outwardly, would feel itself caught between red and yellow, would perhaps even have, beneath the latter color, a pre­sentiment of a whole spectrum in which is naturally prolonged the conti­nuity which goes from red to yellow, so the intuition of our duration, far from leaving us suspended in the void as pure analysis would do, puts us in contact with a whole continuity of durations which we should try to follow either downwardly or upwardly: in both cases we can dilate ourselves indef­initely by a more and more vigorous effort, in both cases transcend our­selves.36

"Transcend": the word is there. Here sympathy no longer consists in "making oneself an organism," but assumes an effort in order to retake the thing to be known. We have in ourselves the means of this renewal, the wherewithal to give a meaning to life again. Intuition becomes a meeting of signs and acts because of a meaning. Sympathy is no longer a reception, but rather a comprehension.

This is precisely what makes the lecture on "Philosophical Intuition"37

possible. All systems, if we are to believe Bergson, contain a central intu­ition. Now, if we keep with his first philosophy, there should be in each system a plurality of intuitions. If intuition were simple coincidence, there would not be in every great philosophy this inner articulation of theses, and we would not uncover therein such a logic of intuition. It is because intu­ition is a movement of comprehension that the intuitions of a philosophy form a kind of organism or a kind of system. "The meaning, . . . is less a

*[We here opt for Hulme's "interior" (An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 45), which agrees with the "interieurs" of CEuvres (p. 1416); Andison (The Creative Mind, p. 184) has "inferior," which seems to be a typographical error; the usup6rieurs" contained in the French text of the current lecture is an obvious error.—Eds.]

The Relationships between Intuition and Construction 111

thing thought than a movement of thought, less a movement than a direc­tion."38 Therefore, there is certainly a logic of intuition and a meaning of a philosophy: the conception elaborated in 1903 in the Introduction to Meta­physics left more possibilities of integrating intelligence into intuition than did the conception presented in Matter and Memory.

COMPLEMENTARY NOTE*

Without claiming to give here an exhaustive summary of the pages in which Merleau-Ponty evokes the teaching of classical philoso­

phers, we thought it would be useful to point out to the reader a certain number of texts which parallel, either in terms of subject or inspiration, those texts discussed in the current series of lectures.

We have used the following abbreviations:

SC/SB= La Structure du comportement, 2d ed. (Paris: P.U.F., 1949; first edition, Paris: P.U.F., 1942). [The Structure of Behavior, trans. Alden L. Fisher (Boston: Beacon Press, 1963; London: Methuen, 1965).]

PiVPP= Phenomenologie de la perception (Paris: Gallimard, 1945). [Phenomenology of Perception, trans. Colin Smith (New York: Humanities Press, 1962; London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1962).]

SNS/SNS = Sens et non-sens (Paris: Nagal, 1948). [Sense and Non-Sense, trans. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Patricia Allen Dreyfus (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1963).]

* [Throughout this note, we have added, in brackets, abbreviations for and references to the available English translations of Merleau-Ponty's work. See also the selected bibliography at the end of the present volume—Eds.]

119

120 COMPLEMENTARY NOTE

5/S= Signes (Paris: Gallimard, I960). [Signs, trans. Richard C. McCleary (Evanston, 111.: North­western University Press, 1964).]

GE/EM= L'CEtt et Vesprit (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). ["Eye and Mind," trans. Carleton Dallery, in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenological Psy­chology, the Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1964).]

VT/VI= Le Visible el Vinvisible (Paris: Gallimard, 1964). [The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1968).]

EP/IPP= Eloge de la philosophie et autres essais (Paris: Gallimard, 1965). [The £loge itself, trans. John Wild and James M. Edie, appears as In Praise of Philosophy (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern Uni­versity Press, 1963) and has been reprinted (with identical pagination) along with John O'Neill's translation of Resumes de cours, College de France, 1952-1960 in In Praise of Phi­losophy and Other Essays (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern Uni­versity Press, 1988). The autres essais from the French vol­ume cited above are available in English translation in Signs.]

A detailed bibliography of Maurice Merleau-Ponty's works can be found in Merleau-Ponty, sa vie, son oeuvre, by Andre Robinet (Paris: P.U.F., 1963), pp. 67-74.

FIRST LECTURE: NOTE ON THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY

The content of this lecture prefigures that of the essay entitled La philoso­phie et le «dehors», which appeared in Les Grands Philosophes (Paris: Mazenod, 1956) and which was reprinted in 5, pp. 158-67, theninjEP, pp. 170-85. ["Philosophy and the 'Outside' " is the first part of the essay "Every­where and Nowhere," in 5, pp. 126-33.]

See also VI, pp. 242 and 252-53 [VI, pp. 188 and 198-200].

SECOND LECTURE: THE UNION OF THE SOUL AND THE BODY IN DESCARTES

See especially SC, p. 225; CE, pp. 55-57; VI, pp. 288, 326-27 [SB, pp. 208-209; EM, pp. 176-77; VI, pp. 234, 272-73].

Complementary Note 121

THIRD LECTURE: CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF IN MALEBRANCHE

1. Regarding the Cartesian Cogito: see especially SC, pp. 210-12; PP, pp. 425-26, 459-61; VI, pp. 326-27 [SB, pp. 195-97; PP, pp. 370-72, 400-402; VI, pp. 272-73]. An article pubUshed November 23, 1964, "Le Primat de la perception et ses consequences philosophiques" (Bulletin de la Soctete frangaise de philosophie, t. XLI, not republished in book format), analyzes (pp. 129-30) "three ways of understanding the Cogito" ["The Primacy of Perception and Its Philosophical Consequences" is con­tained in The Primacy of Perception and Other Essays on Phenomenolog-ical Psychology, The Philosophy of Art, History and Politics, ed. James M. Edie (Evanston, 111.: Northwestern University Press, 1964); cf. pp. 21-22];

2. On knowledge by feeling and passivity in Malebranche: see espe­cially VI, pp. 66, 302 [VI, pp. 42-43, 249];

3. On the experience of passivity: SC, p. 233 [SB, p. 216]. The expression "blind contact," used supra, p. 38, is found in SC, p. 213, applied to Descartes [SB, p. 197].

FOURTH LECTURE: NATURAL JUDGMENTS AND PERCEPTION

1. On the Cartesian theory of perception and its difficulties: see espe­cially^, pp. 205-207, 211-13; PP, pp. 46-57; (E, pp. 36-60; VI, p. 263 [SB, pp. 190-92, 196-98; PP, pp. 36-46; EM, pp. 169-78; VI, p. 210];

2. On natural judgments in Malebranche: see especially SC, pp. 212-13; PP, pp. 297-98 [SB, pp. 196-97; PP, pp. 256-58].

Jean-Paul Sartre's The Transcendence of the Ego, referred to supra p. 46, is referred to and commented upon in SC, pp. 238-39 [SB, pp. 221-22].

FIFTH LECTURE: PERCEPTIBLE EXTENSION AND INTELLIGIBLE EXTENSION

1. On the positive infinite and the partes extra partes in seventeenth-century classical philosophy: S, pp. 186-88 (cf. EP, pp. 220-22) [S, pp. 148-50];

2. On the "cubic foot" of extension (see supra, p. 52): SC, p. 212 [SB, p. 197].

The "connection with existence" evoked supra, p. 52 echoes the "living connection"mentioned in PP, p. 237 [PP, p. 205].

122 COMPLEMENTARY NOTE

SIXTH LECTURE: CAUSALITY IN THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE SOUL AND THE BODY

On Malebranche's occasionalism: SC, p. 238 [SB, p. 221].

SEVENTH LECTURE: THEOLOGY AND THE UNION OF THE SOUL AND THE BODY

1. On Malebranche's religious philosophy: S, pp. 181-83 (cf. EP, pp. 209-13) [S, pp. 143-45];

2. On Kierkegaard's Christianity: SNS, p. 359 [SNS, p. 176]. In several places in his work, Maurice Merleau-Ponty praises Male-

branche for having seen in the world "an incomplete work": see especially PP, p. 465 [PP, p. 406] and the Bulletin de la Societe frangaise de philoso­phic, t. XLI, p. 134.

EIGHTH THROUGH TENTH LECTURES: FROM MALEBRANCHE TO MAINE DE BIRAN; MAINE DE BIRAN AND THE PHILOSOPHERS OF THE COGITO, I AND H

1. On the Biranian subject "which does not know itself except in the world, but which is in the world, and could not even be subject if it did not have a body to move": S, p. 192 (cf. EP, p. 327) [S, p. 152];

2. On the human subject which "temporalizes itself" (supra, p. 75): PP, pp. 484-89 [PP, pp. 423-28].

The conception of doubt presented, supra, pp. 94-75, evokes the "perceptual faith" of SNS, p. 188, n. land VI, pp. 48ff. [SNS, p. 94, n. 13 and VI, pp. 28ff.]

ELEVENTH LECTURE: MATTER AND MEMORY: THE NEW AND THE POSITIVE IN THE ANALYSIS OF THE FIRST CHAPTER

1. OnBergson, Kant, and the point P.: SC. p. 215 [SB, pp. 199-200]; 2. On "pure image": SC, p. 208 [SB, p. 193]; 3. On the being of the perceived: S, pp. 232-34 (cf. EP, pp. 293-96)

[S, pp. 184-86]; 4. On the relationship of the present to the past (supra, pp. 91-92):

PP, pp. 417-18 [PP, pp. 363-64].

Complementary Note 123

TWELFTH LECTURE: THE SECOND CHAPTER OF MATTER AND MEMORY

1. On the projection of recollections in Bergson: SC, p. 209 [SB, p. 194];

2. On the body and time: PP, pp. 93-94 [PP, pp. 78-79].

FOURTEENTH LECTURE: COMMENTARY ON TEXT: THE DEFINITION OF EXISTENCE

InEP, pp. 21-23 [Inaugural Lecture at the College de France], Maurice Mer-leau-Ponty was to interpret Bergson's work with an increased affinity to it and was to recognize in the Bergsonian theory of existence the "prolifera­tion" and the "mis-focus" mentioned supra, p. 106 [IPP, pp. 11-12.]

FIFTEENTH AND SIXTEENTH LECTURES: COMMENTARY ON TEXT: "SEEK EXPERIENCE AT ITS SOURCE"; THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN INTUITION AND CONSTRUCTION IN BERGSON'S METAPHYSICS

See especially SNS, p. 194, n. 1 [SNS, p. 97, n. 15] (on the Introduction to Metaphysics and the "lines of facts"), S, p. 232 (cf. EP, pp. 292-93) [S, p. 184] (on the extension of the experience of oneself) and particularly EP, pp. 29-31 [IPP, pp. 16-17] (on the meaning of Bergsonian "intuition").

In pp. 64-65 of Merleau-Ponty, sa vie, son ceuvre, M. Andre Robinet resituated Maurice Merleau-Ponty's work in the tradition of Malebranche, Maine de Biran, and Bergson, as "an occasionalism of immergence and incar­nation" (p. 65).

Jean Deprun

CHAPTER NOTES

["Eds." designates a note of clarification included by the editors of this volume. The sole note of clarification from the editor of the original French edition of these lec­tures (apart from his Foreword and Complementary Note) has been included at the end of the Sixth Lecture (see supra p. 54). Whenever possible when English trans­lations of the works referred to in the lectures are available, we have used these translations in our text. References to these passages are included in brackets fol­lowing references to the original sources. To insure clarity and consistency, some information omitted in the original French notes (e.g., cities and dates of publica­tion, editors, full titles of works) has been added to the notes here. We have also taken the liberty to correct several reference errors which we discovered in the French text. Finally, for simplicity's sake, titles referred to frequently will sometimes be indicated either by abbreviations or by the first word or words in the title. —Eds.]

FIRST LECTURE: NOTE ON THE HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY IN RELATION TO MALEBRANCHE, BIRAN, AND BERGSON

1. Leon Brunschvicg, Spinoza et ses contemporains, 3ded. (Paris: Alcan, 1923). 2. Nicolas Malebranche, Traite de morale, I, n, iii, in CEuvres completes de

Malebranche (Paris: Vrin, 1962-1968), t. XI, p. 34; cited by Brunschvicg in Spinoza etses contemporainsy p. 336. [The twenty-volume edition, produced under the gen­eral editorship of Andre Robinet, of the CEuvres completes de Malebranche will henceforth be referred to as "O.C." English translation: Treatise on Ethics (1684), trans. Craig Walton (Dordrecht: Kluwer, 1993), p. 54.]

125

126 CHAPTER NOTES

3. Traite de morale, 1, II, xi i inO.C, t. XI, p. 35; cited in Spinoza et ses con-termporains, p. 336. [Treatise on Ethics, p. 57.]

4. Spinoza et ses contemporains, p. 356. 5. Entretiens metaphysiques, VI [in Entretiens sur la me'taphysique et sur la

religion], ed. Armand Cuvillier (Paris: Vrin, 1947), t. I, p. 181; alsoinO.C, C. XII, p. 131; cited by Brunschvicg, Spinoza et ses contemporains, p. 339. [English trans­lation: Dialogues on Metaphysics, trans. Willis Doney (New York: Abaris, 1980), p. 127.]

6. Spinoza et ses contemporains, p. 347.

SECOND LECTURE: THE UNION OF THE SOUL AND THE BODY IN DESCARTES

1. [In the French edition of these lectures, references to Descartes's works first cite the standard twelve-volume edition by Adam and Tannery (referred to as "AT"), (Euvres de Descartes, rev. ed. (Paris: Vrin/C.N.R-S, 1964-76). In some cases references to other editions of Descartes's works are also given. Where possible we have followed the most recent and extensive collection of Descartes's philosophical works in English, the three-volume edition The Philosophical Writings of Descartes, trans. John Cottingham, Robert Stoothoff, Dugald Murdoch, and Anthony Kenny (the last for Vol. Ill, "The Correspondence," only) (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1984-85 [Vols. I, II], and 1991 [Vol. m]). Following John Cottingham's sug­gestion, we refer to this English edition as "CSM" for the first two volumes and as "CSM-K" for the third.—Eds.] AT, i. DC, p. 64. [CSM, Vol. II, p. 56.]

2. AT, t. iy p. 346; CEuvres et lettres, ed. Bridoux (Paris: Gallimard, 1952), p. 1224. [CSM-K, pp. 278-79.]

3. AT, t. IX, p. 64. [CSM, Vol. II, p. 56.] 4. [The Latin version is from AT, t. in, p. 424. Three French translations of the

passage are cited in the French edition of these lectures: CEuvres et lettres, ed. Bridoux, p. 41; Lettres a Arnauld et a Morns, ed. Lewis, p. 41; and CEuvres philosophiques, ed. Alquie (Paris: Gamier, 1963), t. II, p. 362. Both the Latin ver­sion and a single French translation are included in the French edition. The English translation included here is from CSM-K, p. 190.—Eds.]

5. AT, t. in, p. 694; Bridoux, p. 1160. [CSM-K, p. 228.] 6. [The Latin version is from AT, t. V, p. 223. Only two French translations are

cited for this passage in the French edition of these lectures; Bridoux, p. 1309, and Lewis, p. 91. The English translation included here is from CSM-K, p. 358.—Eds.]

7. [Here only Alquie's French translation is cited (t. II, p. 362). English trans­lation from CSM-K. p. 190.—Eds.]

8. [Here onlyAlquie's French translation is cited (t. II, p. 362). English trans­lation from CSM-K. p. 190.—Eds.]

9. [The Latin version is from AT, t. V, p. 342. In this case two French transla­tions are cited. The first, from Bridoux (p. 1334), renders the final phrase "mais seulement une etendue de puissance" ("but only an extension of power"); the second, from Lewis (p. 159), reads". . . [une etendue de puissance ou une exten-

Chapter Notes 127

sion en] puissance" ("... [an extension of power or an extension in] power"). Eng­lish translation from CSM-K, p. 372.—Eds.]

10. [Letter to Elisabeth of June 28, 1643,] AT, t. Ill, p. 692; Bridoux, p. 1158. [CSM-K, p. 227.]

THIRD LECTURE: CONSCIOUSNESS OF SELF IN MALEBRANCHE

1. cf. Martial Gueroult, Etendue etpsychologie chez Malebranche (Paris: Les belles lettres, 1939), p. 11.

2. Etendue et psychologie chez Malebranche, p. 11. 3. Pierre Lachieze-Rey, LIdealisme kantien, 2d ed. (Paris: Alcan, 1950), p. 18. 4. LIdealisme kantien, p. 21. 5. Entretiens metaphysiques, I, § 1; ed. Cuvillier, t. I, p. 62: O.C., t. XIL, p.

32. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 25.] 6. Recherche [de la verite], III, I, I, inO.C, t. I, p. 388. [English translation:

The Search After Truth and Elucidations of the Search After Truth, trans. Thomas M. Lennon and Paul J. Olscamp (Columbus: Ohio State University Press, 1980), p. 202. Hereafter referred to as Search.—Eds.]

7. Reponses a Arnauld, t. I, pp. 273-74; O.C., t. VI, p. 162. 8. Entretiens metaphysiques, V, § iv; ed. Cuvillier, t. I, p. 162; O.C., t. XIII,

p. 115. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 109] 9. Recherche, in, II, VII, § iv; O.C., t. I, p. 452. [Search, p. 238.] See also

Reponses, I, iy pp. 112ff.; O.C., t. IX, pp. 1076ff. 10. Entretien d'un philosophe Chretien et d'un philosophe chinois, O.C., t.

XV, p. 4. [English translation: Dialogue between a Christian Philosopher and a Chinese Philosopher on the Existence of God, trans. Dominick A. Iorio (Wash­ington, D.C.: University Press of America, 1980), p. 66.]

11. Recherche, m, II, VII, § II; O.C. t. I, p. 449. [Search, p. 237.] 12. IIP lettre a Mairan, ed. Moreau, p. 136; O.C, t. XIX, p. 883. 13. Recherche, III, II, VIII § 1; O.C, t. I, p. 456. [Search, p. 241.] 14. Entretiens metaphysiques, in, § iv; ed. Cuvillier, t. I, p. 102; O.C, t. XII,

p. 64. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 57.] 15. Response a Regis, ch. II, § 14; O.C, t. XVIM, p. 289. 16. Antonie Arnauld, Des vraies et des fausses idees, ch. XXIII (Cologne: N.

Schonten, 1683), pp. 257-58. 17. Recherche, I, I, § 1; O.C, t. I, p. 41. [Search, p. 2.] 18. Meditations chr&iennes, IX, xix; O.C, t. X, p. 104.

FOURTH LECTURE: NATURAL JUDGMENTS AND PERCEPTION

1. Meditations chretiennes, n, iv; O.C, t. X, p. 20. 2. Recherche, I, I, § 1; O.C, t. I, p. 43. [Search, p. 3.]

128 CHAPTER NOTES

3. E. Brehier, "Les jugements naturels chez Malebranche,Min Revue philosophique, 1938; reproduced in Etudes de philosophie moderne (Paris, 1957), pp. 72-78.

4. Ibid., p. 77. 5. Ibid., p. 78. 6. AT, t. VI, pp. 137-38; Alquie, 1.1, p. 707; Bridoux, p. 222. [CSM, Vol. I, p. 170.] 7. Jean Paul Sartre, Transcendance de VEgo (Paris: Vrin, 1966, p. 25); first pub-

lished in Recherches philosophiques, VI, 1936-1937, p. 90. [English translation: The Transcendence of the Ego: An Existentialist Theory of Consciousness, trans. Forrest Williams and Robert Kirkpatrick (New York: Noonday Press, 1957), pp. 41-42.]

8. Dioptrique (Optics), DiscoursVI; AT, t. VI, p. 141; Bridoux, p. 224; Alquie, t. I, p. 710. [CSM, Vol. I, p. 172.]

FIFTH LECTURE: PERCEPTIBLE EXTENSION AND INTELLIGIBLE EXTENSION

1. Spinoza et ses contemporains, p. 354. 2. Laporte, "L'Etendue intelligible chez Malebranche," in Revue international

de philosophie, 1938; cf. Etudes d'histoire de la philosophie frangaise au XVTIe

siecle, pp. 153-92. 3. Ibid., p. 162. 4. Entretiens metaphysiques, II, § 2; O.C., t. II, p. 52; Cuvillier, t. I, p. 86.

[Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 45.] 5. Entretiens metaphysiques, II, § 2; O.C., t. II, p. 52. [Dialogues on Meta­

physics, p. 45.] 6. Reponse a Regis, II, § 5; O.C., t. XVII-1, p. 282. 7. 5 February 1649; AT, t. V, 270; Correspondance avecAmauld et Morns,

ed. Lewis, pp. 114, 115 (CSM-K, p. 362). [Due to a discrepancy between "within parts" in CSM-K and upartes extra partesn in AT, we have opted for a translation which is closer to the Latin text.— Eds.]

8. VIe Eclaircissement; O.C., t. Ill, p. 61. [Elucidation Six in Search, pp. 572-73. Because of the awkwardness, we have opted to use "outsides'-rather than "outnesses" as is found in Lennon's translation.—Eds.]

9. Reponses aArnauld, t. I, p. 342; O.C., t. VI, p. 203. 10. "L'Etendue intelligible chez Malebranche," p. 167. 11. Ibid., p. 176 and note 5; cf. O.C., t. XVII-1, p. 281. 12. Recueil des reponses aArnauld, t. I, p. 342; O.C., t. VI, p. 204; quoted

by Laporte, p. 180. 13. "L'Etendue intelligible chez Malebranche," p. 180. 14. IF Entretien sur la mort, ed. Cuvillier, t. H, pp. 244-45; O.C., t. Xm, p. 403. 15. Ibid., ed. Cuvillier, t. II, p. 245; O.C., t. XIII, p. 403. 16. Recueil (des reponses a Arnauld), t. I, pp. 343-44; O.C., t. VI, p. 204;

quoted by Laporte, "L'Etendue intelligible chez Malebranche," pp. 186-87. 17. Troisieme reponse, in Correspondance avec Mairan, ed. Moreau, p. 139;

O.C., t. XIX, p. 886. 18. Quatrieme reponse, ed. Moreau, p. 169; O.C., t. XIX, p. 909.

Chapter Notes 129

SIXTH LECTURE: CAUSALITY IN RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN THE SOUL AND THE BODY

1. Meditations chretiennes, IX, ii; O.C, t. X, p. 96. 2. Entretiens metaphysiques, X, xvi, ed. Cuvillier, t. II, p. 60; O.C, t. XII, p.

247. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 247.] 3. Entretiens metaphysiques, IV, xviii; ed. Cuvillier, t. I, p. 144; O.C, t. XII,

p. 102. [We have corrected this reference, which in the French text reads IV, xvii.— Eds. Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 97.]

4. Ibid.

SEVENTH LECTURE: THEOLOGY AND THE UNION OF THE SOUL AND THE BODY

1. Recherche, I, III, I, ch. 1, § 1; O.C, t. I, p. 383. [Search, p. 199.] 2. Ibid., p. 382. [Search, p. 198.] 3. Ibid., p. 383. [Search, p. 199.] 4. Recherche, I, V, I; O.C, t. II, p. 127. [We have corrected this reference,

which in the French text reads "I, IV, ch. 1."—Eds. Search, pp. 337-38.] 5. Recherche, I** Eclaircissement, O.C, t. in, p. 34. [Elucidation One in

Search, p. 556.] 6. Meditations chretiennes, XVII, iv; O.C, t. X, p. 192. 7. Meditations chretiennes, XIII, xxii; O.C, t. X, p. 159. 8. Meditations chretiennes, XII, xxi; O.C, t. X, p. 149. 9. Recherche, I, V, V; O.C, t. II, p. 175. [Search, p. 367.]

10. Entretiens metaphysiques, IV, xxi; O.C, t. XII, pp. 105-106. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 99.]

11. Elucidation One; Elucidation Seven, xix; Meditations chretiennes, XVI, xiii. 12. Elucidation One. 13. I** Eclaircissement; O.C, t. Ill, p. 22. [Elucidation One in Search, 549.] 14. Elucidation Eleven. 15. Meditations chretiennes, IX, xix-xxi; O.C, t. X, pp. 103-104. 16. Entretiens metaphysiques, IV, xvii; O.C, t. XII, p. 101. [Dialogues on

Metaphysics, p. 95.] 17. Recherche, I, Y § 1; O.C, t. I, p. 71. [Search, p. 20.] 18. VIIIe Eclaircissement, v-vii; O.C, t. in, p. 73-74. [Elucidation Eight in

Search, pp. 580-81.] 19. VIIIe Eclaircissement, xvii-xviii; O.C, t. Ill, p. 80. [Elucidation Eight, pp.

584-85.] 20. Entretiens metaphysiques, IX, v; Cuvillier, t. II, p. 12; O.C, t. XII, p. 205.

{Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 205.] 21. Meditations chretiennes, VII, xii; O.C, t. X, p. 73. 22. Meditations chretiennes, VII, xi; O.C, t. X, p. 73. 23. Meditations chretiennes, XIV, xv; O.C, t. X, p. 158. 24. Ibid.

130 CHAPTER NOTES

25. Ibid. 26. Meditations chretiennes, Xiy xviii; O.C., t. X, p. 159. 27. Ibid. 28. Entretiens metaphysiques, IX, vi; ed. Cuvillier, t. II, p. 13; O.C., t. XII, p.

205. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 205.] 29. Ibid., p. 206. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 205.] 30. Entretiens metaphysiques, XIV viii; Cuvillier, t. n, p. 181; O.C., t. XII, p.

243. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 347.] 31. Entretiens metaphysiques, XIY viii; Cuvillier, t. II, p. 180; O.C., t. XII, p.

243. [We have corrected this reference, which in the French text reads "XIV, vii,. . . p. 432."—Eds. Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 347.]

32. Entretiens metaphysiques, XIV, viii; O.C., p. 243. [In light of the correc­tion in note 31 supra, we have changed this reference, which reads simply "ibid." in the French text.—Eds. Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 347.]

33. Entretiens metaphysiques, XIV, iv; Cuvillier, t. II, p. 177; O.C., t. XII, p. 339. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 343.]

34. Recherche, III, I, I, § 11; O.C., t. I, p. 395. [Search, p. 206.] 35. Meditations chretiennes. Ill, 5-6; O.C., t. X, p. 28. 36. Entretiens metaphysiques, XTV, ix: ed. Cuvillier, t. n, p. 181; O.C., t. XII,

p. 343. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 347.] 37. Meditations chretiennes, XII, xiv; O.C., t. X, p. 130. 38. Traite de la nature et de la grdce. Deuxieme discours, I™ partie, §§ XVII

and XVIII; O.C., t. V pp. 88-89. [English translation: Treatise on Nature and Grace, trans. Patrick Riley (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1992), p. 145.]

39. Entretiens metaphysiques, VIII, iii; ed. Cuvillier, t. I, p. 238; O.C., t. XII, p. 177. [Dialogues on Metaphysics, p. 175.]

40. Traite de la nature et de la grdce, Premier discours, I™ partie, § XVIII; O.C., t. V p. 32. [Treatise on Nature and Grace, p. 118.]

EIGHTH LECTURE: FROM MALEBRANCHE TO MAINE DE BIRAN

1. Leon Brunschvicg, LExperience humaine et la causalite physique, 3d ed. (Paris: Alcan, 1949), p. 5. [Henceforth referred to as LExperience humaine—Eds.]

2. Ibid., p. 17. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., p. 7. 5. XVe Eclaircissement, O.C., t. Ill, p. 227, note; cited in Brunschvicg, LEx­

perience humaine, p. 7 [Elucidation Fifteen in Search, p. 670.] 6. XVs Eclair cissement, O.C., t. IV, p. 227, note. [Elucidation Fifteen in

Search, p. 670.] 7. LExperience humaine, p. 9. 8. Essai sur les fondements de la psychologie. Introduction, V; Tisserand, t.

VIII, p. 77; (CEuvres choisies, ed. Gouhier, p. 128); see Brunschvicg, LExperience humaine, p. 18.

9. Essai sur les fondements', Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 78; Gouhier, p. 129.

Chapter Notes 131

10. Ibid. 11. LExperience humaine, p. 30. 12. Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 75; Gouhier, p. 127; see Brunschvicg, LExperience

humaine, p. 20. 13. See for example, Essai sur les fondements, Irepartie, sect. I, ch. I, § 1; Tis­

serand, t. Vm, pp. 128-29. See Brunschvicg, LExperience humaine, p. 23, note 1. 14. Leibniz, Nouveaux essais, II, xxi, § 14. [English translation: New Essays

on the Understanding, trans. Peter Remnant and Jonathan Bennett (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), p. 179.]

15. Nouveaux essais d'anthropologie\ Tisserand, t. XTV, p. 229; see Brun­schvicg, LExperience humaine, p. 28.

16. LExperience humaine, p. 29. 17. Ibid., p. 28. 18. Ibid. 19. Ibid., p. 26. 20. Essai sur les fondements, Ire partie. sec. II, ch. 1; Tisserand, t. VIII, pp.

183-84; see Brunschvicg, LExperience humaine, pp. 25-26. 21. Essai sur les fondements. Introduction, III; Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 29, n. 1;

Gouhier, p. 91. 22. LExperience humaine, p. 42. 23. Ibid., p. 7. 24. Recherche, I, X, § 3; O.C., t. I, 125; cited by Brunschvicg, LExperience

humaine, p. 7. [Search, p. 50.] 25. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, II; Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 15;

Gouhier, pp. 78-79. 26. Memoire sur la decomposition de la pensee, I1^ partie, Intr., § 5; Tis­

serand, t. Ill, p. 92. 27. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, II; Tisserand, t. VIII, pp. 14-15;

Gouhier, p. 77. 28. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, II; Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 15;

Gouhier, p. 78. 29. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, II; Tisserand, t. VIII, pp. 19-20;

Gouhier, pp. 81-82. 30. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, II; Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 31;

Gouhier, p. 91. 31. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, II; Tisserand t. VIII, p. 33;

Gouhier, p. 93. 32. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, II; Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 33;

Gouhier, p. 94. 33. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, IV; Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 52;

Gouhier, p. 108. 34. Ibid. 35. Essai sur les fondements, Introduction, VI; Tisserand, t. VIII, p. 84;

Gouhier, p. 134. 36. Cf. Memoire sur la decomposition de la pensee, He partie, sec. I, ch. I,

§§ 1-2; Tisserand, t. in, pp. 141-54; Rapport des sciences naturelles avec la psy­chologic. Introduction, § I, V; Tisserand, t. X, p. 48; Gouhier, p. 160, etc.

132 CHAPTER NOTES

37. Essai sur les fondements, Irc partie, sec. I, ch. I, § HI; Tisserand, t. Vin, p. 141. 38. Fondements de la psychologie, ed. Naville, t. I, p. 307; Tisserand, t. VIII,

p. 272. 39. ^Experience humaine, p. 40. 40. Memoire sur la decomposition de la pensee, Tisserand, t. Ill, pp. 180-81. 41. Essai sur les fondements, Irc partie, sec. n, ch. II; Tisserand, t. Vm, p. 197. 42. Essai sur les fondements, Irc partie, sec. n, ch. IV; Tisserand. t. VIII, pp.

257-258. 43. Essai sur les fondements, Ire partie, sec. II, ch. Ill; Tisserand, t. VIII, pp.

208-209. 44. Essai sur les fondements, lK partie, sec. II, ch. IV, § II; Tisserand, t. VIII,

p. 231.

NINTH LECTURE: BIRAN AND THE PHILOSOPHERS OF THE COGITO

1. Brunschvicg, L'Experience humaine, p. 37. 2. Commentaire sur les meditations metaphysiques, I; Tisserand, t. XI, p. 82. 3. Notes sur quelquespassages de Vabbe de Lignac; Tisserand, t. X, p. 348. 4. Commentaire sur les meditations metaphysiques,VL; Tisserand, t. XI, p. 128. 5. Ibid. 6. Ibid., pp. 81-82. 7. Meditation sur la mortpres du litfunebre de sa soeur Victoire, Tisserand,

t. I, p. 12. 8. Memoire sur la decomposition de la pensee, Ire partie, introduction, § V,

iv; Tisserand, t. Ill, p. 139. 9. IIIe Meditation; AT, t. IX, p. 28; Bridoux, p. 285; Alquie, t. II, p. 431.

[Third Meditation in CSM, Vol. II, p. 25.] 10. Commentaire sur les Meditations metaphysiques. III; Tisserand, t. XI, pp.

91-92.

TENTH LECTURE: BIRAN AND THE PHILOSOPHERS OF THE COGITO (CONCLUSION)

1. Cf. Commentaire sur les Meditations metaphysiques, V; Tisserand, t. XI, p. 121.

2. Memoire sur la decomposition de la pensee, Ire partie, introduction, § V, iv; Tisserand, t. Ill, p. 139.

3. Ibid. 4. Meditations chretiennes, VI, xiv; O.C., t. X, p. 64. 5. Notes sur certains passages de Malebranche et de Bossuet, ed. Tisserand,

t. XI, p. 147. 6. Ibid., p. 148. 7. Memoire sur les perceptions obscures, I, iii; Tisserand, t. V, p. 29.

Chapter Notes 133

8. Memoire sur la decomposition de la pensee, sec. II, chap. I; Tisserand, t. IV, p. 14.

9. Ibid. 10. Note sur un ecrit de M. Royer-Collard; Tisserand, t. X, p. 300. 11. See supra, pp. 10-11. 12. Correspondance philosophique; Tisserand, t. VII, p. 419. 13. Essai sur les fondements, He partie, sec. I, chap. II, § iv; Tisserand, t. IX,

p. 301. 14. Note sur Vid^e d*existence', Tisserand, t. XSV, p. 174. 15. Essai sur les fondements, He partie, sec. TV, chap. 1; Tisserand, t. IX, p. 480. 16. Ibid., pp. 482-83. 17. Ibid. 18. Essai sur les fondements, He partie, sec. TV, chap. II; Tisserand, t. IX, p. 490. 19. Ibid., pp. 492-93. 20. Ibid., p. 493. 21. Memoire sur la decomposition de la pensee, IIe partie, sec. I, chap. II, §

3; Tisserand, t. Ill, p. 216. 22. Ibid. 23. Nouveaux essais d'antbropologie; Tisserand, t. XIV, pp. 293-94. 24. Rapport des sciences naturelles avec la psycbologie; Tisserand, t. X, p.

126; Gouhier, pp. 188-89. 25. Examen des legons de philosophie de M. Laromiguiere; Tisserand, t. XI,

p. 328. 26. Reponse a Stapfer, Tisserand, t. XI, p. 427; Gouhier, p. 248. 27. Ibid. 28. Response a Guizot; Tisserand, t. X, pp. 262-63.

ELEVENTH LECTURE: MATTER AND MEMORY: THE NEW AND THE POSITIVE IN THE ANALYSIS OF THE FIRST CHAPTER

1. [Quotations from Matter and Memory are based on the authorized translation by N. M. Paul and W. S. Palmer. Page references correspond to the most recent English edition (New York: Zone Books, 1988) and to the French edition contained in CEuvres, Ed. du Centenaire (Paris: RILE, 1959), pp. 159-379]. The Introduction referred to in this lecture was originally written for the English translation and later added to the sev­enth French edition (which Merleau-Ponty was using in 1947-48). The remainder of the English translation is based on the fifth French edition. In order to preserve Bergson's distinction between "memoire" and "souvenir" we have consistently translated these terms as "memory" and "recollection," respectively, and have altered passages from the English translation of Matter and Memory when necessary.—Eds.]

2. Matter and Memory, p. 14; (Euvres, p. 166. 3. Matter and Memory, p. 31; CEuvres, p. 182. 4. Matter and Memory, p. 21; CEuvres, p. 172. 5. Ibid.

134 CHAPTER NOTES

6. Matter and Memory, p. 35; (Euvres, p. 185. 7. Matter and Memory, pp. 10-11; (Euvres, p. 162. 8. Matter and Memory, p. 35; (Euvres, p. 185. 9. Ibid.

10. Matter and Memory, p. 43; (Euvres,*p. 192. 11. Matter and Memory, p. 152; (Euvres, p. 293.

TWELFTH LECTURE: THE SECOND CHAPTER OF MATTER AND MEMORY

1. Matter and Memory, p. 86; (Euvres, p. 231. 2. Matter and Memory, p. 87; (Euvres, p. 232. 3. (Euvres, p. 244. 4. Ibid., p. 248. 5. Ibid., p. 249. 6. Matter and Memory, pp. 109-11; (Euvres, pp. 254-55. 7. Matter and Memory, p. I l l ; (Euvres, p. 255. 8. (Euvres, p. 274. 9. Ibid.

THIRTEENTH LECTURE: COMMENTARY ON TEXT: THE UNCONSCIOUS

1. Matter and Memory, chap. Ill, pp. 140-43; (Euvres, pp. 282-84. 2. Matter and Memory, p. 139; (Euvres, p. 281. 3. Cf. (Euvres, p. 284. 4. Ibid. 5. Ibid., p. 286. 6. Ibid. 7. Ibid., pp. 286-87.

FOURTEENTH LECTURE: COMMENTARY ON TEXT: THE DEFINITION OF EXISTENCE

1. Matter and Memory, chap. HI, pp. 146-48. (Euvres, pp. 288-89.

FIFTEENTH LECTURE: COMMENTARY ON TEXT: "SEEK EXPERIENCE AT ITS SOURCE"

1. Matter and Memory, chap. IV, pp. 183-86; (Euvres, pp. 288-89. 2. Ze nre: esstf/ sur la signification, du comique ((Euvres, pp. 383-485)

Chapter Notes 135

[English translation: "Laughter in Comedy" (published together with George Meredith's "An Essay on Comedy" with an Introduction and Appendix on "The Mean­ings of Comedy" by Wylie Syper), trans, unknown (Garden City, N.Y.: Doubleday Anchor Books, 1956), pp. 61-190.]

3. CEuvres, p. 462. ["Laughter," p. 161.] 4. La pensee et le mouvant; essais et conferences (CEuvres, pp. 1251-1482).

[English translation: The Creative Mind: An Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Mabelle L. Andison (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946).]

5. Matter and Memory, p. 186 (CEuvres, p. 322). 6. Essai sur les donnees immediates de la conscience (CEuvres, pp. 3-157).

[English translation: Time and Free Will; An Essay on the Immediate Data of Con­sciousness, trans. F. L. Pogson (New York: Harper & Row, 1910).]

7. CEuvres, p. 110. [Time and Free Will. p. 166.] 8. Matter and Memory, p. 189; CEuvres, p. 325. 9. Matter and Memory, p. 187; CEuvres, p. 323.

10. Matter and Memory, p. 188; CEuvres, p. 324. 11. Matter and Memory, p. 192; CEuvres, p. 327. 12. CEuvres, p. 337.

SIXTEENTH LECTURE: THE RELATIONSHIPS BETWEEN INTUITION AND CONSTRUCTION IN BERGSON'S METAPHYSICS

1. [Introduction a la metaphysique is included in CEuvres (pp. 1392-1432) as the sixth part of La Pensee et le mouvant. Two English translations of the essay exist: the first, T. E. Hulme's authorized translation, An Introduction to Metaphysics (New York: Library of Liberal Arts, 1913), is based on the 1903 edition of the essay; the second, by Mabelle L. Andison, is included in The Creative Mind (New York: Philosophical Library, 1946), the English translation of La Pensee et le mouvant, and is based on the revised version of the essay. Page references are given for both translations, but quotations are from the Andison translation in The Creative Mind.—Eds.]

2. CEuvres, pp. 1392-93. [Neither of the English translations includes this note.—Eds.]

3. La Pensee et le mouvant. Introduction (Premiere partie), in CEuvres, p. 1269. ["Introduction I" in The Creative Mind, p. 28.]

4. Ibid. 5. CEuvres, p. 1419. [The Creative Mind, p. 187; An Introduction to Meta­

physics, p. 49.] 6. La Pensee et le mouvant. Introduction (Deuxieme partie), in CEuvres, p.

1273. ["Introduction IP in The Creative Mind, p. 32.] 7. Ibid., p. 1273. 8. CEuvres. [The Creative Mind, pp. 32-33.] 9. CEuvres, p. 1274. [The Creative Mind, p. 33.]

10. Ibid.

136 CHAPTER NOTES

11. CEuvres, p. 1425. [The Creative Mind, p. 32; An Introduction to Meta­physics, pp. 54-55.]

12. CEuvres, p. 1274. [The Creative Mind. p. 33.] 13. CEuvres, p. 1286. [The Creative Mind, pp. 43-44.] 14. CEuvres, p. 1287. [The Creative Mind, p. 44.] 15. CEuvres, p. 1393, n. 16. Z<z perception du changement, CEuvres, p. 1369. ["The Perception of

Change" in The Creative Mind, p. 134.] 17. CEuvres, p. 1370. [The Creative Mind, p. 134.] 18. Ibid. 19. CEuvres, p. 1421. [The Creative Mind, pp. 189-90; An Introduction to

Metaphysics, pp. 50-51.] 20. CEuvres, p. 1402. [The Creative Mind, p. 168; An Introduction to Meta­

physics, p. 30.] 21. Ibid. 22. CEuvres, p. 1278. [The Creative Mind, p. 39.] 23. Ibid. 24. CEuvres, p. 1422. [The Creative Mind, p. 190; An Introduction to Meta­

physics, p. 52.] 25. CEuvres, pp. 1422-23. [The Creative Mind, p. 191; An Introduction to

Metaphysics, p. 52.] 26. CEuvres, p. 1423. [The Creative Mind, p. W\, An Introduction to Meta­

physics, p. 53.] 27. CEuvres, p. 1425. [77be Creative Mind, p. 193; 4 « Introduction to Meta­

physics, p. 55.] 28. CEuvres, p. 1430. [Tfre Creative Mind, p. 197; 4w Introduction to Meta­

physics, p. 59.] 29. CEuvres, p. 1430. [77?e Creative Mind, p. 198; 4w Introduction to Meta­

physics, p. 59.] 30. CEuvres, p. 1276. [The Creative Mind, pp. 35-36.] 31. CEuvres, p. 1430. \Xhe Creative Mind, p. \9&, An Introduction to Meta­

physics, p. 60.] 32. CEuvres, pp. 1408-1409. [The Creative Mind, pp. Y75-16, An Introduc­

tion to Metaphysics, pp. 36-38.] 33. CEuvres, p. 1416. [77?e Creative Mind, p. 184; 4w Introduction to Meta­

physics, p. 45.] 34. Ibid. 35. CEuvres, p. 1416. [Tfte Creative Mind, p. 184; 4w Introduction to Meta­

physics, p. 45.] 36. CEuvres, p. 1419. [The Creative Mind, p. \$>1\ An Introduction to Meta­

physics, pp. 48-49.] 37. ^intuition philosophique, contained in CEuvres (pp. 1345-65) as the

fourth part of Z<z pensee et le mouvant. ["Philosophical Intuition" in Tfte Creative Mind, pp. 107-29.]

38. CEuvres, p. 1358. [The Creative Mind, p. 121.]

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INDEX OF AUTHORS CITED BY MAURICE

MERLEAU-PONTY

Alain, 44 Kant, 41, 65, 69, 76, 89, 108 Arnauld, 39-40 Kierkegaard, 60

Bacon, 68 Lachieze-Rey, P., 37 Bergson, 29, 63, 87-96, 99-101, Laporte, J., 49, 51

104-106, 109-17 Leibniz, 49, 63, 67 Berkeley, 44, 88 Locke, 68-69 Biran, 29, 61-72, 73, 74-85 Lucretius, 69 Bonnet, C, 66 Breheir, E., 44 Mairan, 52 Brunschvicg, L., 29-30, 61-65, 69 Malebranche, 29-31, 35-60, 61-62,

64, 65, 71, 75, 83 Condillac, 66-68, 69 Mesland, 33

Degerando, 70 Paul, Saint, 59 Descartes, 29-31, 33-35, 44, 46,

53-54, 68, 70-71, 73-79, 81, Royer-Collard, 81 83

Sartre, J.-P, 46 Fichte, 69 Schelling, 69

Spencer, 94 Galileo, 115 Spinoza, 29-34, 35, 52, 90 Gueroult, M., 37

Zeno, 111 Husserl, 96

139

SUBJECT INDEX

ACTION, and motion, 70; Biran relates thought to action, 78-79; of living bodies, 87-88; and dream, 94. See: Dreamy Effort, Human Person, Occasionalism.

ACTUAL, and potential in the Cogito, 73-74; priority of the actual over the possible, 75. See: Implicit.

ANALAGON, and imagining con­sciousness, 46. SeeHyle, Image.

ANTITHESIS, and primitive fact, 64; and Bergsonian intuition, 116. See: Contradiction, Fact, Human person, I, Intuition.

APHASIA, Bergson and, 95-96. APPERCEPTION, and con­

sciousness according to Male-branche, 43; prepersonal according to Biran, 80-81; genesis of internal apperception, 82-83. See: Reflec­tion, Signs, Voice.

ATHEISM, and theism in Descartes, 35. See: Theism.

ATTENTION, to life according to Bergson, 87.

BEING, and thought in the Cogito, 37; extension is a, 49; God is not of the order of, 59; thematic ordering of a sector of, 66; subject connected to universal being, 83; the perspective of the subject carved out of total being, 89; Bergsonian method and contact with, 110. See: For Itself.

BELIEF, in the noumenal self in Biran, 83-85.

BODY, is in Descartes a totality, 33; the soul is created just as bodies are, 40; is taken legitimately for our­selves, 40; natural judgment and one's own, 44; causality in the rela­tionships between the soul and, 53-54; image of, 66; no difference between moving one's body and per­ceiving it, 70; inhabited body and known body, 72; contributes to intel­lection, 76-77; Biran on the brink of intuition of one's own, 77; absolute soul facing the absolute body, 85; discussion of the body with the world, 87; unthinkable without con-

141

142 SUBJECT INDEX

sciousness, 89; intentionality of, 89; impedes the actualization of recollec­tions, 90; as element of the physical world and as representation, 91; its comprehension of time, 92; from element, becomes a center, 93; tran­sition toward consciousness, 93; does not succeed in being a subject, 94; means of actualizing the past, 96. See: Causality, Extension, Memory, Recollection, Soul, Subject, Union of the soul and the body.

BRAIN, does not contain recol­lections, 95-96.

CAUSALITY, in the relation­ships between the soul and the body, 53-54; experience of, 84-85. See: Effort.

CERTAINTY, CERTITUDE, of the Cogito, 37; makes analysis and reflections possible, 73-74.

CHOICE, philosophical, 31; freedom as choice already made, 74.

CHURCH, history of, 57-58; Christ animates the Church as the soul animates the body, 59-60.

COGITO, obscured by Male­branche, 35; as experience of myself according to Descartes, 37; dependent on a single principle in Malebranche, 37; its tripartite divi­sion, 39; discovered at a certain date, 40; referred to continually by Biran, 69; is not eliminated, but broadened, 71; rethought by Biran, 73-74; becomes a simple conver­sion to psychic facts, 79; exercise of a new, 80; Bergson does not address the problem of, 88. See: Conscious­ness, I, Idea, For Itself.

COINCIDENCE, intuition-coin­cidence, 111-14; and transcen­

dence, 116-17. See: Contact, Inte­gration, Intuition.

COMMUNICATION, with sys­tems, 31; contagious, 40; true com­munication, 110. See: Incantation, Signs, Speech, System.

COMPREHENSION, of time by the body, 92; intuition as, 114-17. See: Contradiction, Intuition, Understanding.

CONDUCTOR, the body is but a mere conductor, 91; the body is no longer a conductor, but a center, 93. See: Body.

CONNECTION, with existence, 52; and presentation to conscious­ness, 103-106. See: Existence.

CONNIVANCE, between the In Itself and the For Itself, 46-47.

CONSCIOUSNESS, of self in Malebranche, 37-41; imagining, 45-46; at work and already situated, 46; is what can never be taken as pure, 46; of self as relationship of the I to another term, 64; we have to become consciousness and freedom, 74; needs signs in order to conquer itself, 83; Bergson blind to the intentional structure of, 88-89; of something and judgment, 90; sit­uated, 90; in situation and objec­tivity, 101; Bergson never speaks of his, 105-106; as history and prolif­eration, 105. See: Cogito, For Itself, Idea, Object, Reflection.

CONSTANCY, of forms, of objects, 46; hypothesis of, 96. See: Perception.

CONSTRUCTION, in metaphys­ics, 109-10, 115-17. See: Intuti-tion.

CONTACT, blind, 38; obscure contact of the soul with itself, 41; of

Subject Index 143

self and of the world, 105; with being, 110; intuition as contact and coincidence, 114. See: Coinci­dence, Consciousness, Intuition.

CONTENT, and form of experi­ence, 76. See: Experience, Form, Philosophy, Psychology.

CONTRADICTION, between the In Itself and the For Itself, 105-106; Bergson goes beyond the contradic­tions without assuming them, 111. See: Comprehension, Intuition.

CORPOREALITY, of the soul according to Descartes, 34. See: Body, Extension, Soul.

CRITERIO-LOGICAL PHILOS­OPHY, abandonment of, 74.

CUBE, judged cube and per­ceived cube, 45. See: Depth, Judg­ment, Perception.

DECOUPAGE (CARVING-OUT), perceptive, 88-89; consciousness carved out from the inside of a world of images in itself, 88-89. See: Consciousness, For Itself, In Itself, Subject.

DEPTH, perception of accord­ing to Descartes, 44-45.

DIALECTIC, of time, 91, 101. DISORDER, and monsters, 60.

See: Miracles, Order. DISTANCE, perception of dis­

tance, 44-45; subject as impercep­tible distance, 90-91.

DOUBT, awe rather than mis­trust, 74; critique of Cartesian doubt by Biran, 77. See: Certitude, Evil Genius.

DREAM, myths and, 46-47; alternative of action and dream, 94.

DURATION, Bergsonian dura­tion and freedom, 109-11; paradox­

ical reality, 116. See: Evolution, Freedom, Intuition, Time.

EFFORT, Brunschvicg criticizes the feeling of effort, 61-62; con­sciousness of effort according to Biran, 64; its ontological value, 79-80. See: Power.

EMPIRICISM, the theory of nat­ural judgment, equivalent of an empiricism, 45-46; fills conscious­ness with nerve impulses, 64; Biran juxtaposes reflection and, 67-68; reflective and empirical, 71; Biran very close to, 80-82; he wavers be­tween empirical philosophy and reflective philosophy, 83; and intel-lectualism according to Bergson, 105. See: Intellectualism, Reflection.

ESSENCE, priority of existence over essence in Biran, 75, 79; the noumenal subject, thing without essence, 84. See: Existence, Nou­menal, Subject.

EVIDENCE, displaced by Biran, 62; transfer of, 65; signs already endowed with, 82.

EVIL, radical, 41; is merely a privation, 56. See: Monsters, Sin.

EVIL GENIUS, would continue to exist, but while changing demeanor, 74.

EVOLUTION, Bergsonian free­dom, reasonable evolution, 110; intuition of the vital and, 114. See: Intuition, Freedom, Life.

EXISTENCE, and ideality, 30; seen in the mirror of God, 30; opaque, 41; connection with, 52; consciousness is an existence For Itself, 67; Biran and the feeling of, 70; astonished at feeling oneself exist, 77; the excess of our exis-

144 SUBJECT INDEX

tence over what we know about it, 84; definition of by Bergson, 103-104; critique of the concep­tion, 104-106. See: Connection, For Itself, Noumenal, Subject.

EXPERIENCE, of myself, of ideas, and of God, 55; religious, 55, 59; of truth, 94; form and content of, 76; is not the simple application of a logos, 85; as mixture, 89; in metaphysics, 110. See: Intuition.

EXTENSION, of the soul, 34; of substance and of power, 34; clear idea of, 38; model of a pseudo-idea of the soul, 40; is not a manner of being, 49; intelligible and created extension, 49; intelligible, not a trait of divine psychology, 50; it remains a space, 50; is not the idea of air, 51; interior of the body, 71; Bergsonian analysis of, 91; behind space, 111; space divided into pieces and, 110; progressive from intuition, 114-15. See: Space, Spa-tiality.

FACT, primitive according to Biran, 64-68; primitive fact and primitive facts, 69; is not something which exists in itself, 73; notion of according to Bergson, 107. See: Antithesis, Philosophy.

FACnCITY, of consciousness, 67. FALL (PECHE), the human

person before the Fall, 41; human nature since and before the Fall, 57. See: Sin.

FEELING, idea, reason, 40; of self, displaced in order to be situated in God, 41; consciousness is always feeling, 43; the short proof of, 53; and idea, 55; subjectivity of, 66; of our individual existence, 67; evi­

dence that there is something that we can call world, 78. See: Effort.

FINALISM, and idealism, 44. FINALITY, reintroduced by

Malebranche, 53; the human per­son, subject to, 57; alternative of finality and initiative, 58-59. See: Organism.

FINITUDE, means of positing being, 89-90; Bergson never sees the positive value of it, 101.

FOR ITSELF, natural judgment, wavering between the In Itself and the For Itself, 46-47; consciousness is an existence For Itself, 67; kind of intermediate existence between the In Itself and the For Itself, 89; nei­ther memory nor body are For Itself, 94; we set in opposition the In Itself to the For Itself, 105-106; weakness of the description of the For Itself in Bergson, 106. See: Consciousness, In Itself, Subject.

FORM, constancy of perceived forms, 46; and matter of knowl­edge, 69; and content of experi­ence, 76. See: Perception, Philos­ophy, Psychology.

FREEDOM, human according to Malebranche, 41; experience of according to Biran, 70; as choice already made, 74; and reason according to Bergson, 110-11. See: Evolution, Fall, Sin.

FUTURE, future dimension, 76; the same movement opens the future and closes the past, 91. See: Past, Present, Time.

GENESIS, interior of exteriority, 50; and totality, 69.

GLORY, the three glories of God, 58.

Subject Index 145

GOD, existence seen in the mirror of, 30; Descartes's double attitude, toward God and toward the world, 35; grasped without ideas, 39; vision in, 39; Male-branche projects in God the condi­tions of rationality, 41; and natural judgments, 45; ideal foundation for particularities, 49; alone efficacious, 53; accessible by the short proof of feeling, 53; will, movement toward, 56-59; natural love of, 57; wants to save everyone, 58; glory of, 58-59; is not a comprehensible object, 60; Malebranche puts himself most often in God's point of view, 60; and the reasons for union, 65; my motor power is certain for God himself, 80; the relationship between God and the world is similar to the rela­tionship between the noumenal soul and the self, 85. See: Word.

GRACE, counter-pleasure, 53, 56.

HEARING, and phonation: their role in the genesis of reflection according to Biran, 81-83. See: Reflection, Voice.

HISTORY, of philosophy, 30-31; of the church, 57.

HORIZON, the horizonal rela­tionship is not the index of a total possession, 39; a horizon takes shape around the living body, 88; a present without any temporal horizon, 96; unconsciousness and horizonal relationship, 101; and perception, 106.

HUMAN PERSON, naturally ordered to an end, 56; subject to a finality, capable of initiative, 57-59; would be changed into an object by the salvation of all, 57-58; linked to

the infinite by the sacrifice of Jesus Christ, 59; everything is antithesis for, 64; we become monsters because we temporalize ourselves, 75; everything in is supra-animal organization, 94.

HYLE, and imagining conscious­ness, 46.

I, no inhabitant of conscious­ness, not even the I, 46; conscious­ness of self as relationship of the I to another term, 64; would no longer be a cautiousness, but a possible success, 74; sensibility without, 81; will not be at the apex of a cone, nor at its base, 91. See: Cogito, Con­sciousness, For itself, Subject

I THINK, See: Cogito. IDEA, seek to have clear ideas

or to understand things as they are, 30; nature of according to Male­branche, 38-39; my relationship to, horizonal relationship, 39; Brun-schvicg and the conversion toward, 61-62; the presentation of the idea is a fact, 65; philosophy questions the evidence of, 65; clarity of the new idea according to Bergson, 115-16.

IDEALISM, Cartesian, 29; seen in the mirror of God, 30; and percep­tion, 44-45; removes meaning from perspectives, 45; inverted, 46; must take imagination into account, 65; Beigson criticizes subjective idealism, not transcendental idealism, 89; tran­scendence of realism and, 90.

IDEALITY, and existence, 2; of space, 51; and illusion, 51-52; of the past, 90-91; of knowledge, 99-100; of recollections and of non-perceived objects, 90.

146 SUBJECT INDEX

ILLUSION, and ideality, 51; of amputees, 65-66.

IMAGE, imagining conscious­ness, 46; consciousness carved out of the interior of a world of images, 88-89; the body is only an, 93.

IMAGINATION, can idealism account for it?, 65.

IMMANENCE, psychological transition toward transcendental immanence, 51-52.

IMPLICIT, in the Cogito, 73-74. INCANTATION, and speech,

63, 110. IN ITSELF, natural judgement,

wavering between the In Itself and the For Itself, 46; Biran rises from For Ourselves to the In Itself, 83; intermediate existence between the In Itself and the For Itself, 89; no In Itself which is not a For Itself, 88-89; consciousness carved out in a world of images In Itself, 89; coming and going between the two levels of In Itself, 91; world extri­cated from its condition of In Itself, 91; Bergson no longer treats the past as an In Itself, 101; we set in oppo­sition the In Itself and the For Itself, 105. See: For Itself.

INDIVIDUALITY, illusion of, 29. INSTINCT, and natural judg­

ment, 49, 52; prehuman link with living beings, 110.

INTEGRATION, and intuition, 108-109, 110-11.

INTELLECTION, the body aids, 76-77.

INTELLECTUALISM, and per­ception of depth, 44-45; and defin­ition of existence, 104-105.

INTELLIGIBLE, is not attenu­ated sensibility, 51. See: Extension.

INTENTIONAUTY, intentional structure of consciousness, 89; of the body, 89; and judgment, 90; attained from the past through direct intentionality, 94.

INTERIOR, primitive fact is nei­ther interior, nor exterior, 64; syn­thesis of interiority and exteriority, 67; neither exterior model, nor inte­rior model, 68; regaining an interi­ority at first opaque, 68; knowledge of the body can be neither purely exterior, nor purely interior, 72. See: Within and without.

INTERNAL, and external experi­ence, 67-68.

INTUITION, of a truth that a philosopher wanted to express, 71; potential sensible intuitions, 73; Bergson leads us to the brink of an intuition that he does not fulfill, 106; as integration, 111; as coinci­dence, 114; its progressive exten­sion, 113-15; as comprehension, 115-17; obtained as the result of an effort, 115; logic of, 116-17. See: Coincidence, Comprehension.

JESUS CHRIST, See: Word. JUDGMENT, intentionality and,

90. See: Natural judgment.

LIFE, ignorant of itself, 109-10; known by an extension of intuition, 114; intuition gives a meaning to, 116.

LOGIC, of Cartesianism, 30; of the body, 95-96; of intuition, 116-17.

MATHEMATICS, mathematical knowledge and empirical knowl­edge, 29-30; formulated and im-

Subject Index 147

plicit mathematics according to Bergson, 115-16.

MATTER, grasped as the uncon­scious on the brink of self, 114. See: Form.

MEANING, to act is to put in movement an intention endowed with, 70; of life, 116; of a philoso­phy, 117. See: Action, Intuition, Life.

MEMORY Qnemoire), second world, 90; body at the junction of perception and, 91; second being, 92; bodily, 92; and brain, 93; cannot be explained by the body, 94; the two memories, 94-95. See: Past, Recognition, Recollection.

METAPHYSICS, perception of the world, 115; performs qualitative integrations, 115. See: Ontology, Philosophy, Science.

MIND, I am a mind which has several powers at its disposal, 41; no philosophy of in Malebranche, 41; is not completely whole in its works, 65-66; Bergson sometimes attributes everything to the mind and some­times to the body, 94.

MIRACLE, my ideas appear to me as if by, 38; Malebranche and, 60.

MONSTERS, and disorder, 60; we are monsters because we tempo-ralize ourselves, 75. See: Miracle, Time.

MOTILITY, and thought accord­ing to Biran, 64, 69, 73. See: Effort, Power, Thought.

MOVEMENT, of the human per­son toward the infinite, 41; body as locus of passage for movements in themselves, 91; the same movement opens the future and closes the past,

91; dichotomy of movement "in the third person" and subject, 93; Zeno's arguments against, 111. See: Body, Effort, Motility.

MYTH, in the Platonic sense of the word, 35; in Malebranche, today's problems appear as in myths or in dreams, 47.

NATURAL JUDGMENT, ambigu­ous and bastard expression, 43; and free judgment, 43; building block for a theory of one's own body, 44; as factor, 45; idealism and realism, 45; wavering between the In Itself and the For Itself, 46.

NOTHINGNESS, there is noth­ingness in ideas, 38; is not a simple privation of being, 52; conceived of by Bergson from being, 90-91.

NOUMENAL, belief in the noumenal self according to Biran, 83-85; is the affirmation of a thing without essence, 84; represents the excess of our existence beyond what we know about it, 84; rela­tionship of God to the world similar to the relationship of the noumenal soul to the self, 85.

NUCLEUS, conceptual, 50.

OBJECT, Kant idealizes the being of, 89; reference to the object and consciousness of self, 90; status of the absent object, 100.

OBJECTIVITY, and subjectivity in the history of philosophy, 31; absolute, 84.

OCCASIONALISM, Malebranche changed from idealism to, 44; Biran, Descartes, and the occasionalist idea, 71.

ONTOLOGY, and psychology,

148 SUBJECT INDEX

79-80; and primitive fact, 80-81. See: Metaphysics.

OPAQUE, OPAQUENESS, exis­tence is fundamentally opaque, 41; a nonobservable knowledge of God would remain opaque, 55; a being who struggles against a pre-existing opaqueness, 66; regaining an inferi­ority at first opaque, 68.

ORDER, disorder, monsters, 60. ORGANISM, living, center of

perspective, 87. See; Body, Finality.

PAST, my reference to the past is not my doing, 40; dimension of future running from future to past, 76; its ideality, 90-91; conscious­ness of present and reference to a past, 92; actualized by the body, 96; transcendence of, 100; is no longer treated as an In Itself, 101. See: Future, Memory, Present, Recollec­tion, Time.

PASSIVITY, Malebranche con­fronted the problem of, 40-41; emerging activity of, 73.

PERCEIVED, PERCEPTION, ideas and perceived world, 39; per­ception of depth according to Descartes, 44-45; according to intellectualism, 45; return to per­ception, 46; natural implication between will and perception, 70; pure according to Bergson, 88; establishes the body in things, 88; deduced from total being, 88-89; is not constituting for Bergson, 90; is entirely memory, 90; in pure per­ception, being is only perceived being, 91; and projection of recol­lections, 95-96; status of nonper-ceived objects, 100-101; horizon of

perception, 106; metaphysics as perception of the world, 115. See: Depth, Form, Natural Judgment, Percipi, World.

PERCIPI, conceived as lesser esse, 89.

PERSPECTIVE, idealism and, 45; organism, center of, 87; carved out in total being, 88-89; and objec­tivity, 81; matter is a, 105.

PHANTOM, phantom limb, 66; Bergson fills consciousness with, 99.

PHENOMENAL, phenomenal reality, neutral zone, 81. See: Pre-world.

PHENOMENOLOGY, Biran an­ticipates, 68.

PHILOSOPHY, as conversion to the idea, 62; and nonphilosophy, 63; starts from a fact, 65; calls evi­dence into question, 65; questions Being, 66; and psychology, 75; meaning of a, 116-19. See: Psy­chology, System.

PHYSIOLOGISM, Biran's, 75. POWER, certain even for God,

80. See: Effort, Motility. PREWORLD, according to

Biran, 81. See: Phenomenal. PRESENT, consciousness of the

present contains a reference to the past, 92; no passage of the present to the past in Bergson, 96; occupies a place, 99. See: Movement, Past, Time.

PRIMITIVE, primitive fact according to Biran, 64-68; primitive fact and primitive facts, 69; primi­tive space and time, 81. See: Fact, Space, Time.

PSYCHOLOGY, simple the­matic ordering of an aspect of being,

Subject Index 149

66; science of the subject placed in the world, 69; and reflection, 68-69; and philosophy, 75-76.

PSYCHOLOGISM, spiritual inte-riority and, 74; Biran attempted to move beyond, 85.

QUALITY, Bergson rehabilitates secondary qualities, 88.

REASON, created, 39. RATIONALITY, Malebranche

projects its conditions in God, 41; absolute, 55.

REALISM, makes consciousness a succession of states, 45-46; Bergson sank into, 90-91; he intro­duces the subject in realist terms, 89-90; realist postulates which he retains, 92; he begins with a certain realism, which introduces the mind as a surplus, 95.

REALITY, phenomenal, 81; concurrence of reality between rec­ollection and perception, 90-91.

RECOGNITION, motor, is only the past played, 93; lived, is neither pure recognition, nor pure motor habit, 95; attentive, avoids the alter­native of action and dream, 95.

RECOLLECTION (souvenir), concurrence between recollection and perception, 90-91; assembly of pure percept and pure recollection, 91; pure recollection contains itself an element of generality, 94; and dynamic of the body, 95-96; pure recollection is only a borderline case, 96; pure recollection, phan­tom, 99; floating and inextensive recollections, hollow in being, 100. See: Memory, Past, Present, Recog­nition, Recollection.

REFLECTION, in the history of philosophy, 31; voice and reflection of the body according to Biran, 69, 81-82; alternative of reflectivity and empiricism, 71; certainty prerequi­site for reflection, 74; synthesis of explanation and, 83; Bergson ignores reflective philosophy, 89; perception and reflective analysis, 89. See: Unre-flected.

RELIGION, prospective and ret­rospective, 57. See: Theology.

SCIENCE, is only a part of our experience, 66; refers us to the per­ceived world, 88; knows what is not ourselves, 114; thrives on intuition, 115. See: Intuition, Metaphysics, Perception, Philosophy.

SELF, a being who seeks to "become self," 67; relationship between the self and the senses, 69; this self which withdraws performs an action, 78. See: Cogito, I, Noumenal, Subject.

SENSES, relationship between the self and, 69.

SENSIBILITY, and self according to Biran, 68-69; without I, 81.

SIGNS, natural, 40; in mathe­matics and philosophy, 62; and intellection, 77; and primitive fact, 82; origin of signs, 82-83; and con­sciousness of self, 82-83. See: Incantation.

SIN, exceptions to the laws of union before original sin, 53; origin and consequences of, 57-59. See: Fall.

SOUL, problem of the union of the soul and the body, 29-31 and passim; extension of the soul according to Descartes, 34-35; of

150 SUBJECT INDEX

others, 35; and thought according to Malebranche, 38; pseudo-idea of, 40; cannot be known through ideas, 40-41; symbolic and material thought of, 41; is both perception of idea and passive subject, 43; by itself has neither agility nor transparence, 50; before the Fall, 53; union of the soul and the body, union of Christ with the church, 59-60; clarity proper to the union, 65; soul as soul and soul for us, 83; absolute soul facing absolute body, 85. See: Body, Cogito, For Self, I, Noumenal, Sub­ject, Thought, Union of the Soul and the Body.

SPACE, and primitive time ac­cording to Biran, 81; divided into pieces of extension, 111. See: Ex­tension, Ideality, Matter, Spatiality.

SPATIALITY, corporeal, 71; prior to space, 72; prior to objective spatiality, 75. See: Extension, Space.

SPEECH, universe of speech, 82; as incantation, 110. See: Incan­tation, Signs, Voice.

SPIRITUALISM, justified by Bergson based on a realism, 95-96.

SUBJECT, our inherent nature as unreflective subjects, 35; motor or thinking subject, false alternative, 64-65; of freedom, 74; the motor subject is thinking, 76; becomes psychic thing, or absolute intellect, 77; connected to the universal Being, 83; noumenal according to Biran, 84; a subject's experience is not the simple application of a logos, 85; Bergson cannot place himself in the dynamism of a consti­tuting subject, 90; he arrives at the subject by substraction, 90; he introduces the subject as a non-

being, 90; the body does not suc­ceed in becoming a subject in Bergson, 94. See: For Itself.

SUBJECTIVITY, and objectivity in the history of philosophy, 31; and absolute objectivity, 84.

SUPERSTRUCTURE, theolog­ical, 41, 44.

SYMBOL, symbolic and material thought of the soul, 41.

SYMPATHY, is no longer only a reception, but a comprehension, 116. See: Intuition.

SYNTHESIS, of transition, 101; must be given in an intuition, 109.

SYSTEM, how to understand, 31; each system beginning with a fact must take into account others, 65; the theory of the phantom limb forms a part of a system with Carte­sian physiology, 65-66; central intu­ition of a, 116. See: History, Objec­tivity, Subjectivity.

TELEPATHY, extension of intu­ition, 114.

TEMPLE, 58; animates the church as the soul animates the body, 59.

THEISM, and practical atheism in Descartes, 35.

THEOLOGY, recourse to, 41; theological superstructure, 44; nonobservable knowledge of God, 55.

THINKING, grasping at results for which we do not have all the premises, 74.

THOUGHT, Cogito, interior connection between thought and being, 37; our idea of the soul will remain a half-thought, 40; Malebran-chism, simple open thought, 41;

Subject Index 151

willful motility, 69-70, 74; the intention of thought, 73. See: Con­sciousness, For Itself, Motility.

TIME, and Cogito, 37; I am not a mind which dominates and unfolds time, 41; we are finite minds which need time, 57; the human person temporalizes itself, 75; starts with the absolute initia­tives of the motor subject, 76; prim­itive space and time, 81; genuine dialectic of time, 91; Bergson doesn't describe anything re­sembling a temporalization, 100; he forsees a dialectic of time, 101. See: Duration, Future, Past, Present.

TOTALITY, of the writings and the life of Descartes, 31; the body as, 33; and genesis, 69.

TRANSCENDENCE, of ideas, 40; and perceptive aiming, 90; of the past, 100; coincidence and in intuition, 116-17.

TRANSITION, from the partic­ular to the universal, 84-85; the body as transition toward conscious­ness, 93; synthesis of, 116.

TRANSPARENCE, the human soul does not have, 50; Cogito without complete transparence, 73. See: Opaque, Opaqueness.

TRUTH, in the history of philos­ophy, 31, experience of, 74.

UNCONSCIOUS, Bergsonian theory of the, 97-100; its difficul­ties, 100; and horizonal relation­ship, 101; weakness of the theory of the, linked to the weakness of the theory of the For Itself, 106; matter and on the brink of self, 114.

UNDERSTANDING, and will according to Malebranche, 55; and

will according to Biran, 76; etymo­logical meaning of the word, 82; of contradiction, 111. See: Compre­hension.

UNION OF THE SOUL AND BODY in the Cartesian tradition and in the Pascalian tradition, 29; state­ment of fact, 29; three texts by Descartes insist upon the union, 30; is not merely a speculative difficulty for Descartes, 33; conceived in the image of that of weight and exten­sion, 33-34; exception granted by God, in favor of Adam, to the laws of union, 53; model of the union of Christ with the church, 59. See: Body, Soul.

UNIVERSAL, faculty of the uni­versal and the absolute, 83; transi­tion to the universal, 85.

UNREFLECTED, Malebranche introduces into philosophy, 40; Biran takes as a theme a reflection turning itself toward the unre-flected, 73; previous state of unre-flection, 80. See: Implicit, Reflec­tion.

VISION IN GOD, the complete Cogito is the vision in God, 39.

VOICE, interiority of voice, 69; hearing-phonation and beginning of reflection, 81-82. See: Reflection.

WILL, and understanding ac­cording to Malebranche, 55-56; movement toward God, 56; willing and willed, 57; and movement, 64; and understanding in Biran, 76-77.

WITHIN AND WITHOUT, in Biran, 72. See: Interior.

WORD (Jesus Christ), makes us wise by a kind of foolishness, 56;

152 SUBJECT INDEX

repairs the universe, constructs his spiritual temple, 58.

WORLD, is not yet made, 57-58; and self, correlative perspec­tives, 69; a system of certainties which is called world, 74; seeking to see the, 78; attested to by feeling,

54; relationship of God to the, according to Biran, 85; conscious­ness carved out in a world of images In Itself, 89; memory, second world, 90; extricated from its In Itself condition, 91. See: Pre-world.